Hampstead Heath with Keats

One free Tuesday when everyone else was in class and I was sitting at my computer in my room it hit me again. I’m in London. Of course followed the following thought occurred next: ‘And you’re in your room why?' So I looked at my list of “to sees,” and picked one: Hampstead. I grabbed my copy of Hard Times by Dickens, walked outside campus into the tube station and was zooming away within five minutes of the initial thought.

Hampstead, a more suburban area in the northern greater London area, had been on my list since I began looking up things to do in London. An overwhelming amount of actors, writers, poets, musicians and artists had lived there at some point in their lives. It seemed to be a more affluent, quiet part of London where giants in the arts, science and politics went to be inspired. C.S. Lewis lived near the Heath - a huge park with endless hillsides offering views of London or the surrounding towns. Wentworth Place, the house where Keats had lived, was a few streets away. Audrey Hepburn had also lived there, as had Freud, Sting, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Charles De Gaulle, Elizabeth Taylor and many others.


I got off the tube at the right station and started walking toward a Starbucks on the main street. There were huge, leafy trees lining the street and old brick and stone buildings. The street was peaceful but felt alive, as if it had seen and inspired many great people over the years.

Drink in hand, I headed back up the street in what I hoped was the direction of Wentworth Place. After a few blocks I saw a sign, half covered in ivy, which read Keats’ Grotto and pointed off down a leafy side street. Not far down on the left was a pretty white house with inlaid arches around the ground floor windows and a path leading through the unfenced yard to the back door. The round plaque on the front told me I had found my destination.



The doorknob was at knee level, making the backdoor awkward to open. Adjacent to the hallway immediately ahead was a gift shop where tickets, books, pins and other souvenirs could be purchased. The tour started just off the shop and led through the rooms on the ground floor, including a parlor where Keats had put a chaise lounge chair so he could recline and look out the window when he was ill later on in his short life. Down the stairs were the kitchens and washing rooms, and up on the second floor (British first floor) were the bedrooms, including Fanny Brawne’s,
Keats’ fiancé from 1818 up to his death in 1821, Keats’ friend Charles Armitage Brown who actually owned the house, and Keats’ own modest bedroom. A copy of his death mask was displayed in a corner near the end of an enormous four-poster bed. The original death mask is displayed in Rome, where he died at age 25 of tuberculosis.

Back down the stairs and out the front door the day was clear and cool. Cats lazed about the garden, listlessly mewing for attention if you got too close. I wandered back up the street and into the Heath. To the left was an open hill, leading away into the sunlight. A path to the right led under some trees by a lake. I chose the right. Houses were reflected in the lake and swans swam across the reflections chasing after bread that was thrown by kids on the banks. The path continued over a hill, down between two smaller ponds, and up into thicker trees. It was shaded here, and every now and then a piece of it would split off to the side, leading to a small open hill surrounded by trees with views of Hampstead, London and the other idyllic English towns surrounding the Heath. It almost seemed absurd to share a hill, as there were so many that it was easy to find an unoccupied one. I picked a random one, settled onto a bench under a pine and pulled out the slim book of Keats’ poems that I had just purchased.

“I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still,
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,
Their scantly leav’d, and finely tapering stems,
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the moon.”
--first five lines from “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” 1817


It’s easy to see how he drew inspiration from the Heath. I wonder if he ever came here to write or just to wander and reflect. It’s also strange to think that he wrote the poem I was reading four years before he died and was my age at the time.

Finally as the wind grew colder, I moved back to the path and continued up toward Parliament Hill, an open hill at the southeast corner of the Heath that is perhaps the most popular part of the park. It faces London, and you can pick out famous buildings in the skyline, like the Eye and St. Paul’s Cathedral.




On the way out of the Heath, I was taking photos of the big, old houses when an ovular plaque caught my eye. I leaned over the gate to read it better: GEORGE ORWELL, WRITER, LIVED HERE.



(Side Note: This brings us back to my very well documented love of Blue-and-any-other-colored-Plaques and how I would love nothing more than to move to England (preferably Hampstead, London or Liverpool) buy a house with a (preferably) blue (because most of them are) plaque, get a really comfortable outdoor chair and do nothing but sit outside, read my books and admire my blue plaque.)

A week or so later, Felicia, Lindsay and I returned to the Heath, partly because I love Hampstead and Hampstead Heath and partly because all of the tickets to Wentworth Place are actually one year passes, so I was excited to use it again. (Plus, the words “one year pass” remind me of Disneyland, and oh my gosh, Disneyland.)

Other Photos

The back porch at Wentworth Place

Lindsay and Felicia next to the Death mask, looking dead of course

Credits to Felicia. "Oops timed that wrong. That one's just Lindsay with the death mask."

Dead animals in the kitchen

This would be my mom's house if she lived in the London area

It's my car-twin!

"Speak softly and carry a big stick." --Teddy Roosevelt

This is, in my opinion, one of the most epically failed jumping photos we've ever taken... Just sitting on our invisible toilets.

And finally (because if you scroll through previous posts, I am completely addicted to them) Bird Photos





RLO - Suds on the Dishes

The majority of my British acquaintances washed their dishes by hand. They would fill the sink or washing up bucket with soapy water, scrub the dishes and then transfer them to a drying rack. The first few times I was a little surprised. What happened to that last rinse that we Americans are so fond of?

I quickly realized that no, this doesn’t make food taste like soap, you don’t ingest enough soap to die or anything like that and you probably save quite a bit of water in the long run. I am still fascinated that there are so many little things like washing dishes that we do differently. When I said I was studying in London and not somewhere more exotic like Zanzibar, a lot of people thought I was being foolish and told me the cultures were practically the same. Yes, Both countries speak English, but the differences are wonderfully pronounced from big things, like national sports, to small things, like washing dishes.

London-isms

Wonky - Shaky, unsteady
Tinned - canned
Term - semester, trimester, quarter etc. Where we would say, “I can’t wait for this semester to end,” a lot of British people would say “I can’t wait for the end of term.”
Beep - honk
Knock it - to diss or insult something. i.e. “don’t knock it!”
Cross - So this isn’t exclusively British but most American’s aren’t as likely to say Cross instead of angry or mad.
Bum - Butt