An Improbable Name
Swiss Cottage, the neighbourhood that marks the southern boundary of Belsize Park, takes its name from one of the more improbable episodes in the history of London's suburban expansion. The Swiss Cottage — an Alpine-style inn and tea garden built in the 1840s at the junction of Finchley Road and Avenue Road — was a commercial venture that combined the Victorian taste for picturesque novelty with the commercial opportunity presented by the growing number of middle-class Londoners who were moving northward along the Finchley Road into the new suburbs. The inn's Swiss architectural styling — its timber-framed exterior, its overhanging eaves, its Alpine decorative details — was an exercise in fantasy that was not unusual in the Victorian period, when the picturesque style encouraged the construction of buildings that evoked distant landscapes in the most improbable urban settings.
The Swiss Cottage inn gave its name to the crossroads around which it was built, and the crossroads gave its name to the neighbourhood that developed around it as the Victorian suburb expanded. The name has persisted through several generations of urban change, surviving the demolition of the original inn and its replacement by successive generations of commercial and residential development, and the word Swiss Cottage now designates a neighbourhood of considerable density and complexity whose character is entirely unlike the Alpine fantasy that generated its name.
The relationship between Belsize Park and Swiss Cottage is one of contiguity rather than identity — they are adjacent neighbourhoods that share some characteristics (the Victorian housing stock, the proximity of the Heath, the intellectual and cultural character of their populations) while differing in others (Swiss Cottage is more commercial, more mixed in its social composition, more influenced by the major traffic routes that converge at its centre). The boundary between them is not marked by any physical feature but by the gradual shift in character that the walker from one to the other will notice without being able to locate precisely.
The Contemporary Swiss Cottage
The contemporary Swiss Cottage is dominated by the large-scale public and commercial development that has occurred around the tube station and the roundabout at its centre. The Swiss Cottage leisure centre, the library, the Hampstead Theatre — all of which have been discussed in earlier articles — constitute a cluster of civic and cultural facilities that gives the area a public character that distinguishes it from the more purely residential character of Belsize Park to the north. The concentration of these facilities in the Swiss Cottage area reflects the planning decisions of the post-war decades, which designated the area as a local centre capable of accommodating the larger-scale public buildings that the surrounding residential neighbourhoods required.
The library at Swiss Cottage — designed by Sir Basil Spence and opened in 1964 — is one of the more significant examples of post-war civic architecture in North London. Its combination of internal flexibility (a large open reading space that can be arranged in various ways) with external presence (a building that asserts its civic function without overwhelming the surrounding street) represents the aspirations of the post-war public library movement, which saw the public library as a democratic institution of the first importance — a resource available to all citizens regardless of their ability to pay, providing access to the knowledge and culture that the market would otherwise restrict to those who could afford it.
The Boundary and Its Meaning
The boundary between Belsize Park and Swiss Cottage is one of those urban boundaries that is felt rather than seen — the imperceptible shift in the quality of the street, the character of the buildings, the pace of the pedestrian traffic that marks the transition from one neighbourhood to another. For the resident of Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage is a resource: the tube station, the leisure centre, the library, the commercial facilities concentrated around the roundabout. For the resident of Swiss Cottage, Belsize Park is a destination: the quieter streets, the independent shops and cafés of England's Lane and Belsize Village, the access to the Heath that the higher ground of the neighbourhood provides.
The relationship between the two neighbourhoods is part of the larger geography of NW3 — the network of adjacent communities that together constitute the cultural and social landscape of North West London. Understanding Belsize Park requires understanding its position in this network: adjacent to Swiss Cottage to the south, to Hampstead to the north, to Primrose Hill and Chalk Farm to the west, to Kentish Town and Gospel Oak to the east. The neighbourhood's character is partly a product of its internal qualities and partly a product of its position in this network — its accessibility to the resources of the surrounding area and its distinctiveness in relation to the communities that border it.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*