A Yorkshireman Arrives on the Hill
John Boynton Priestley came to Highgate in the early 1930s as a man whose reputation was already enormous. The publication of The Good Companions in 1929 had made him one of the most widely read novelists in the English-speaking world, and the royalties from that sprawling, generous, picaresque tale of a travelling theatrical troupe had given him the means to choose where he lived with some care. He chose Highgate. The reasons were characteristic of the man: he wanted somewhere that felt like a proper place, a village with its own identity and its own social texture, rather than a mere London neighbourhood. Highgate, perched on its hill above the sprawl of the capital, with its ancient pubs and Georgian terraces and views stretching south across the city, suited him perfectly. It was London without being swallowed by London, a hilltop settlement that retained something of the self-contained character of the provincial towns he had grown up among in the West Riding.
The house he settled in stood in the area around Highgate West Hill, in one of those handsome, substantial properties that line the western approach to the village. It was a house with presence — large enough to accommodate his growing family, his study, his library, and the steady stream of visitors who became a feature of Priestley's domestic life. From its upper windows, one could look out across the green canopy of Waterlow Park and the rooftops of the village, a prospect that combined the rural and the urban in precisely the way that suited Priestley's temperament. He was a man who liked to feel connected to the great currents of national life while retaining a degree of separation from its metropolitan frenzy, and Highgate afforded him exactly that balance.
His arrival in the village coincided with a period of extraordinary productivity. Throughout the 1930s, Priestley was writing novels, plays, essays, and journalism at a pace that astonished even his contemporaries. He worked in his Highgate study with the discipline of a man who had learned his craft in the hard school of provincial journalism, rising early, writing steadily through the morning, and emerging in the afternoon to walk the lanes and paths of the village. The Heath extension, Waterlow Park, and the winding streets around Highgate High Street became his habitual territory, and neighbours grew accustomed to the sight of the stocky, pipe-smoking figure striding purposefully along the footpaths, often deep in conversation with whichever friend or colleague had come to visit.
The Highgate Study
Priestley's study in Highgate became something of a legendary place among the literary circles of the 1930s and 1940s. It was a room filled with books, manuscripts, pipes, and the accumulated detritus of a working writer's life, presided over by the man himself — broad-shouldered, blunt-spoken, and possessed of an energy that could fill any room he entered. He wrote at a large desk positioned to catch the morning light, surrounded by the reference works, dictionaries, and volumes of history and philosophy that fed his voracious intellectual appetite. The study was both his workshop and his sanctuary, the place where the novels, plays, and essays poured out in an unending stream that would eventually amount to one of the largest bodies of work produced by any twentieth-century English writer.
It was here that he wrote Angel Pavement, the dark, atmospheric London novel that showed a very different side of his talent from the sunlit optimism of The Good Companions. The novel's depiction of the grey, grinding world of a small City office drew on Priestley's own observations of London life, but it was shaped and refined in the quieter surroundings of Highgate, where the roar of the capital was reduced to a distant murmur. He would later say that Highgate gave him the distance he needed to see London clearly, that the view from the hill was both literal and metaphorical — a vantage point from which the city's patterns and textures became visible in ways that were impossible when one was down among them.
The plays that established Priestley as one of the most important dramatists of his generation were also conceived and largely written in the Highgate study. Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways, An Inspector Calls, and When We Are Married all took shape in that book-lined room above the village. His dramatic experiments with time — influenced by the theories of J.W. Dunne, whose An Experiment with Time fascinated Priestley for decades — gave his plays a philosophical dimension that set them apart from the drawing-room comedies and naturalistic dramas that dominated the West End stage. These were plays that asked large questions about fate, responsibility, and the nature of time itself, and they were written by a man gazing out across the ancient landscape of Highgate Hill.
Wartime Broadcasts from the Hill
It was Priestley's wartime work that cemented his status as a national figure of the first importance, and Highgate was his base throughout those extraordinary years. When war broke out in September 1939, Priestley was already fifty-five years old, too old for military service but burning with the desire to contribute. His opportunity came in June 1940, when the BBC invited him to give a series of Sunday evening radio talks following the nine o'clock news. The Postscripts, as they became known, were broadcast to an audience of millions — some estimates suggest that as many as sixteen million people listened each week — and they made Priestley, for a brief but intense period, the most important voice in Britain after Churchill himself.
The broadcasts were written in Highgate, often in the hours immediately before transmission, and they drew on the qualities that Priestley's village life had nurtured: a deep love of ordinary English places and ordinary English people, a belief in community and common purpose, and a Yorkshire bluntness that cut through the pomposity and evasion of official rhetoric. Where Churchill spoke of blood, toil, tears, and sweat, Priestley spoke of the pleasure boats at Dunkirk, of the pie shops and the allotments, of the small, everyday things that made England worth defending. His tone was conversational, warm, and direct — the voice of a man sitting in his Highgate study, speaking to his neighbours and to the nation as if they were one and the same.
The Postscripts were eventually taken off the air in October 1940, ostensibly because the series had reached its natural end, though Priestley always believed — with some justification — that the Conservative establishment had grown uncomfortable with the increasingly radical social content of his talks. He had begun to speak not just about winning the war but about building a better, fairer society afterwards, and this did not sit well with those who wished to preserve the pre-war order. The experience left Priestley with a lasting bitterness towards the political establishment, but it also reinforced his conviction that he was, at heart, a spokesman for ordinary people — a role that his Highgate years had prepared him for, situated as he was in a community that, despite its affluence, retained a genuine village character.
Entertaining at Highgate
Priestley was a generous and gregarious host, and his Highgate home became a gathering place for writers, artists, politicians, and intellectuals throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes — the distinguished archaeologist whom he married in 1953, after his second marriage ended — entertained with a warmth and lack of pretension that reflected their shared belief in the importance of good company, good food, and vigorous conversation. Dinner at the Priestleys' was an experience that guests remembered for decades: the table laden with substantial English fare, the wine flowing freely, and the host holding court with the combination of Yorkshire directness and intellectual range that made him one of the great conversationalists of his age.
Among the regular visitors to Highgate were figures from every corner of the cultural and political landscape. Ralph Richardson and Alec Guinness came to discuss the plays they were performing; the painter Henry Moore, who lived not far away in Hampstead, was a frequent guest; politicians of the left, including Michael Foot and Aneurin Bevan, came to talk about the future of socialism; and fellow writers — from the established, like H.G. Wells and Somerset Maugham, to the younger generation, like John Braine and Alan Sillitoe — sought out Priestley's company and advice. The Highgate house functioned as a kind of salon, informal and unpretentious but intellectually serious, where the great issues of the day were debated over brandy and cigars late into the evening.
Jacquetta Hawkes brought her own considerable intellectual authority to these gatherings. Her work as an archaeologist and writer — her book A Land, published in 1951, remains one of the finest works of English nature writing — complemented Priestley's literary concerns with a deep engagement with landscape, prehistory, and the long story of human settlement in Britain. Together, they made a formidable couple, and their Highgate home became a place where literature and science, art and politics, converged in conversations that could range from the dating of a Neolithic monument to the prospects for nuclear disarmament in the space of a single evening.
Priestley's England
Priestley's vision of England was shaped, in part, by his Highgate years. He was a man who believed passionately in the reality and importance of English culture — not the culture of the aristocracy or the metropolitan elite, but the broader, deeper culture of ordinary English people going about their ordinary English lives. This belief informed everything he wrote, from the novels and plays to the polemical works like English Journey, the 1934 account of his travels through the industrial heartlands that remains one of the most powerful documents of the interwar years. In Highgate, he found a place that embodied his ideal of English community: a village that was neither grand nor humble, where people of different backgrounds and occupations lived alongside one another in something approaching genuine neighbourliness.
His commitment to this vision led him, in the years after the war, to become one of the most prominent advocates for a distinctively English form of social democracy. He was instrumental in the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, writing the New Statesman article that launched the movement, and he remained active in progressive causes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. But his politics were always rooted in a fundamentally conservative — with a small 'c' — love of English places and English ways of life. He distrusted ideology, whether of the left or the right, and he had no time for what he called the "admass" culture of American-influenced consumerism that he saw creeping into British life. What he wanted was something simpler and more humane: a society in which people had enough to live on, meaningful work to do, and access to the kind of culture and community that he himself had found in places like Highgate.
Highgate itself appeared in his writing in various guises. He rarely named it directly, but the village's atmosphere — its combination of urbanity and rusticity, its steep lanes and ancient trees, its pubs and its parkland — infused the settings of many of his later works. He was particularly drawn to the way the village seemed to exist slightly out of time, its Georgian and Victorian architecture creating a sense of continuity with the past that the modern city below had largely lost. For a man obsessed with the nature of time and its relationship to human experience, this quality of Highgate's was not merely charming but philosophically significant. The village was living proof that the past was not dead but continued to exist alongside the present, shaping and enriching it in ways that most people took for granted.
The Village as Literary Setting
While Priestley never wrote a novel explicitly set in Highgate, the village's influence on his imaginative landscape was profound and pervasive. The hilltop setting, with its sense of elevation above the common run of metropolitan life, appealed to something deep in his temperament — the part of him that remained, despite decades of London living, essentially a man of the provinces, more comfortable observing the capital from a distance than being immersed in its centre. His later novels, including The Image Men and Lost Empires, are suffused with a quality of detached, ironic observation that owes something to the perspective afforded by Highgate's geographical and social position.
The walks he took through the village and its surrounding green spaces were an essential part of his creative process. He was a great walker, and the routes he favoured — through Waterlow Park, along the tree-lined paths of Highgate Cemetery, up through the Heath extension to Kenwood — became as familiar to him as the streets of Bradford where he had grown up. He walked to think, to work out the problems of plot and character that occupied his mind, and the rhythm of his prose — expansive, unhurried, confident — owed something to the rhythm of those daily excursions through the green heart of Highgate. Friends who walked with him recalled that he would often stop mid-stride to dictate a phrase or an idea to himself, muttering into the collar of his overcoat before resuming his pace with renewed energy.
The Flask, the ancient pub on Highgate West Hill, was another of his regular haunts. Priestley was a man who appreciated the civilised institution of the English pub — its warmth, its democracy, its function as a place where strangers could become acquaintances and acquaintances could become friends — and The Flask, with its panelled rooms and its air of comfortable antiquity, suited him perfectly. He would drink there in the evenings, sometimes alone with a book, sometimes in company, and the pub's character — at once convivial and private, bustling and intimate — found its way into his writing about English social life.
The Later Years at Highgate
As Priestley grew older, his attachment to Highgate deepened. The man who had arrived as a young novelist in his thirties became a fixture of village life — a grand old man of English letters whose presence lent the neighbourhood a distinction that its residents appreciated even if they did not always read his books. He continued to write prolifically throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, producing novels, plays, essays, and volumes of autobiography that, while they no longer commanded the vast audiences of his earlier work, displayed an undiminished vigour and intelligence. His study remained the centre of his world, and the routines he had established decades earlier — the early morning writing, the afternoon walk, the evening's conversation — continued with the regularity that had sustained one of the most productive literary careers of the twentieth century.
His relationship with the village was one of genuine affection rather than mere convenience. He cared about Highgate's character and was vocal in his opposition to developments that threatened to erode it. The creeping commercialisation of the High Street, the threat of increased traffic through the village, the possibility of inappropriate modern building — all these provoked his displeasure and, on occasion, his public intervention. He understood that places like Highgate were precious precisely because they were fragile, that the qualities that made them distinctive — their human scale, their historical layering, their sense of community — could be destroyed in a generation by indifference or greed. This concern for the preservation of English places was not mere nostalgia; it was an expression of the same values that had animated his wartime broadcasts and his political activism.
In his final years, Priestley divided his time between Highgate and Kissing Tree House, his country home near Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died in August 1984 at the age of eighty-nine. But it was Highgate that had been his London base for the better part of half a century, and it was in Highgate that he had done much of his most important work. The village had given him what he needed: a place that was both of London and apart from it, a community that respected his privacy while welcoming his participation, and a landscape of hills, trees, and ancient buildings that nourished his imagination and sustained his faith in the enduring qualities of English life.
Legacy in N6
Priestley's legacy in Highgate is quieter than one might expect for a writer of his stature. There is no blue plaque on his house — an oversight that some literary historians have found puzzling — and no memorial in the village that bears his name. Yet his presence lingers in the character of the place itself. The Highgate that Priestley loved and wrote about — a village of pubs and parks, of handsome houses and steep, tree-shaded lanes, of intellectual conversation and unpretentious neighbourliness — is still recognisably the Highgate of today. The qualities he valued have survived, not unchanged, but essentially intact, and in this survival there is a kind of vindication of the faith he placed in English places and the communities that sustain them.
His contribution to the cultural life of the village was considerable, even if it was never formalised in the way that, say, Coleridge's connection with Highgate has been memorialised. Priestley's Highgate was a living, working place, not a shrine, and the work he produced there — the novels, the plays, the broadcasts, the essays — speaks for itself. An Inspector Calls alone, written in the Highgate study in the space of a single week in 1945, would be enough to secure his reputation as one of the major English dramatists of the twentieth century. That it was written in Highgate, in a house on the hill above London, by a Yorkshireman who had found in this ancient village something essential about the nature of English community, adds a layer of significance that the play's millions of admirers may not always appreciate.
For those who know the village, Priestley's Highgate is never far away. Walk through Waterlow Park on a grey afternoon, or sit in the back room of The Flask with a pint of bitter and a book, or stand on the terrace above the village and look south across the vast, smoking expanse of the capital, and you are in Priestley's territory. He saw in Highgate something that he spent his entire career trying to articulate: the possibility of a civilised, humane, distinctively English way of living that was neither exclusive nor parochial, but open, generous, and rooted in a genuine love of place. That vision remains, like the village itself, stubbornly and beautifully alive.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*