Hampstead

Chalybeate springs, then Keats and Constable, and eight hundred acres of heath with Kenwood on it.

The water made it. In 1698 the Hon. Susanna Noel gave six acres of springs to the poor of the parish, the water was bottled and sold in London, and a hilltop village became a spa with a pump room and a ballroom. Well Walk runs where the wells were, and Flask Walk is named for what the water went out in. The spa faded and the air stayed, which is why the writers came. John Keats took half of Wentworth Place in 1818, fell in love with Fanny Brawne through the party wall, and wrote the Ode to a Nightingale in the garden in the spring of 1819; the house is open as Keats House. John Constable painted the skies over the Heath, and is buried at the parish church. Fenton House of 1686 is the oldest house in the village and keeps a collection of early keyboard instruments still played. Ernő Goldfinger built himself a modern brick terrace at 2 Willow Road in 1939 and lived in it until he died. Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens, and his consulting room is kept as it was, couch and all. Behind all of it is the Heath: nearly eight hundred acres, saved by forty years of argument with a lord of the manor who meant to build on it, and an Act of 1871. Kenwood stands on its northern edge, remodelled by Robert Adam in the 1760s and left to the nation in 1927 with the pictures still in it.

Photo by David, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons