H.G. Wells in NW3

A Mind That Could Not Stop

Herbert George Wells was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary intellectual figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His output was prodigious — novels, short stories, popular science, social polemic, utopian speculation, autobiography, history — and his influence, both on popular culture and on serious intellectual life, was immense. His connections to the NW3 neighbourhood belong to different periods of his long life, but they are consistently significant: Belsize Park and Hampstead were places where Wells found community, stimulation, and the kind of intense social and intellectual engagement that his restless intelligence required.

Wells's early science fiction — The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) — was written before his NW3 years, but its themes and obsessions were continuous with the ideas he developed and debated in North London. The anxieties about technological acceleration, about the fragility of civilisation, about the biological and social futures of humanity — these were topics of intense discussion in the Edwardian intellectual world, and Wells was simultaneously its most popular and most provocative voice.

His relationship with the Fabian Society, which brought him into contact with George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the wider world of progressive Edwardian thought, placed him in a network that had significant NW3 roots. The Fabians were heavily concentrated in Hampstead and its surroundings, and the arguments about the pace and direction of social reform that consumed them were argued in the drawing rooms and on the Heath walks of the neighbourhood. Wells was never a comfortable Fabian — he was too impatient with committees, too dismissive of procedural caution, too prone to the grand gesture — but the engagement was formative.

Utopia and Its Discontents

Wells's relationship to utopian thinking was more complex than is sometimes recognised. His utopias — A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), The Shape of Things to Come (1933) — are not naive celebrations of social perfection but explorations of the conditions under which human society might become better, and they are always shadowed by the awareness of what stands in the way: human selfishness, inertia, tribalism, and the capacity for spectacular foolishness that history demonstrates on every page. The utopias Wells imagined were products of catastrophe as much as of progress — societies rebuilt after wars and collapses rather than smoothly evolved from current arrangements.

This understanding of catastrophe as a condition of renewal gave Wells's social thinking a quality that was simultaneously more honest and more disturbing than that of simpler progressives. He could see, more clearly than most of his contemporaries, the direction in which European civilisation was heading, and his clarity about the coming catastrophe — he predicted something very like the Second World War in The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933 — was part of what made him so unsettling a presence in the pre-war intellectual world. The NW3 drawing rooms in which these ideas were debated were filled with people who found Wells's pessimism excessive; history would vindicate him with a thoroughness he cannot have found comforting.

The intellectual world of Belsize Park and Hampstead was, in the early twentieth century, a world in which ideas about the future were taken with radical seriousness. The Fabians were planning a new social order. The anarchists associated with Herbert Read were imagining communities beyond the state. The modernist artists were remaking the perceptual world from the ground up. Wells was part of all these conversations, both as a contributor and as a critic — always impatient with what he found insufficiently radical or insufficiently realistic, always pushing towards the uncomfortable conclusion that the existing order was not merely improvable but probably doomed.

The Romance of Science

Wells's scientific imagination was shaped by his study under T.H. Huxley at what is now Imperial College — a formation that gave him not only scientific knowledge but an understanding of science as a mode of thought, as a way of stripping away the comfortable assumptions that allow people to live without confronting what the world actually is. The great theme of his scientific romances is the encounter between the human and the non-human — between the familiar social world and the alien, indifferent forces that it normally keeps at bay. The Martians in The War of the Worlds are not malevolent; they are simply doing what successful species do, which is to expand and consume. The horror lies not in their cruelty but in their indifference.

This encounter with cosmic indifference was mediated, in Wells's personal life, by an extraordinary capacity for sociability and pleasure. He was a man who loved food, conversation, games, and romantic adventure with an enthusiasm that could be exhausting to his friends and catastrophic to his marriages. His NW3 social world was rich with the kind of people who could engage with his ideas and his personality — the writers, intellectuals, scientists, and social reformers who found in the neighbourhood a congenial environment for the kind of serious, sociable life that Wells exemplified at his best.

The legacy of this social world is partly the books and ideas that came out of it, and partly the tradition of intellectual engagement that the neighbourhood maintains. The Hampstead literary community in the early twentieth century — Wells, Shaw, the Fabians, the anarchists, the artists — established a pattern of serious, sociable, argumentative engagement with ideas that characterises the neighbourhood's cultural life to this day.

The Friendship with Rebecca West

Wells's long and turbulent relationship with Rebecca West — which produced a son, Anthony West, and lasted more than a decade — is one of the most celebrated literary affairs of the early twentieth century. West was herself a writer of extraordinary talent and force, whose journalism, fiction, and political reporting would eventually establish her as one of the great English prose writers of the century. The relationship, conducted partly in the NW3 neighbourhood, was a meeting of matched intelligences in which the personal and intellectual were inextricably entangled.

West's feminist perspective provided a productive counterpoint to Wells's more ambivalent relationship to women's emancipation. He was in principle committed to the equality of the sexes, but in practice his relationships with women tended to reflect the power imbalances of the society he professed to criticise. West saw this clearly and said so, with the directness that characterised everything she wrote, and the tension between Wells's theoretical progressivism and his practical conservatism in personal relations is one of the interesting subplots of the NW3 intellectual world.

Late Life and Disillusionment

Wells's late career was marked by increasing disillusionment with the progress of the social reforms he had advocated and the political catastrophes he had foreseen. The Second World War, which confirmed his worst predictions about the direction of European civilisation, was followed by an atomic bombing campaign that seemed to him both a validation of his technological prophecies and a judgement on the species that had developed such capabilities. His last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), is a cry of despair from a man who had spent his entire life believing in the possibility of human improvement and found himself, at the end, unable to maintain that belief.

This trajectory — from utopian confidence to pessimistic despair — is one of the defining intellectual journeys of the twentieth century, and Wells traced it with unusual honesty and unusual public visibility. He is buried in the sea, as he requested — his ashes scattered off the Dorset coast. But his intellectual presence persists in the tradition of speculative, reforming, occasionally infuriating public engagement with ideas that Belsize Park and Hampstead have maintained throughout the century since his NW3 years. He was a man who took ideas seriously enough to follow them to their uncomfortable conclusions, and who found in North London a community willing to engage with him on the same terms.

The Shape of Things to Come in NW3

Walking the streets of Belsize Park today, it is possible to trace the outlines of the world that Wells both inhabited and predicted. The concentration of psychologists and analysts in these streets would not have surprised him — he had anticipated Freud's impact on intellectual culture, even if his own relationship to psychoanalysis was more sceptical than enthusiastic. The international community of thinkers and artists who settled here from the 1930s onwards would have confirmed his internationalist convictions. The continued existence of serious intellectual life in domestic settings — in flats and houses rather than in academies or salons — would have pleased him as confirmation that the life of the mind does not require institutional support to flourish.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*