ArchMusicMan: Hampstead - a country idyll on our doorstep

My dear abode for half a year...

Hampstead, to me, is a very special place indeed. I had the honour to live there for half a year in a house that was all that one would want of 'Old Hampstead'. This house is on Cannon Place, a grand Victorian row of houses on what was once the grounds of Cannon Hall. The house had been in the hands of our friends since they had moved there from Moscow in the early 1930's. It was a house with a character as tangible as the various characters that had inhabited, the last of which being a very dear and old friend of my family, who had recently died. My Grandparents had laughed and danced here when they were studying at King's London in the 30's, my Father and Uncle had caused havoc there on numerous occasions and my cousin and I moved in for the princely sum of £40 a week, which covered bills...these were mainly for the heating, which could either be all on or off, so the house with its nine bedrooms and high dusty ceilings was a like a hot house throughout the early wintry months of 2010. There were various discoveries in the first few days of living there; a death mask belonging to some long gone inhabitant, some ashes (ditto), a machine gun, another machine gun and many other long forgotten things. These prototype weapons were moved to the Imperial War Museum I believe.

Machine gun and other forgotten things in the south attic

The real honour of living in Hampstead was having this extraordinary survival of a country village on the edge of London on one's doorstep. I delighted in the hidden architectural treasures all around; the tiny Italianate frontage of the St Mary's Catholic Church on Holly Walk, the front of Fenton House down it's avenue, the Georgian Lock-Up within the great brick garden wall of Cannon Hall, the Lilliputian streets of the Vale of Health, the crooked vistas across the High Street to the spire of Christchurch and the skyscrapers of Docklands, which served as a reminder to me of the preciousness of this little village on a hill above the rat-race of London.