A Neighbourhood That Writes Itself
Belsize Park and the surrounding NW3 neighbourhood have been the subject of fiction, film, and television with a frequency and an intensity that is disproportionate to their geographical extent and their population — a consequence of the extraordinary concentration of writers, filmmakers, and other creative people who have lived in the neighbourhood and used it as material for their work. The result is a body of creative representations of the neighbourhood that constitutes a parallel history — a history of the imagination rather than the archive, but one that is no less revealing of the neighbourhood's character and of the experience of living in it.
The fiction set in Belsize Park and Hampstead ranges from the intimate domestic novel to the political thriller, from the psychological study to the social satire. Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca — whose narrator lives in Hampstead before being transported to the gothic world of Manderley — uses the neighbourhood as the emblem of respectable normalcy against which the novel's more dramatic events are set. George du Maurier's Trilby — set in a Bohemian artistic world that draws partly on the Hampstead studio culture of the nineteenth century — established some of the most persistent cultural myths about the artistic life of North London. Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, set in an area recognisably close to the NW3 neighbourhood, explores the supernatural possibilities of the English landscape with the sardonic intelligence that characterised his late fiction.
The psychoanalytic community of the neighbourhood has generated its own fictional literature, drawing on the distinctive social world of the consulting room and the community of analysts that has characterised Belsize Park and Hampstead since the 1930s. The novels that use the milieu of London psychoanalysis — the therapeutic relationship, the community of analysts, the particular social world of the North London intelligentsia — often locate themselves explicitly or implicitly in the NW3 neighbourhood, using the geography of the streets and the character of the community as an integral part of their fictional world.
Film and Television
The visual character of Belsize Park and Hampstead has attracted filmmakers and television producers throughout the history of British film and television. The neighbourhood's combination of architectural quality, natural beauty (the Heath), and social diversity has made it a useful setting for productions ranging from period drama to contemporary thriller. The recognisable visual character of the NW3 streets — the stucco terraces, the red brick mansion flats, the plane tree-lined avenues, the tube station entrances — has made the neighbourhood a reliable visual shorthand for certain kinds of London experience, particularly the experience of the educated, prosperous, and culturally engaged middle class.
The Swinging London of the 1960s found some of its most recognisable settings in and around the NW3 neighbourhood. The films of that decade that used the streets of Hampstead and Belsize Park as locations were using the neighbourhood's combination of bohemian energy and architectural respectability to locate their stories in a specific social world — the world of the young, ambitious, culturally sophisticated Londoners who were reshaping British culture in the decade of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
The Spy Thriller and Its Geography
The espionage connections of the Isokon building and the surrounding neighbourhood have made Belsize Park a recurring location in the spy thriller genre — both the authentic spy memoirs that have drawn on the neighbourhood's intelligence history and the fictional spy thrillers that have used it as a setting. The combination of apparently respectable bourgeois domesticity and the knowledge of Soviet espionage that underlies it provides exactly the kind of dramatic tension that the spy genre requires, and the specific geography of the Isokon — its international modernist community, its communist sympathisers, its aesthetic ambitions — has provided a richly specific setting for a number of fictional explorations of the Cold War's London chapter.
Living and Writing
The most significant dimension of the relationship between Belsize Park and fiction is not the fiction that depicts the neighbourhood from the outside but the fiction that has been written from within it — the novels, stories, and other creative work produced by the writers who have lived and worked in the neighbourhood and who have drawn on its particular character as the background against which their imaginative work has developed. The solitary work of writing, conducted in the flats and houses of NW3, has generated some of the most significant fiction in the English language, and the neighbourhood's cultural tradition is inseparable from the imaginative work that has been done within it.
The relationship between place and imagination is never simple — the fiction that emerges from a particular place is never merely a transcription of that place, but a transformation of it through the individual imagination of the writer. But the transformation is never entirely free of its materials, and the NW3 neighbourhood — its streets, its Heath walks, its social character, its cultural tradition — has left its marks on the fiction produced within it in ways that are sometimes explicit and always present. The literary geography of Belsize Park is not identical to its physical geography, but it is shaped by it, and reading the fiction of the neighbourhood is one of the most rewarding ways of understanding what it has meant to live and work there.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*