Historical Hampstead’s ‘Gentle Nest of Artists’: A Belsize Park Walk

Belsize Park became London’s most cosmopolitan artistic enclave in the 1930s, where British modernists lived alongside refugees from fascism and war. On this walking tour, you’ll explore the quiet streets that housed an extraordinary community of artists, poets, and writers who shaped British modernism, while creating some of their most influential works.

The tour begins at Belsize Park tube station. From there, you’ll pass Victorian houses converted into affordable studios and flats, and explore the area that critic Herbert Read called ”a gentle nest of artists”. You’ll pass the former studio of sculptor Henry Moore, where he created his famous Reclining Figure sculptures and wartime Shelter Drawings of Londoners sleeping in tube stations.

The tour ends back at Belsize Park station, where you can reflect on how this affordable quarter between expensive Hampstead and working-class Camden became a creative sanctuary. You’ll come to understand how war and displacement ultimately scattered this remarkable community, ending one of London’s most diverse artistic experiments.

Along the way, you’ll have a chance to:

• Explore Mall Studios, the Victorian artist cottages that became the epicenter of British modernism, home to Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and art critic Herbert Read
• Discover the house where Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian lived while creating some of his most celebrated geometric paintings before fleeing to New York
• Stand outside the striking modernist Isokon Building, where Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer lived alongside detective novelist Agatha Christie
• Learn about the Chinese artists’ colony on Upper Park Road, where the playwright behind Lady Precious Stream and the artist known as The Silent Traveller created works fusing Eastern and Western traditions
• Visit the former site of Booklovers’ Corner, where George Orwell worked as a part-time bookseller while writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• Explore the former home of war artist C.R.W. Nevinson, whose powerful paintings brought the realities of World War I to the British public

By the end of this 90-minute tour, you’ll have walked the streets where international modernism took root in London during one of the most turbulent decades of the 20th century.