What Is Gone
The Belsize Park that exists today is not the Belsize Park that might have been — or, more precisely, it is not the Belsize Park that once was. The history of the neighbourhood includes significant losses: buildings of genuine quality that were demolished for reasons of economy, fashion, or development pressure, leaving gaps in the neighbourhood's fabric that subsequent development has not always been able to fill. Understanding these losses is part of understanding the neighbourhood as a whole — understanding not just what survived but what did not, and why.
The most significant lost building in the history of Belsize Park is the original manor house — Belsize House itself — which was demolished in stages in the nineteenth century to make way for the Victorian suburban development that created the neighbourhood as it exists today. The manor house, which had been the centre of the Belsize estate for centuries, was a substantial building of considerable historical importance: it had been the residence of the Secretary of State during the Restoration period, the site of some of the most scandalous entertainments of the eighteenth century, and a physical embodiment of the long history of the Belsize estate. Its demolition to make way for terrace houses was a significant cultural loss, though one that was not recognised as such at the time.
The Victorian and Edwardian development of the neighbourhood also involved the loss of many older buildings — farmhouses, cottages, and the various service buildings of the agricultural landscape that the suburb replaced. These buildings were not, for the most part, architecturally distinguished, but they represented a continuity with the pre-urban landscape of the area that was entirely severed by the Victorian development. The loss of this older fabric meant that the Victorian suburb had no visible connection to the landscape it replaced — a disconnection that is typical of the Victorian suburban development and that gives it its characteristic quality of having arrived fully formed, without visible precedent.
The Lost Cinemas
The cinema history of the Belsize Park area is a history of buildings that appeared in the early twentieth century, flourished during the golden age of cinema from the 1920s to the 1950s, and then disappeared as television and the closure of many suburban cinemas in the 1960s and 1970s removed their economic basis. The Hampstead Everyman, which survived this decline by reinventing itself as an art-house cinema and has been a continuous presence on Holly Bush Vale since 1933, is the exception rather than the rule: most of the cinemas that served the Belsize Park neighbourhood in the mid-twentieth century no longer exist as cinemas.
The buildings that housed these cinemas have had varied fates. Some have been demolished and replaced by residential or commercial development. Others have been converted to other uses — supermarkets, bingo halls, and eventually residential apartments have occupied the shells of buildings designed for the specific purpose of cinema exhibition. A few have been repurposed in ways that maintain some connection to their original use — the conversion of former cinemas to live performance venues, or the use of their large internal spaces for retail uses that benefit from the generous volumes of the original design.
The loss of the suburban cinema is one of the more culturally significant changes in the social geography of NW3 over the past half century. The cinema was not merely an entertainment venue but a social institution — a place where the residents of the neighbourhood came together in the shared experience of watching films, where the social life of the suburb was partially conducted in the queues and foyers and cafés that surrounded the screen, where the popular culture of the mid-twentieth century was most immediately accessible. The reduction of this institution to a single art-house cinema has changed the character of cultural life in the neighbourhood in ways that are difficult to quantify but easy to feel.
Post-War Losses
The post-war decades were a period of significant architectural loss in Belsize Park and the surrounding neighbourhood, as development pressure and changing architectural tastes combined to threaten buildings that would now be valued and protected. The demolition of Victorian and Edwardian buildings to make way for post-war development — council housing estates, commercial developments, institutional buildings — was in many cases irreversible, and the buildings that were lost are now represented only in the historical record: in photographs, architectural drawings, and the memories of those who knew them.
The development of the conservation area designation in the 1970s, and its subsequent strengthening, has significantly reduced the pace of demolition and inappropriate development in the core of the Belsize Park area. But the losses of the pre-conservation era were substantial, and their effects on the character of the neighbourhood are still visible in the gaps and discontinuities in the Victorian fabric — the post-war infill that does not quite match its Victorian context, the vacant sites that have never been satisfactorily developed, the buildings that were replaced by something demonstrably inferior.
Recording What Was Lost
The recording of lost buildings — through historical photography, measured drawings, archive research, and oral history — is one of the more neglected dimensions of heritage conservation in Belsize Park and most other historic neighbourhoods. The priority of conservation policy is necessarily focused on what survives, and the resources available for recording what has been lost are limited. But the historical record of the neighbourhood is incomplete without an account of the buildings that are no longer there, and the effort to reconstruct that record is a contribution to the understanding of the neighbourhood's character and development that no amount of attention to surviving buildings can replace.
The Belsize Park that might have been — with its manor house intact, its Victorian fabric complete, its suburban cinemas still functioning — would have been a different neighbourhood from the one that exists today. The losses that shaped the current neighbourhood are as much a part of its story as the survivals, and acknowledging them is part of the honest engagement with history that the neighbourhood's cultural tradition demands.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*