In the spring of 1938, a steady procession of bewildered, exhausted, and profoundly grateful arrivals began to appear on the streets of Hampstead and its neighbouring districts. They came with suitcases packed hastily and incompletely, with whatever possessions the Nazi authorities had permitted them to take, and with the invisible burden of knowing that the world they had left behind — the coffeehouses of Vienna, the concert halls of Prague, the university libraries of Berlin — was being systematically destroyed. They were doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers, psychoanalysts, painters, architects, philosophers, and scientists. Many of them were Jewish. Almost all of them were fleeing for their lives. And a remarkable number of them found their way to the hilltop streets around Finchley Road, Fitzjohn's Avenue, and Swiss Cottage, where they proceeded to recreate, with extraordinary determination and resourcefulness, a Central European cultural world in exile.
The community they built became known, with affectionate precision, as "Little Vienna" — a transplanted fragment of Mitteleuropa that retained its distinctive customs, its intellectual intensity, its culinary traditions, and its particular way of sitting in a coffee house for three hours over a single cup of coffee while debating the nature of consciousness. This community did not merely survive in Hampstead — it thrived, and in thriving it transformed the neighbourhood from an English village of literary and artistic associations into something altogether more cosmopolitan: a place where the German language could be heard on every bus, where Viennese pastries were sold alongside English scones, and where the intellectual life of an entire continent, violently uprooted, put down new roots in the clay soil of North London.
Flight from the Darkness
The exodus from Central Europe did not begin all at once. It gathered momentum gradually through the 1930s, accelerating with each new act of persecution. Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 triggered the first wave of departures from Germany — primarily political opponents, prominent intellectuals, and those Jewish professionals who understood immediately what the new regime intended. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews, prompted a second wave. The Anschluss of March 1938, which absorbed Austria into the Third Reich, unleashed a flood of refugees from Vienna and the Austrian provinces. Kristallnacht, in November 1938, made the situation unmistakable even to those who had hoped that the persecution might be temporary or limited.
Britain's response to the refugee crisis was characteristically ambivalent. The government was reluctant to accept large numbers of refugees for reasons that combined genuine economic anxiety — the country was still recovering from the Depression — with less admirable currents of xenophobia and antisemitism. Visas were difficult to obtain, and those who managed to secure them often arrived with severe restrictions on their right to work. Doctors could not practise medicine. Lawyers could not practise law. Academics found that British universities had few positions for foreign scholars, and that the positions that did exist carried salaries barely sufficient for survival. The refugees came anyway, because the alternative was death.
Why Hampstead? The answer lies in a combination of practical circumstances and cultural affinities. The neighbourhood already had a significant Jewish community, centred on the synagogues of Belsize Park and the commercial establishments along Finchley Road. The housing stock — large Victorian and Edwardian houses that had been subdivided into flats and bedsits — offered affordable accommodation in a respectable setting. The Northern Line provided easy access to central London, where many refugees hoped eventually to re-establish their professional lives. And the intellectual atmosphere of the neighbourhood — its tradition of progressive politics, its literary associations, its general tolerance of eccentricity and difference — made it a more welcoming environment than many other parts of London.
The concentration was remarkable. By 1940, the streets between Finchley Road and Fitzjohn's Avenue had acquired a distinctly Central European character. German and Czech and Hungarian could be heard on the pavements. The shop signs began to include unfamiliar names. The smells from kitchen windows changed — the scent of paprika and poppy seed joined the traditional aromas of English cooking. For the established English residents of Hampstead, the transformation was disconcerting. For the refugees themselves, the presence of fellow exiles in such numbers was a lifeline, providing the social and emotional support without which the trauma of displacement might have proved unbearable.
The Cosmo and the Coffee House Tradition
No institution better captured the spirit of Little Vienna than the Cosmo restaurant on Finchley Road. Opened in the late 1930s, the Cosmo became the social, cultural, and emotional centre of the refugee community — a place where exiles could gather to eat familiar food, speak their native languages, read the continental newspapers, and sustain the rituals of civilised life that the catastrophe of Nazism had threatened to extinguish.
The Cosmo was more than a restaurant. It was a recreation of the Viennese Kaffeehaus tradition — that unique Central European institution in which a customer was entitled to occupy a table for as long as he wished, ordering nothing more than a single Melange, while reading the newspapers, writing letters, conducting business meetings, playing chess, or simply watching the world go by. The Viennese coffeehouse was not a place of consumption but a place of being — a semi-public living room where the boundaries between the private and the social dissolved in a haze of cigarette smoke and intellectual conversation. To recreate this institution in exile was an act of cultural defiance, a refusal to surrender the habits of civilisation to the forces of barbarism.
The regulars at the Cosmo included some of the most remarkable figures of the emigration. Writers, musicians, and psychoanalysts rubbed shoulders at its tables, conducting in miniature the intellectual life of the cities they had been forced to leave. The conversations ranged across languages — German, Hungarian, Czech, Yiddish, and increasingly English — and across disciplines. A table might include a former professor of philosophy from the University of Vienna, a concert pianist who had played with the Berlin Philharmonic, a psychoanalyst who had trained under Freud, and a businessman who had lost everything in the Aryanisation of Jewish property. What united them was the shared experience of exile and the shared determination to maintain intellectual and cultural standards in circumstances that made such maintenance an act of heroism.
The Cosmo was not alone. A network of continental-style cafes and restaurants sprang up along Finchley Road and in the streets of Swiss Cottage and Belsize Park, each serving as a node in the social network of the refugee community. The Dorice, the Vienna, and numerous smaller establishments offered the particular combination of strong coffee, good pastry, and unhurried sociability that the Central European exile required as surely as oxygen. These establishments also served a practical function, acting as informal employment agencies, advice centres, and meeting places where information about visas, work permits, and the fates of relatives left behind could be exchanged.
Artists, Intellectuals, and Psychoanalysts
The intellectual calibre of the refugee community that settled in Hampstead was staggering. The Nazis had driven out of Central Europe precisely those people whose talents and achievements made them most valuable — and most threatening to a regime that despised intellectual independence, artistic experimentation, and the free play of critical thought. The result was an involuntary gift of human capital to Britain that enriched every field of intellectual and cultural endeavour.
The psychoanalytic community was perhaps the most concentrated and the most consequential. Sigmund Freud's arrival at 20 Maresfield Gardens in September 1938 was the symbolic centrepiece of the emigration, but he was accompanied and followed by dozens of analysts who had trained in Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest. Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter and the founder of child psychoanalysis, established herself at 20 Maresfield Gardens and built the Hampstead War Nurseries and later the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic into institutions of global significance. The presence of so many analysts in such a small area transformed the practice and theory of psychoanalysis, shifting its centre of gravity from Vienna to London and establishing Hampstead as the world capital of the discipline.
The artistic community was equally distinguished. Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian Expressionist painter whose work had been denounced by the Nazis as "degenerate art," settled in London and moved in Hampstead circles. The architects of the Bauhaus and the modern movement, driven from Germany by a regime that considered their clean lines and functionalist principles to be subversive, found in Hampstead a receptive audience for their ideas. The Isokon Building on Lawn Road, designed by Wells Coates, became a residential hub for refugee intellectuals — its minimal, modernist flats housed Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, three of the most influential architects and designers of the twentieth century. The building was, in effect, a fragment of the Bauhaus transplanted to a leafy street in NW3, and its influence on British architecture and design was profound and lasting.
The musicians who settled in the area brought with them the performance traditions of Central Europe's great conservatories and orchestras. Refugee musicians contributed to the enrichment of London's musical life, performing in orchestras, teaching at conservatories, and bringing to British audiences a standard of instrumental and vocal performance that had no previous equivalent. The tradition of house concerts — chamber music performed in private drawing rooms for invited audiences — was a direct transplant from Vienna, and it flourished in Hampstead's generous Edwardian rooms with their high ceilings and excellent acoustics.
The Kindertransport Children
Among the most poignant arrivals in the Hampstead area were the children of the Kindertransport — the rescue operation that brought approximately 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to Britain between December 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939. These children arrived without their parents, carrying small suitcases and identity tags, many of them too young to understand fully what was happening or why they had been sent away from everything they knew.
The Kindertransport children were distributed across Britain, some to foster families, others to hostels and group homes. A significant number were placed with families in the Hampstead and Belsize Park area, where the existing refugee community could provide linguistic and cultural support. The experience of these children — torn from their parents, deposited in a foreign country whose language they did not speak, aware at some level that they had been saved while their families remained in mortal danger — was one of the defining traumas of the twentieth century. Many of the children never saw their parents again. The mothers and fathers who had put them on trains in Berlin and Vienna and Prague, who had waved goodbye on station platforms with smiles that concealed unimaginable grief, were murdered in the death camps of Eastern Europe.
The Kindertransport children who grew up in Hampstead carried their trauma with different degrees of visibility. Some spoke openly about their experiences; others maintained a silence that lasted decades. Many achieved remarkable success in their adopted country — the list of distinguished Britons who arrived as Kindertransport children includes scientists, artists, businesspeople, and public servants of the highest distinction. Their resilience was extraordinary, but it was a resilience forged in the furnace of an experience that no child should ever have to endure, and the psychological costs were immense and lifelong.
The memorials to the Kindertransport — including the statue at Liverpool Street Station, where many of the trains arrived — serve as reminders of both the generosity that made the rescue possible and the catastrophe that made it necessary. In Hampstead, the memory of the Kindertransport children is preserved not in monuments but in the living fabric of the community — in the family stories passed down through generations, in the cultural institutions that the children and their descendants have built, and in the neighbourhood's enduring commitment to the principle that refugees should be welcomed, not turned away.
Integration and Friction
The relationship between the refugee community and their English neighbours was complex and not always comfortable. The sheer number of arrivals, concentrated in a relatively small area, inevitably generated tensions. Some English residents resented the transformation of their neighbourhood's character — the foreign languages on the streets, the unfamiliar shops, the social customs that seemed alien and sometimes intrusive. The wartime atmosphere, with its anxieties about fifth columnists and enemy aliens, made matters worse. German-speaking refugees, regardless of their reasons for being in Britain, were sometimes viewed with suspicion by neighbours who could not or would not distinguish between a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution and a potential Nazi sympathiser.
The internment crisis of 1940 brought these tensions to a head. Following the fall of France, the British government ordered the mass internment of "enemy aliens" — a category that included thousands of German and Austrian refugees who had fled the very regime they were now suspected of supporting. The absurdity of interning people who had been persecuted by the Nazis as potential Nazi agents was not lost on everyone, but wartime panic overrode rational calculation. Many of the Hampstead refugees found themselves shipped to internment camps on the Isle of Man or, in some cases, deported to Canada and Australia on ships that were vulnerable to U-boat attack. The Arandora Star, carrying internees to Canada, was torpedoed and sunk in July 1940, killing hundreds of Italian and German internees, some of them refugees from NW3.
The internment policy was eventually reversed, partly in response to public protests led by, among others, the Bishop of Chichester and various Hampstead residents who had come to know and respect their refugee neighbours. The experience left lasting scars on the refugee community, reinforcing the sense of precariousness that exile always carries and reminding them that their welcome in Britain was conditional and could be withdrawn at any time. But it also produced a determination to integrate more fully into British life — to learn English perfectly, to adopt British customs, to demonstrate through achievement and contribution that they belonged.
The Cultural Legacy
The cultural legacy of Little Vienna extends far beyond the boundaries of NW3. The refugee community that settled in Hampstead in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to the transformation of British intellectual and cultural life in ways that are still being measured. In medicine, in psychoanalysis, in architecture, in music, in literature, in philosophy, in the visual arts, and in the sciences, the contribution of the Central European refugees was disproportionate to their numbers and incalculable in its significance.
The architectural legacy is perhaps the most visible. The modernist buildings that the refugee architects designed or influenced — from the Isokon Building to the postwar social housing projects that drew on Bauhaus principles — changed the physical landscape of London. The aesthetic sensibility that the refugees brought with them — a commitment to functionalism, to the integration of art and daily life, to the idea that good design should be available to everyone and not merely to the wealthy — became one of the defining influences on British architecture and design in the second half of the twentieth century.
The intellectual legacy is equally profound. The refugee scholars who found positions in British universities brought with them traditions of scholarship and intellectual rigour that enriched and challenged the British academic establishment. The Warburg Institute, transplanted from Hamburg to London in 1933, introduced British art historians to the interdisciplinary methods of Aby Warburg and his followers. The psychoanalytic tradition, centred on Hampstead, reshaped British psychology and psychiatry. The philosophical traditions of Central Europe — phenomenology, logical positivism, critical theory — entered British intellectual life through the teaching and writing of refugee scholars, diversifying a philosophical culture that had previously been dominated by the empiricist tradition.
The culinary legacy, though more modest, is not insignificant. The coffee house tradition that the refugees brought with them contributed to the gradual transformation of British attitudes toward food and drink. The Cosmo and its sister establishments introduced Londoners to a style of eating and socialising that was more relaxed, more sociable, and more continental than the traditional English tea room or pub. The influence was slow but cumulative, and when the coffee shop revolution finally swept Britain in the 1990s, it was building on foundations that the Central European refugees had laid half a century earlier.
Memory and Continuity
The generation that fled Central Europe in the 1930s has now largely passed away. The Cosmo restaurant closed its doors. The Finchley Road coffee houses have been replaced by chain restaurants and estate agents. The German language is no longer heard on every street corner. But the legacy of Little Vienna persists in the cultural DNA of the neighbourhood — in the cosmopolitan outlook of its residents, in the intellectual seriousness of its institutions, in the particular quality of its bookshops and galleries and concert venues, and in the instinctive sympathy for refugees and outsiders that remains one of the most admirable features of Hampstead's character.
The Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens stands as the most visible memorial to the refugee experience in NW3 — Freud's study, preserved exactly as he left it, with his famous couch, his collection of antiquities, and his library, offers visitors a window into the world of a man who lost everything and rebuilt what he could in the time that remained to him. But the real memorial to Little Vienna is less tangible. It is the atmosphere of the neighbourhood itself — the sense that Hampstead is a place where difference is valued, where intellectual ambition is encouraged, where the stranger is welcomed, and where the life of the mind is considered not a luxury but a necessity. This atmosphere is the gift of the refugees who, arriving with nothing, gave everything they had to the place that took them in.
The story of Little Vienna is, in the end, a story about the resilience of culture — about the capacity of human beings to carry their civilisation with them when everything else has been taken away, to plant it in foreign soil, and to watch it grow into something that belongs to both the old world and the new. It is a story that Hampstead should tell with pride, because it demonstrates what a community can gain when it opens its doors to those who have been driven from their homes. The thinkers, artists, and scientists who arrived as refugees became, within a generation, not merely residents of Hampstead but architects of its identity — and the neighbourhood they helped to create is immeasurably richer for their presence.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*