The Flight from Central Europe
The rise of National Socialism in Germany after 1933, and the Anschluss — the annexation of Austria — in 1938, generated one of the most extraordinary migrations of intellectual and cultural talent in European history. Jews, political opponents of Nazism, artists and intellectuals whose work was classified as degenerate, and others whose lives were threatened by the new regimes fled westward in large numbers, seeking safety in countries that remained beyond Hitler's reach. Britain received a significant proportion of these refugees, and within Britain, certain London neighbourhoods became the destinations of choice for specific communities of exiles.
Belsize Park and the surrounding streets of NW3 became the primary destination for many of the Austrian and German Jewish refugees who arrived in London during the late 1930s. The neighbourhood's character — its educated, liberal, relatively cosmopolitan population; its supply of reasonably priced furnished flats in manageable Victorian buildings; its proximity to the institutions of cultural and intellectual London; and its established tradition of welcoming educated Continental Europeans — made it a natural destination. By 1939, the concentration of Austrian and German refugees in NW3 was sufficiently large and distinctive to attract the nickname "Little Vienna" — a tribute to the cultural traditions of the Habsburg capital that so many of the refugees had brought with them.
The refugees who settled in Belsize Park were not a homogeneous group. They included the very distinguished — Nobel Prize winners, leading writers and philosophers, celebrated musicians and artists — alongside the comfortably middle-class and the barely surviving. What united them was a combination of enforced displacement, professional and intellectual distinction, and the particular qualities of Central European Jewish culture — its emphasis on education, its cosmopolitan engagement with the wider world, its complex relationship with both German and Jewish identity — that gave the community its characteristic flavour.
The Coffee House Culture
One of the most visible manifestations of the refugee community's cultural presence in NW3 was the establishment of coffee houses and cafes in the Viennese tradition. The Kaffeehaus — with its tradition of allowing customers to sit for hours over a single cup of coffee, reading newspapers, playing chess, and conducting the intellectual conversations that were the lifeblood of Central European cultural life — was an institution without exact equivalent in English culture, and its transplantation to the streets of Belsize Park created establishments of a distinctive character that became important social institutions for both the refugee community and the broader NW3 population.
The most celebrated of these Viennese-style establishments was not a coffee house per se but the Cosmo restaurant on Finchley Road, which became the central gathering place of the refugee intellectual community. A longer journey from Belsize Park, but close enough to attract regulars from the neighbourhood, the Cosmo was a place where the entire spectrum of Central European exile society could be encountered at any time of day: philosophers and painters, politicians and psychoanalysts, musicians and mathematicians, all sharing the communal space of the restaurant in a continuation of the coffee house culture they had left behind in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague.
In the streets of Belsize Park itself, smaller establishments — cafes, delicatessens, bread shops, and pastry makers — catered to the refugee community's specific tastes and created the physical infrastructure of the Little Vienna identity. The smell of Viennese coffee and Central European pastries in the streets of NW3 was reported by contemporaries as one of the most evocative sensory markers of the neighbourhood's transformation, a small but vivid detail that signalled the arrival of a new cultural community in the neighbourhood's life.
Intellectual Life and Cultural Production
The concentration of intellectual talent in Little Vienna produced a remarkable efflorescence of cultural activity during the late 1930s and war years. Writers produced novels, essays, and journalism in German and English; musicians performed chamber concerts in private houses and small halls; artists exhibited in the few galleries that would show their work; and the intellectual discussions that were the lifeblood of Central European culture continued in the cafes, in private houses, and in the corridors of the institutions that the refugees had found employment in.
The relationship between the refugee community and British intellectual and cultural life was complex and not without tension. The British academic and cultural world was sometimes welcoming and sometimes resistant to the influx of European talent; individual refugees found remarkable support from British colleagues, while others experienced the characteristic British combination of formal politeness and practical exclusion. The language barrier was a significant obstacle for those whose careers depended on sophisticated verbal communication, and many of the most distinguished literary refugees found their ability to work seriously impaired by their inability to write in English with the facility they had in German.
Yet the intellectual impact of the refugee community on British cultural and intellectual life was substantial. The scholars who found academic positions in British universities brought with them research programmes and intellectual traditions that enriched the disciplines they entered. The psychoanalysts who settled in NW3 transformed the practice and theory of psychotherapy in Britain. The artists who formed part of the émigré community contributed to the development of British modernism. The musicians who found employment in orchestras, as teachers, and as performers raised the standard of musical performance in Britain. The cumulative effect of this infusion of talent was to accelerate and deepen the modernisation of British intellectual and cultural life that was already underway.
The Post-War Community
After the war, the character of the Little Vienna community in NW3 changed significantly. Many refugees who had the option returned to Austria or Germany; others chose to remain in Britain permanently, completing their assimilation into British life and raising children who identified primarily as British rather than as Austrian or German. The community that had been defined by its exile identity gradually transformed into something more settled and more integrated — still culturally distinct in some ways, still marked by the particular traditions and values of Central European Jewish culture, but no longer constituted primarily as a community of refugees.
The physical infrastructure of the Little Vienna — the coffee houses, the delicatessens, the specialist food shops — gradually changed as the refugee generation aged and died and as the neighbourhood's population became more varied. Some establishments disappeared entirely; others transformed into different kinds of businesses serving the general NW3 market rather than the specific needs of the Central European community. But the cultural legacy of the Little Vienna remained in the neighbourhood's character — in the continuing tradition of intellectual engagement, in the cosmopolitan food culture, in the disproportionate representation of Central European surnames in NW3's professional and creative life — as a lasting testimony to the remarkable community that had found refuge in the streets of Belsize Park.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*