A Life Dedicated to Children
Of all the remarkable figures associated with the intellectual life of Belsize Park in the twentieth century, Anna Freud occupies a particularly significant place — not merely as the daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis, but as an original and influential theorist and practitioner in her own right, whose work on child development, child psychoanalysis, and the psychological effects of trauma on children made lasting contributions to both clinical practice and developmental psychology. She lived at Maresfield Gardens from her arrival in London with her father in 1938 until her death in 1982 — a span of forty-four years during which Belsize Park served as the home and professional base from which she built one of the most important psychoanalytic institutions in the world.
Anna Freud's relationship with NW3 was not merely residential. The neighbourhood became, through her work and the institution she built there, a major centre of child psychoanalysis and child development research, attracting students, trainees, and visiting scholars from across the world. The Hampstead Psychoanalytic Clinic — later the Anna Freud Centre — became a focal point for the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the understanding and treatment of disturbed and traumatised children, and its work influenced the development of child mental health services both in Britain and internationally.
Her intellectual relationship with her father was complex and well-documented. As his closest confidante, his editor and translator, his secretary and carer in his later years, she was the custodian of his legacy in ways that went beyond the merely practical. Her theoretical work developed from his foundations but in distinctly original directions: her development of ego psychology, her elaboration of the concept of defence mechanisms, and above all her pioneering work on child development and child analysis established her as an independent contributor to psychoanalytic theory rather than merely an interpreter of her father's ideas.
The Wartime Nurseries
Anna Freud's most celebrated contribution to child welfare in NW3 was the Hampstead War Nurseries, which she established in 1940 with Dorothy Burlingham, her American collaborator and lifelong companion. The nurseries provided residential care for young children who had been separated from their parents by the war — either through evacuation, through the death or incapacitation of parents in the bombing, or through other wartime disruptions. By caring for these children directly while systematically observing their psychological development and their responses to separation and stress, Anna Freud generated the empirical foundation for a theoretical contribution of the first importance: the demonstration that children's psychological development was profoundly affected by the quality of their early attachment relationships, and that disruption of these relationships caused identifiable and lasting psychological damage.
The Hampstead War Nurseries operated from premises in Maresfield Gardens and adjacent streets in NW3, providing residential care for approximately eighty children at any one time. The meticulous observational records kept by Anna Freud and her colleagues, published during and after the war in a series of reports and eventually in the landmark book Young Children in Wartime, constituted a major contribution to developmental psychology — one that anticipated by several years the attachment theory developed by John Bowlby, with whose work it had both similarities and differences that generated important theoretical debate.
The Hampstead Clinic
After the war, Anna Freud developed the wartime nurseries into the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, which became one of the leading training institutions for child psychoanalysts in the world. The clinic occupied premises in Maresfield Gardens and later expanded into additional buildings in the neighbourhood, providing both a training programme for child therapists and a clinical service for disturbed children and their families. The intellectual programme of the clinic was ambitious: to apply the methods of psychoanalysis to the understanding and treatment of children's psychological problems across the full developmental range, from infancy through adolescence.
The clinic attracted an extraordinary community of researchers, clinicians, and trainees from across the world, drawn by the opportunity to work with Anna Freud and her colleagues and to contribute to the development of child analysis as a clinical discipline. The Diagnostic Profile, the Developmental Line concept, and the Programme for the Prevention of Blindness in Children — among the most widely cited of Anna Freud's later contributions — were all developed within the NW3 institutional context of the Hampstead Clinic, demonstrating the direct connection between the neighbourhood's intellectual community and the development of clinical knowledge with international significance.
The Personal and the Professional
Anna Freud's life in NW3 was not merely professional. The house at 20 Maresfield Gardens was her home as well as her father's memorial and her professional base, and her domestic life there — with Dorothy Burlingham, with the household of students and colleagues who formed a kind of extended family around her, with the dogs that she kept throughout her adult life — was as much a part of the neighbourhood's social fabric as her professional activities. She was known to local shopkeepers, to the postman, to the children of colleagues who grew up playing in the Maresfield Gardens area; she was a regular at local restaurants and a familiar figure in the streets of Belsize Park.
Her death in 1982 marked the end of an extraordinary epoch in the neighbourhood's intellectual life — the period during which the first and second generations of the psychoanalytic tradition had lived and worked in NW3, giving the neighbourhood a sustained connection to one of the most important intellectual movements of the twentieth century. The Freud Museum, established after her death in the house where she had lived for forty-four years, is the physical memorial to this connection and to the remarkable woman who, more than anyone else, made Maresfield Gardens and Belsize Park synonymous with the psychoanalytic tradition.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*