London: Oct 30: Hampstead and Hampstead Heath

I've heard it rains a lot in London during the fall. Hence, when I saw that the forecast for Saturday, October 30, didn't include rain, I advocated to Di Yin that we should use the opportunity and spend it outside. Of the choices I gave her, she selected Hampstead Heath as our destination.

I took pictures during our outing. Di Yin also took pictures. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day, starting with lunch near our apartment. When you see a picture of us beginning our trip to Cambridge (picture #72), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the Cambridge pictures in a later post.

Before heading to Hampstead, we stopped for lunch at Spice Grill's, a hole-in-the-wall Indian joint on Salusbury Road, near the Queen's Park station. This road is the other high street (besides Kilburn High Road) near us. Our meal was respectable; at the time I said I was willing to return (and indeed I did later).

We then took the train to Hampstead and walked around town on the way to the Heath. Hampstead has many architecturally interesting buildings. There are a variety of styles represented. You can tell it's a wealthy area, not just from the houses but also from the number of boutiques on the high street.

We were in the Heath for only ten minutes before it started raining. Given how we planned the day, the rain surprised the dickens out of me. Rather than checking the weather on a random web site, I guess I should've used the most authoritative source. We took shelter with about ten other people under a large tree. When the rain let up, we decided to head back to a pub or cafe to have a snack and to hide from the rain should it come again.

We ended up having tea in the Burgh House's cafe. The Burgh House is one of the oldest houses in town. It turns out the main two floors have been converted into a museum about Hampstead; we explored it after tea.

The Hampstead Museum was surprisingly good, containing more information/material than I imagined it could've had.

There was an exhibit on John Constable, a painter who painted the area a lot. Though all his works shown are prints--he's relatively famous so they're hanging in more prominent museums--it was nonetheless neat to see his perspective on the town at the time.

The exhibit on the Hampstead tube was extensive, explaining how the establishment of the station changed the area. For illustration, it included advertising posters, showing how the London transport organization tried to get people to accept and use the tube. London transport partially did this by promoting the nature you could reach with it.

Also in this exhibit I learned the Hampstead tube station is, at 192 feet deep, the deepest station in the system. Indeed, as we discovered when we arrived, the station has no escalators; it uses large elevators to move people up and down. Another consequence of its depth is that it was used as an air raid shelter during WWII; a substantial portion of the exhibit was devoted to elaborating on this.

This exhibit also included old tube maps. I found it interesting to see the change-over from the old, geographic representation to the modern, diagrammatic one. The shift in font faces was also notable.

Finally, the exhibit also mentioned there's a ghost station between Hampstead & Golders Green--a tube station that was fully built but never opened. You can't enter from the ground level and trains certainly don't stop there.

Another section of the museum covered Hampstead's history from the year 1000 onward, and reflected a bit on how Hampstead, as it was built over the years, has buildings in most architectural styles, from old ones such as the Burgh House to Isokon modernist structures.

There was also an art gallery.

Having exhausted the museum, we left to explore a bit more of Hampstead and then headed home. In addition to residential neighborhoods, we walked up and down the main street, Hampstead High Street.