The Making of a Boulevard
If you stand at the southern end of Fitzjohn's Avenue, where it begins its ascent from Swiss Cottage towards Hampstead village, the road stretches before you like a statement of intent. Wide, straight, and tree-lined, it climbs the long hill with a grandeur that feels more Parisian than suburban — a proper boulevard carved through what had been, until the 1870s, the private parkland of one of London's most obstinate landowning families. The avenue runs for almost exactly one mile, rising some two hundred feet in elevation from the busy junction at Swiss Cottage to the top of Fitzjohn's Avenue where it meets Heath Street at the edge of Hampstead village. Along its length stand some of the most imposing domestic buildings in north London: enormous red-brick houses in the Queen Anne Revival style, their facades a riot of terracotta panels, carved stone dressings, elaborate chimney stacks, and Dutch gables that catch the afternoon light in shades of ochre and burnt sienna.
The creation of Fitzjohn's Avenue in the 1870s was one of the most significant pieces of suburban development in Victorian London, and it transformed the geography of Hampstead forever. Before the avenue was built, the journey from Swiss Cottage to Hampstead village required a circuitous route through narrow lanes and across open fields. The hill that separated the two settlements was part of the Maryon Wilson estate, a vast landholding that stretched across much of what is now Hampstead and Belsize Park. The Maryon Wilson family had resisted all attempts at development for decades, keeping their land as private parkland while the city grew up around them. It was only when the estate finally agreed to release land for building in the late 1860s that the opportunity arose to cut a new road straight through the heart of their property — a road that would become Fitzjohn's Avenue.
The avenue takes its name from the Maryon Wilson family themselves. The "Fitzjohn" refers to the family's ancient lineage — they claimed descent from a Norman knight named Fitz John who had been granted lands in the area after the Conquest. Whether this genealogical claim was entirely accurate is a matter of some scholarly debate, but it served the purpose of lending an air of aristocratic distinction to what was, in essence, a speculative property development. The name stuck, and Fitzjohn's Avenue quickly became synonymous with a particular kind of late-Victorian wealth and respectability — the address of choice for successful professionals, prosperous artists, and the upper reaches of the mercantile class.
The Maryon Wilson Estate and the Battle for Development
The story of Fitzjohn's Avenue cannot be separated from the long and contentious history of the Maryon Wilson estate. For much of the nineteenth century, the family's determination to keep their Hampstead lands undeveloped was a source of constant frustration to property developers, local authorities, and neighbouring landowners who watched the value of the surrounding land soar while the Maryon Wilson acres remained stubbornly pastoral. Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson, the baronet who controlled the estate from 1821 to 1869, was particularly intransigent. He made repeated attempts to obtain parliamentary permission to grant building leases on his land, but these efforts were consistently blocked by a combination of legal obstacles — the estate was entailed, meaning that Sir Thomas could not sell or develop it without parliamentary approval — and vigorous opposition from Hampstead residents who feared the loss of open space.
Sir Thomas's battles with Parliament and the courts dragged on for decades and became one of the great legal sagas of Victorian London. He submitted bill after bill to the House of Lords, seeking the power to develop his estate, and each time he was defeated by opponents who argued that the open spaces of Hampstead were too valuable to be sacrificed to the builder's trowel. The irony was acute: Sir Thomas wanted to build on land that was not the Heath itself but the private parkland adjacent to it, yet the campaign to preserve the Heath — which would eventually succeed with the Hampstead Heath Act of 1871 — spilled over into opposition to any development in the area.
When Sir Thomas died in 1869, his successor Sir John Maryon Wilson took a more pragmatic approach. Rather than continuing the fruitless legal battles, Sir John negotiated a settlement that allowed him to develop parts of the estate while preserving other areas as open space. The key to this compromise was the creation of Fitzjohn's Avenue — a grand new road that would open up the estate for high-quality residential development while preserving the parkland character of the surrounding landscape. The avenue was designed to be wide enough to serve as a main thoroughfare, with generous building plots on either side that would attract the kind of wealthy residents whose houses would enhance rather than diminish the character of the area.
Construction began in the early 1870s and proceeded rapidly. The road was cut through the hillside, drainage was installed, and trees were planted along both sides. The first houses began to appear in the mid-1870s, and by the end of the decade the avenue was substantially complete. The transformation was remarkable: where there had been open fields and scattered copses of trees, there was now a grand urban boulevard lined with substantial houses that proclaimed the wealth and confidence of the Victorian upper-middle class.
The Queen Anne Revival: Architecture of Ambition
The houses of Fitzjohn's Avenue are among the finest examples of Queen Anne Revival architecture in London, and they represent the style at its most exuberant and confident. The Queen Anne Revival — sometimes called the "Aesthetic Movement" style in its domestic manifestation — emerged in the 1870s as a reaction against the heavy, ornate Gothic Revival that had dominated British architecture for the previous three decades. Where Gothic Revival was dark, vertical, and ecclesiastical in spirit, the Queen Anne Revival was warm, horizontal, and domestic. It drew its inspiration not from medieval cathedrals but from the red-brick townhouses of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — the period of Queen Anne and the early Georgians — and it combined this historical vocabulary with a new freedom of composition that allowed architects to arrange facades asymmetrically, to mix materials and motifs with playful abandon, and to create buildings that were, above all, comfortable and inviting.
The architects who designed the houses on Fitzjohn's Avenue embraced these principles with enthusiasm. The facades are composed of warm red brick, often with bands of moulded terracotta and carved stone detailing that add texture and visual interest. Gables — steep, elaborate, and often of the Dutch or Flemish type with curved and stepped profiles — punctuate the roofline and give the street its distinctive silhouette. Tall chimney stacks, grouped in decorative clusters, rise above the gables and add further vertical emphasis. Bay windows, oriel windows, and loggias project from the facades, breaking up the wall surface and creating interplay of light and shadow that changes throughout the day.
The scale of these houses is remarkable. Many of them contain fifteen or twenty rooms, with grand entrance halls, sweeping staircases, multiple reception rooms, servants' quarters, and extensive basements. They were designed for families who expected to employ a full staff of domestic servants — cook, housemaid, parlour maid, butler, and possibly a coachman — and the internal planning reflects this social hierarchy, with separate staircases, entrances, and corridors for family and staff. The principal rooms are generously proportioned, with high ceilings, elaborate plasterwork, and large windows that flood the interiors with light. Many of them retain their original fireplaces, carved in marble or stone with tile surrounds in the fashionable aesthetic patterns of the period.
Among the most distinguished architects to work on Fitzjohn's Avenue was Richard Norman Shaw, the leading exponent of the Queen Anne Revival, whose influence can be seen throughout the street even in houses that were not designed by his own hand. Shaw's approach to domestic architecture — combining historical references with modern planning, using materials honestly and expressively, and creating facades that were varied and picturesque without being chaotic — set the standard for the entire development. Other architects who contributed to the avenue include Ernest George, who brought an Arts and Crafts sensibility to several of the larger houses, and various lesser-known practitioners who worked within the stylistic parameters established by Shaw and his circle.
Artists' Studios and Creative Life
One of the most distinctive features of Fitzjohn's Avenue and its immediate surroundings is the concentration of purpose-built artists' studios that were incorporated into many of the houses. The late Victorian period saw an enormous demand for studio space from painters, sculptors, and other visual artists, and Hampstead — with its clean air, its proximity to the Heath, and its established reputation as an artistic community — was a natural location for studio houses. Many of the houses on Fitzjohn's Avenue and the neighbouring streets of Netherhall Gardens and Maresfield Gardens were designed with large, north-lit studios on their upper floors, purpose-built spaces with high ceilings, rooflights, and carefully controlled natural lighting that were ideal for painting.
These studios attracted some of the most successful artists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The avenue and its environs became a kind of open-air gallery of artistic ambition, with painters and sculptors living and working in houses that proclaimed their status and success. The studio house was a particular Victorian institution — part home, part workspace, part design studio — and the examples on Fitzjohn's Avenue were among the grandest in London. The studios typically occupied the entire top floor of the house, with skylights set into the roof to provide the steady, diffused north light that artists preferred. Some studios were double-height, with mezzanine galleries for storing canvases and a large open floor area that could accommodate the enormous history paintings and society portraits that were the stock-in-trade of the successful Victorian artist.
The artistic community around Fitzjohn's Avenue was not limited to visual artists. Writers, musicians, and intellectuals were also drawn to the area, attracted by the combination of spacious houses, leafy surroundings, and proximity to central London. The avenue was well served by public transport — first by horse-drawn omnibus and later by the Metropolitan Railway, which opened a station at Swiss Cottage in 1868 — making it possible for residents to travel to the City or the West End in under half an hour. This accessibility was crucial to the avenue's appeal: it offered the tranquillity and space of a country retreat with the convenience of an urban location, a combination that has remained the essential attraction of Hampstead to this day.
The tradition of artistic residence on Fitzjohn's Avenue continued well into the twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, the avenue was home to several émigré artists and intellectuals who had fled continental Europe. The Freud family — Sigmund's daughter Anna Freud lived nearby on Maresfield Gardens — and other psychoanalysts settled in the area, adding a new dimension to the intellectual life of the avenue. After the war, the large Victorian houses were increasingly subdivided into flats, and the purpose-built studios were converted to other uses, but the creative character of the street persisted, and it continues to attract artists, writers, and cultural figures to this day.
Notable Residents and Social History
The roll call of residents who have lived on or near Fitzjohn's Avenue reads like a condensed history of British intellectual and cultural life from the 1870s to the present day. Among the earliest and most distinguished residents was Kate Greenaway, the beloved Victorian illustrator of children's books, who lived in a house on the avenue designed for her by Richard Norman Shaw. Greenaway's house, completed in 1885, was one of Shaw's most charming domestic commissions — a red-brick composition with a studio wing that perfectly suited the artist's needs. Greenaway lived and worked there until her death in 1901, producing some of her most famous illustrations in the top-floor studio that looked out across the rooftops towards the Heath.
The avenue also attracted successful professionals — lawyers, doctors, academics, and businessmen — who valued the combination of prestige, space, and accessibility that the address offered. In the late Victorian period, Fitzjohn's Avenue was one of the most desirable residential streets in London, and its houses commanded prices that reflected this status. The residents were, for the most part, members of the prosperous upper-middle class — families who could afford to employ servants, to entertain lavishly, and to maintain houses of considerable size and grandeur. The social life of the avenue was correspondingly active, with dinner parties, musical evenings, and cultural gatherings that connected the residents to the wider world of London society.
The early twentieth century brought changes to the social composition of the avenue. The First World War disrupted the comfortable patterns of Edwardian domestic life, and many of the larger houses proved difficult to maintain in the post-war period when domestic servants became scarce and expensive. Some houses were converted into flats; others were taken over by schools, nursing homes, or other institutional uses. The Second World War brought further disruption, with bomb damage and requisitioning taking their toll on several properties. But the fundamental character of the avenue survived these upheavals, and by the mid-twentieth century Fitzjohn's Avenue had settled into a new identity as a street of mixed uses — part residential, part institutional — that retained its architectural grandeur even as its social function evolved.
Among the twentieth-century residents of the avenue and its immediate surroundings were several figures of international significance. The psychoanalytic community that gathered around Anna Freud's clinic on Maresfield Gardens gave the area a distinctive intellectual flavour, and the neighbourhood became known as a centre of progressive thought in fields ranging from child psychology to social welfare. Writers, including several members of the Hampstead literary establishment, lived in the converted flats and studio houses along the avenue, contributing to the area's reputation as a place where creative and intellectual work was valued and supported.
The Avenue as NW3's Spine
In purely geographical terms, Fitzjohn's Avenue functions as the main artery of the NW3 postcode district — the road that connects the lower-lying areas around Swiss Cottage and Finchley Road to the hilltop village of Hampstead. This connecting role gives the avenue a significance that extends beyond its architectural and historical interest. It is the route that most visitors to Hampstead travel, whether by car, bus, or on foot, and the experience of ascending the avenue — watching the houses grow grander and more elaborate as the hill steepens, feeling the air change as the elevation increases, catching glimpses of the Heath through gaps in the streetscape — is one of the defining experiences of north London.
The avenue's role as a spine also shapes the pattern of surrounding development. The streets that branch off Fitzjohn's Avenue — Netherhall Gardens, Maresfield Gardens, Nutley Terrace, Arkwright Road — take their character from the main road, with houses of similar scale and style that create a coherent architectural neighbourhood extending several blocks in each direction. This consistency of character is unusual in London, where most residential areas are a patchwork of different periods and styles, and it gives the Fitzjohn's Avenue district a sense of completeness and unity that is one of its greatest assets.
The trees that line both sides of the avenue are an essential part of its character. Planted when the road was first laid out in the 1870s, the original London planes have grown to enormous size, their canopies meeting overhead to create a green tunnel that filters the light and softens the urban landscape. In summer, the effect is almost rural — the leaves dapple the sunlight, the trunks rise like columns, and the traffic noise is muffled by the dense foliage. In autumn, the leaves turn golden and brown and fall in great drifts that carpet the pavement and gather in the gutters. In winter, the bare branches create intricate patterns against the sky, and the full grandeur of the architectural facades is revealed. These trees are not merely decorative; they are structural elements of the streetscape, as important to the character of the avenue as the brick and stone of the buildings themselves.
The commercial character of the lower end of the avenue, near Swiss Cottage, contrasts with the purely residential upper reaches. Shops, restaurants, and cafes cluster around the junction with Finchley Road, creating a neighbourhood centre that serves the surrounding streets. This transition from commercial to residential, from busy to tranquil, from urban to almost suburban, is one of the pleasures of walking the length of the avenue. The journey from Swiss Cottage to Hampstead is a journey through a changing landscape of uses and atmospheres, and it mirrors the larger transition from the flat, busy streets of inner London to the elevated, leafy tranquillity of the hilltop village.
Preservation and the Future
Today, Fitzjohn's Avenue faces the same pressures that affect historic residential streets across London: rising property values, the demand for conversion and extension, the challenge of maintaining large Victorian buildings in good repair, and the constant tension between preservation and adaptation. Many of the avenue's houses are now divided into flats, and the original internal arrangements of grand reception rooms, servants' quarters, and purpose-built studios have been substantially altered. Yet the exteriors remain remarkably intact, protected by the Hampstead Conservation Area designation and by the vigilance of local preservation groups who have fought to maintain the architectural character of the street.
The challenge of maintaining these buildings is considerable. The elaborate terracotta and carved stone detailing that gives the facades their richness is vulnerable to weathering and pollution damage, and the repair of these elements requires specialist craftsmen whose skills are increasingly rare. The original timber windows, with their delicate glazing bars and decorative fanlights, are under constant pressure from replacement with modern double-glazed units that may be more energy-efficient but lack the refinement and character of the originals. The roofs, with their complex arrangements of gables, dormers, and chimney stacks, require regular maintenance that is expensive and difficult to carry out.
Despite these challenges, Fitzjohn's Avenue retains its essential character as one of London's great residential streets. The combination of architectural quality, historical significance, and landscape setting that made it an exceptional address in the 1870s continues to make it exceptional today. The avenue is a living demonstration that Victorian domestic architecture, so often dismissed as fussy and over-decorated, can achieve a grandeur and coherence that rivals anything in London's older and more celebrated streets. It is a monument to the ambition, taste, and confidence of the Victorian upper-middle class — and a reminder that the best domestic architecture is never merely functional but always, in some sense, a work of art.
Walking the length of Fitzjohn's Avenue on a late afternoon, when the westerly sun catches the red-brick facades and turns them to gold, and the shadows of the plane trees stretch across the pavement, and the roofline rises and falls in an irregular procession of gables and chimneys against the sky, one understands why this road has been at the centre of Hampstead life for a century and a half. It is not simply a road — it is a landscape, a community, and a statement about the kind of places that Londoners have always aspired to call home.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*