A Decade of Transformation
The 1960s were a decade of profound transformation in the housing geography of Belsize Park and the surrounding NW3 neighbourhood. The combination of a post-war baby boom generation reaching independence, an increasingly mobile professional workforce, and the liberalisation of social attitudes that characterised the decade created a dramatic increase in demand for the kind of accommodation — small, self-contained, affordable — that the Victorian family houses of the neighbourhood had not been designed to provide. The response of the property market to this demand was a wave of conversion that transformed thousands of Victorian terrace houses from single-family homes to multi-unit dwellings, fundamentally changing the social character of the neighbourhood.
The conversion process was typically simple in its physical execution but complex in its social consequences. The Victorian family house — designed for a family with servants, with its basement kitchen, its ground-floor reception rooms, its upper-floor bedrooms, and its attic servant accommodation — was relatively easily converted into a series of self-contained flats: a basement flat, a ground-floor flat, one or two upper-floor flats, and sometimes an attic conversion. The conversion required some adaptation of the plumbing and electrical systems to provide individual kitchens and bathrooms for each unit, and some modification of the interior arrangement to separate the units adequately. The external appearance of the building was rarely affected.
The social consequences of the conversion wave were more complex. The single-family occupancy of the Victorian terrace, with its clear social character and its established social networks, was replaced by the multiple-household occupancy of the converted house — a social arrangement that was simultaneously more anonymous and more diverse. The young professionals, the students, the artists and musicians, the recent arrivals from the provinces and from abroad who moved into the converted flats of Belsize Park in the 1960s were a very different population from the Victorian middle-class families who had built the houses they now occupied, and their presence transformed the social character of the neighbourhood in ways that were both exciting and occasionally disorienting.
The Bedsit Era
The conversion wave of the 1960s produced not only self-contained flats but a large supply of bedsitting rooms — single rooms with shared bathrooms and kitchens, the most minimal form of private accommodation compatible with urban independence. The bedsit — the quintessential accommodation of the young, mobile, and marginally funded urban dweller of the 1960s — was in plentiful supply in the converted Victorian houses of Belsize Park, and the neighbourhood's supply of bedsits attracted a population of young people whose presence gave the area its characteristic 1960s character: bohemian, creative, politically engaged, sexually liberated by the standards of the preceding generation, and thoroughly enjoying the opportunities that London in the 1960s provided.
The bedsit era of Belsize Park has been extensively documented in the literature and film of the period — partly through the work of writers and filmmakers who lived in the bedsits themselves and who drew on their NW3 experiences for their creative work, and partly through the retrospective documentation that the period has attracted as its cultural significance has become more widely recognised. The concentration of creative talent in the bedsits and converted flats of the neighbourhood in the 1960s was remarkable, and the work produced by the writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who lived there during this decade was a significant contribution to the cultural output of what many regard as the most creative decade in twentieth-century British cultural history.
Planning and Conversion Control
The conversion wave of the 1960s was largely uncontrolled by the planning system, which had not yet developed the tools necessary to manage the rapid transformation of the housing stock. The permitted development rights that allowed internal alterations to be made without planning permission meant that the conversion of houses into flats could proceed without any scrutiny of the impact on the neighbourhood's housing supply, social character, or physical fabric. The consequence was that the conversion process was rapid, comprehensive, and sometimes poorly executed — the cheapest and quickest conversions rather than the most carefully considered ones.
The subsequent development of planning controls — including the requirement for planning permission for changes of use from single-family dwelling to multiple-unit dwelling, and the policies that restricted further subdivision in areas where the housing stock was considered adequate or over-provided — represented a belated attempt to manage a transformation that had already largely occurred. The neighbourhood that emerged from the 1960s conversion wave was permanently changed: a neighbourhood of flats rather than family houses, of diverse and transient population rather than stable family community, of social energy and cultural vitality rather than the quiet domesticity of the Victorian suburb.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*