A POTTERY AND A PRISON

HAMPSTEAD IN NORTH London is full of interesting nooks and crannies.

 

At the west end of Well Walk in Hampstead, near the lower end of Flask Walk, there is a corner building with a Georgian shop front. It is now a small theatre but was once the Well Walk Pottery, which occupied this place for many years. The pottery was started by the potter Christopher Magarshack in 1959. According to Bohm and Norrie, writing in their “Hampstead: London Hill Town”, published in 1980, Elsie, the widow of the Russian Jewish translator and writer David Magarshack (1899-1977), lived there. She bought this corner building, which had formerly been Sidney Spall’s grocery shop in 1957, for Christopher to use as his pottery. His father, David, left his birthplace Riga, then in Russia in 1918 and later lived above the shop. Elsie died in 1999, aged 100. In addition to selling pottery there, the pottery also held classes for ceramicists, some of whom now have good reputations. David’s daughter Stella, a fine artist, was the Head Art Teacher at King Alfred’s, a ‘progressive’ school situated between Hampstead and Golders Green. In 2016, aged 87, she was brutally attacked in the street close to her home. Now, the premises is to be home to a theatrical enterprise, The Wells Theatre. Its present owners have decorated one of its windows has been decorated with a pictorial history of the premises.

 

Before returning uphill along Flask Walk towards the pub, you will pass a pair of doors covered in metal studs arranged neatly in geometric patterns. According to an article in the January 2018 issue of “Heath and Hampstead Society Newsletter”, this pair of studded doors:

“…is supposed to have come from Newgate Prison,”

The prison closed in 1902.

THEY LIVED IN NORTH LONDON BEFORE FOUNDING NEW NATIONS

PLATTS LANE WINDS its way between London’s Finchley Road and West Heath Road in Hampstead. It follows the route of a track between Hampstead Heath and West End (now West Hampstead). This track was already in existence by the mid-18^th century. According to a historian of Hampstead, Christopher Wade, the thoroughfare was first called Duval’s Lane to commemorate a 17^th century French highwayman. Louis (alias Lodewick alias Claude) Duval (alias Brown) who was, according to another historian, Thomas Barratt, famed for being gallant towards his victims, many of whom he robbed on Hampstead Heath. Barratt related:

“It used to be told that, after stopping a coach and robbing the passengers at the point of the pistol on the top of the Hill, he would, having bound the gentlemen of the party, invite the ladies to a minuet on the greensward in the moonlight.”

Duval was hung at Tyburn soon after 1669.

Over time this track’s name became corrupted to Devil’s Lane. A pious local resident, Thomas Pell Platt (1798-1852), probably put an end to that name after he had built his home, Childs Hill House, nearby in about 1840.

 

Platt graduated at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1820 and became a Major Fellow of his college in 1823. While at Cambridge, he became associated with the British and Foreign Bible Society and was its librarian for a few years. He was also an early member of The Royal Asiatic Society (founded 1823) as well as a member of The Society of Antiquaries of London. In 1823, he prepared a catalogue of the Ethiopian manuscripts in a library in Paris. In addition, he did much work with biblical manuscripts written in the Amharic and Syriac languages. Apart from being a scholar, he was an intensely religious man. He died not in Hampstead but in Dulwich.

 

Platt lived near the lane named after him for quite a few years. The same cannot be said for a later resident of Platts Lane, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), who was born in Moravia (now a part of the Czech Republic). Masaryk added the name Garrigue to his own when he married the American born Charlotte Garrigue (1850-1923) in 1878. A politician serving in the Young Czech Party between 1891 and 1893, he founded the Czech Realist Party in 1900. At the outbreak of WW1, he decided that it would best if the Czechs and Slovaks campaigned for independence from the Austro-Hungarian empire. He went into exile in December 1914, staying in various places before settling in London, where he became one of the first staff members of London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, then later a professor of Slavic Research at Kings College London.

 

In London, Masaryk first lived in a boarding house at number 4 Holford Road in Hampstead (http://tg-masaryk.cz/mapa/index.jsp?id=285&misto=Pobyt-T.-G.-Masaryka-1915-1916). In June 1916, he moved from there to number 21 Platts Lane, which was near to the former Westfield College where his daughter Olga was studying. The house, the whole of which he rented, became a meeting place for the Czechoslovak resistance movement in England. Masaryk stayed in Platts Lane until he departed for Russia in May 1917. It is possible that he returned there briefly when he made a visit to London in late 1918. On the 14^th of September 1950, the Czechoslovak community affixed a metal plaque to the three-storey brick house on Platts Lane, which was built in the late 1880s. It reads:

“Here lived and worked during 1914-1918 war TG Masaryk president liberator of Czechoslovakia. Erected by Czechoslovak colony 14.9.1950”

Actually, Masaryk only used the house between 1916 and 1917. The year that the plaque was placed was a century after Masaryk’s birth year. The day chosen, the 14^th of September, was that on which he died in 1937.

 

Not too far away from Masaryk’s Hampstead home, there is a place on West End Lane that used to be called The Czechoslovak Club before it became the Czechoslovak Restaurant and currently Bohemia House. Here you can see a portrait of Masaryk and enjoy yourself sampling Czech beers and food. The establishment is within the Czechoslovak National House, which was founded as a club in 1946.

 

The houses where Czechoslovakia’s freedom fighter lived in London still stand in Hampstead. However, that is no longer the case for another freedom fighter and founder of a new nation, who lived near Platts lane on West Heath Road, the wealthy barrister and founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948). In the 1930s, Jinnah practised law in London. One of his biographers, Hector Bolitho (1897-1975) wrote (in 1954):

“One day in June 1931, when Jinnah was walking in Hampstead, he paused before West Heath House, in West Heath Road. It was a three-storied villa, built in the confused style of the 1880s, with many rooms and gables, and a tall tower which gave a splendid view over the surrounding country. There was a lodge, a drive, and eight acres of garden and pasture, leading down to Childs Hill.

All are gone now, and twelve smaller, modern houses occupy the once-pretty Victorian pleasance. Nearby lives Lady Graham Wood, from whom Jinnah bought the house; and she remembers him, on the day when he first called, as “most charming, a great gentleman, most courteous…

… In September 1931 Jinnah took possession of West Heath House, and he assumed the pattérn of life that suited him. In place of Bombay, with the angers of his inheritance for ever pressing upon him, he was able to enjoy the precise, ordained habits of a London house. He breakfasted punctually and, at nine o'clock, Bradbury was at the door with the car, to drive him to his chambers in King's Bench Walk. There he built up his new career, with less fire of words, and calmer address, than during the early days in Bombay.”

It was at West Heath House that Jinnah entertained Liaquat Ali Khan (1895-1951), another of Pakistan’s founding fathers and its first Prime Minister, who had arrived from India. Bolitho wrote:

“A great part of the fortunes of Pakistan were decided оn the day, in July 1933, when Liaquat Ali Khan crossed Hampstead Heath, to talk to his exiled leader.”

Bolitho recorded that Liaquat’s wife recalled the occasion:

“Jinnah suddenly said, ‘Well, come to dinner on Friday.’ Sо we drove to Hampstead. Іt was a lovely evening. And his big house, with trees—apple trees, I seem to remember. And Miss Jinnah, attending to all his comforts. I felt that nothing could move him out of that security. After dinner, Liaquat repeated his plea, that the Muslims wanted Jinnah and needed him.”

At the end of the evening, Jinnah said to Liaquat:

“’You go back and survey the situation; test the feelings of all parts of the country. I trust your judgment. If you say “Come back,” I'll give up my life here and return.’”

Jinnah returned to India in 1934, and Pakistan was created in August 1947.

 

Judging by Bolitho’s description, Jinnah’s Hampstead house could not have been very far from the house which Masaryk rented in Platts Lane, which, like Jinnah’s garden, is close to, or more accurately on, Childs Hill. I have found Jinnah’s house marked on a map surveyed in the 1890s. It was located on the west side of the northern part of West Heath Road, about 430 yards north of Masaryk’s residence on Platts Lane.

 

It might come as much of a surprise as it was to me to learn that the founders of two countries, each of which was founded soon after the ending of World Wars, both lived in Hampstead for brief periods in their lives.

 

A pub in London's Hampstead

ONCE LONDON’S HAMPSTEAD had two pubs or taverns named ‘The Flask’. This should not come as a great surprise as Flask used to be a common name given to pubs. One of them, The Upper Flask, used to be located at the top (northern) end of East Heath Road and the other, The Lower Flask’ was (and still is) on Flask Walk, a street leading off Hampstead High Street.

 

The Upper Flask used to be a remarkable establishment. Once called ‘The Upper Bowling Green House’ because of its good bowling green, it was a meeting place favoured by fashionable and ‘cultured’ men (mainly) and women during the 18^th century. It was a summer meeting place for The Kit Kat Club, which thrived in the early 18^th century and whose members included literary figures and political personalities, who supported the Whig Party. The Upper Flask figures several times in “Clarissa”, a lengthy novel by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), first published in 1747. The place ceased operating as a hospitality business in the 1750s, when it became a private residence (www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol9/pp81-91). In 1921, it was demolished to clear the site for building the Queen Mary Maternity Hospital (https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/queenmaryhampstead.html), which has since become the site of a luxury housing complex.

 

The Lower Flask (in Flask Walk) is also mentioned in “Clarissa”, but unflatteringly as:

“… a place where second-rate persons are to be found often in a swinish condition,” (quoted from “Old and New London”, by Edward Walford, about 1880).

Unlike the lost Upper Flask, the formerly named Lower Flask is still in business, but much has changed since Richardson published his novel.

 

Located at the eastern end of the pedestrianised stretch of Flask Walk, the former Lower Flask, renamed The Flask, was rebuilt in 1874 (and extended in 1990; https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1322190). Formerly, it had been a thatched building and was a place where mineral water from Hampstead’s chalybeate springs was sold. It and Keith Fawkes’ second-hand bookshop are the only things in Flask Walk, which were in existence when I used to visit Hampstead regularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In those, now far-off, days, I remember that there used to be another second-hand bookshop and a butcher, both on the south side of the passageway. Before the 20^th century, there used to be a fair held for a few days in August on the triangular open space a few yards downhill from The Flask pub. Close to The Flask, also on Flask Walk, miscreants could be found languishing in the parish stocks. Both the stocks and the fair are now but long distant memories recorded only in books published many decades ago.

 

Oddly, despite visiting Hampstead literally thousands of times during the last more than 65 years, it was only on Halloween 2021 that I first set foot in the Flask pub, and I am pleased that I did. The front rooms of the pub retain much of their Victorian charm and the rear rooms are spacious. Although we only stopped for a drink, I could see that the Sunday lunches being served to customers around us looked delicious. We hope to return there soon.

 

REMEMBERING HAMPSTEAD

This may sound ridiculous, but it has taken us over 20 years to realise the convenience of London bus route number 46 that begins its journey at Lancaster Gate, which is close to where we live. This bus goes almost straight to Hampstead Village (which used to be known as 'Hampstead Town'). Until we 'discovered' it a few days ago, we took a far more roundabout and longer route to visit the village near to where I was brought up.

During my childhood in Hampstead Garden Suburb in the early 1960s, my parents used to take my sister and I to Hampstead almost every Saturday morning. My mother, who was the only driver in the family, drove us up to Jack Straws Castle, a pub that used to stand close to a war memorial and the Whitestone Pond. The car park behind this historic pub, which no longer exists, had a very uneven unmade surface. We walked from there to the pond, often passing men who offered donkey rides, which we never accepted. Whitestone Pond, which was popular with those who needed to sail toy boats, still exists but has recently had a cosmetic 'make-over'. 

From the pond, we walked down Heath Street. In summer, the northern end of Heath Street which had a very broad pavement hosted an outdoor art exhibition. Paintings were hung in makeshift shelters under corrugated iron roofs. There were also artists selling wooden sculptures and bits of pottery, but these were outnumbered by the painters. My late mother, who was an accomplished artist, used to study the works of art on display, and rarely made kind comments about them. My parents knew one of the men who displayed carved wood sculpturs every year, and we always stopped to chat with him even though we never bought any of his works. The exhibition is no longer held there, and has not existed for several decades. For a long time after it ceased to be held, there used to be small blue marks on the wall that ran alongside the stalls. These had something to do with the positioning of the exhibition stands. Now, even those feint  reminders of the open-air art exhibitions have disappeared; parts of the wall have been rebuilt or cleaned.

Soon after the pavement narrows, and Heath Street begins to descend steeply, we used to pass the picturesque Friends Meeting House. This Quaker establishment still exists, but was not a place that we ever entered. A little further down, and on the opposite side of the road one can still see and eat or stay at La Gaffe, an Italian restaurant that seems to have been in Hampstead as long as I can remember. It was not a place that we patronised.

Further down and on the same side of Heath Street as The Quaker's place there is a wedge shaped restaurant. Its only entrance is on the corner of Heath Street and Elm Row. This restaurant, currently selling Italian food, has been through many reincarnations. When I was a child it was an Italian restaurant called the Pimpernel. This was always our first stop on our Saturday morning excursions to Hampstead.

When I was a child in the '60s, there was a short bar next to, and on the left of the entrance. It was here that my parents, who were incredibly fond of Italy and the Italians, ordered their espresso coffees and fruit juices for my sister and I. As they drank thier beverages, they used to chat with the Pimpernel's staff, but mainly in English. When we finished what we had ordered, my sister and I were always given small pieces of torrone - the Italian version of nougat - as gifts by the staff. These were wrapped in silver paper and contained inside cardboard boxes that were the same size as small matchboxes. A newish (1960s) building across the main road from the Pimpernel housed the most wonderful classical music gramophone record shop. This moved away to another site in the early 1970s before going out of business. By then, a branch of the Our Price chain had opened in nearby Hampstead High Street. This has also disappeared. The shop opposite the Pimpernel looks much as it did when it housed the record shop, which I think was called 'Hampstead Hi-Fi', but now it contains a completely different kind of business. The picture below shows Heath Street looking northwards towards the former home of the Pimpernel on the right, and that of the record shop on the left.

Our next stop was a clothes shop further down Heath Street on the same side as the Pimpernel. My mother loved browsing in this shop, but never bought anything!  After visiting that shop, we used to turn left, and walked down the steep Back Lane, which is still cobbled even today. This led to Flask Walk, a short pedestrian way lined with shops that links Back Lane to Hampstead High Street. Next to an old-fashioned butchers shop on the south side of  Flask Walk, there used to be a small bookshop that sold both second-hand and remaindered books. This has gone, as has a small gallery opposite it that exhibited paintings by one of my parents' numerous  friends, the portrait artist Milein Cosman. She was married to the music critic Hans Keller. We used to call in on her occasionally. Some years after I first began visiting Hampstead with my parents, a second and larger second-hand bookshop opened in Flask walk. This still exists, and is one of the only - if not the only - survivor of the 6 or 7 second-hand bookshops that were in Hampstead in the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from Keith Fawkes shop, one of the only places in Flask Walk apart from the pub that has survived since my much younger days is a small French restaurant called 'La Cage Imaginaire'. This did not exist in the 1960s; it opened after my mother died in 1980.

From Flask walk we used to turn left and walk down Hampstead High Street, which eventually becomes Rosslyn Hill. Before changing its name, there is on its south side, closed to what is now Waterstone's bookshop, a truly venerable Hampstead establishment: The Coffee Cup.

Oddly enough, I had never entered this place until a few days ago. It was not somewhere that my parents frequented, and I never ever felt the urge to do so. It dates back to 1954, when I was 2 years old, and is littled changed. Its archaic interior, illustrated below confirms this.

Further down Hampstead High Street, where it becomes Rosslyn Hill, there used to be three neighbouring shopfronts behind which stood the shelves of High Hill Bookshop. This was for me the highlight of our weekly visits to Hampstead. My sister and I were always allowed to choose a book to buy from its well-stocked childrens' department. Sadly, the shop has long gone. Its demise was in no little way the result of the opening of Waterstone's far inferior bookshop in the early 1980s. High Hill closed its doors forever in 1988.

From High Hill Bookshop, we used to make our way up hill and back to the car. Every Saturday was much the same. The very first cinema film that I ever watched was The Red Balloon. I saw thisFrench film, which was first released in 1956 in the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. This cimema, which still exists, was first a drill hall, then a theatre, and in 1933 it became a cinema. I saw many more films there in my childhood and adolescence. Every year, there used to be a festival of Marx Brothers films. I loved these. In those days, the cinema's audtorium had a strange smell that strongly resembled gas.  Indeed, there were gas lamps attached to the walls of the auditorium, but I am certain that I never saw them working. The Everyman is located in Holly Bush Lane, which is close to Hampstead Underground Station.

This station's platforms are the deepest in London. They are 192 feet below street level. In my youth, these were reached by four or five lifts. Two of these were high-speed. They had metal concertina-like doors and travelled so fast that my stomach shifted and my ears popped. The other lifts with brown wooden sliding doors with art-nouveau decorations were used when the high-speed ones were out of action. They took ages to travel between the station entrance hall and the platforms. The station's entrance was where young people from all over northwest London loitered whist waiting for their friends.

Heath Street continues past the station and winds its way towards Fitzjohns Avenue which descends in a straight line to Swiss Cottage. Before doing so Heath Street is lined with shops and restaurants. One of these that has survived since my adolescence is Louis Hungarian Patisserie.

Even in its heyday, I thought little of it, but considered it a suitable place to entertain a young lady friend. recently, we revisited it, and were disappointed. Its fare was nothing special and its ambience was at best rather depressing. Further along from Louis and occupying a spot on the corner of Heath Street and Perrins Lane is another shop that has been there as long as I can recall:  Photo Craft.

This camera shop is now showing its age. I believe that over the years I bought one or two accessories there, but I am recording its existence mainly because it is one of the few shops that has rmained unchanged in Hampstead for over 5 decades. Next to it on Perrins Lane there is a shop of recent vintage, but next to that there is a row of houses, the first of which can be seen in the picture below to have a green front door:

In my teens, this used to be a second-hand bookshop. It was run by a learned old man. The groundfloor was his shop; he lived above it. Although shelves lined the walls, every available surface including most of the floor was covered with disorderly piles of books. Whilst my friends and I rummaged about looking for interesting volumes, he sat at a book covered table reading. every now and then, he used to chuckle loudly and then he used to read us aloud a passage, often in Latin. We bought many books from him, but now he and the bookshop are merely memories. 

Parallel to Perrins Lane, but a little near to the Underground station there is another narrow thoroughfare called Perrins Court. Near to the end of this where it meets Hampstead High Street, there is the Villa Bianca Restaurant. This opened long after my mother died in 1980. In the 1980s, I lived in Gillingham in Kent. On most weekends, I visited London and stayed with my widowed father. Often on Sundays, we used to eat lunch in this restaurant, or occasionally, the Cage Imaginaire. The Villa Bianca used to serve good Italian food in those days. I have not eaten there for at least 20 years.  Returning to Heath Street and close to the Photo Craft Shop, we reach the beginning of the tree-lined Church Row. This is the locatiuon of another restaurant, the Cellier du Midi.

When the Cellier opened  in the late 1960s or early 1970s, my parents, who were connoisseurs of good food rated it highly, but never took my sister and me tto eat there. A few years ago, we did visit the  restaurant, thus fulfilling a long-held ambition. We were disappointed. Apart from being an interesting time-warp, the food was drearily prepared.

The end of Church Row is dominated by the attractive 18th century parish church of St John at Hampstead. Oddly, I had never set foot inside this lovely building until about 5 years ago. And, only yesterday did I discover that it is a real curiosity. Its high altar is at the west end of the church. It used to be, as convention dictates, at the east end of the church, but it was moved when there were fears about the stability of its bell-tower.

Before leaving Hampstead, let us return to Hampstead High Street. A little way down the hill from the Coffee Cup there is another institution that has been in Hampstead for many decades: La Creperie de Hampstead:

Finally, let me not forget the New End Hospital. Now, it has been converted into luxury flats, but when I was a school boy in the late 1960s, it was still a hospital. I used to do voluntary work in its thyroid treatment laboratory, and once in 1969 I narrowly escaped being attacked by a bunch of skin-heads who were lurking near it. 

So, there you have it: a selection of my memories of Hampstead.

If you have enjoyed these reminiscences,

you will probably also enjoy reading:

CHARLIE CHAPLIN WAVED TO ME

by

ADAM YAMEY

It is availbale from Lulu.com, Amazon, & Barnes&Noble, and may be ordered from 

your local bookshop.