Can heritage be romantic? Silly question...

I met my wife while I was excavating an old abbey – my chat-up line was ‘Would you like to see my medieval cess pits?’ Surprisingly, very surprisingly she said yes and we’ve remained together ever since. I wouldn’t recommend such a line to anyone who is not an archaeologist, but I would champion the romance of ruins, ancient monuments and historic buildings. And London has plenty of romantic locations – historic places where couples may clasp hands against an iconic backdrop. Of these, it is Hampstead Heath that glows bright as a hotspot blessed by St Valentine.

What could be a better place to start our courtship on the Heath than by walking through the scented pergola at The Hill, a house purchased by William Lever in 1904 (now Inverforth House). Lever, an industrialist from Bolton made his fortune in the manufacture of soap, including the brand Sunlight. The Hill was almost 100 years old when Lever moved in and he soon decided to refurbish and expand it, but the object of our interest is the extraordinary pagoda that he created in the garden. For this he commissioned a fellow Lancastrian, the great landscape designer Thomas Mawson who began work in 1905 and extended the garden and pergola in phases over the next seven years as Lever acquired the neighbouring properties (coincidentally Mawson also designed Fazl Mosque, the first purpose-built mosque in London). The result of his and his successors work is a 200m long structure comprising a colonnade of Doric columns made of Portland stone with a timber pergola overhead imitating a classical entablature. It stretches from a westerly summerhouse, eastwards and then southwards, with numerous summerhouses, niches and seats placed at intervals as it zig-zags around the contours of the hill – the eastern portion is in private ownership, but The Hill Gardens is open to the public. The magic of the place is completed by its elevated views, an effect that is largely man-made as Lever had to import huge quantities of earth to raise it up. Fortunately, the Hampstead tube extension of the Northern line was under construction at the same time, so there was plenty of material to lift the land the required 6-9m.

Next on our amorous meander around historic Hampstead Heath is Wentworth Place.? Originally built in c.1815 for two writers, Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown, it was constructed as a semi-detached pair but designed to appear as one house, with the two friends living in either half. At first glance it is a fine house, but hardly worthy of its Grade I listing making it into the top 2.5% of protected buildings in England, until you appreciate the reason for our visit, because this is the one-time home of the Romantic Poet John Keats. Keats stayed at Wentworth Place as a friend of Brown for just under two years in 1818-20 before leaving for Italy where he was to die of tuberculosis in 1821. Something about his stay in Hampstead must have inspired him because he wrote most of his mature poetry there, including six great odes. One of his most famous works, Ode to a Nightingale was probably composed under a plum tree in the garden. It was here that he wrote the narrative poem The Eve of St. Agnes – St. Agnes, like St. Valentine, being a martyred Roman saint of the 3rd and 4th century CE. Appropriately [or not!] for our topic, St Agnes was the patron saint of virgins and Keats’ poem is based upon the medieval tradition that a young woman would see her future husband in a dream if she went to bed without any supper and transferred pins one-by-one from a pincushion to a sleeve while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. One to try next Jan 20th?

There is one final Keats link with this place (now renamed Keats House), because it was here that he met Fanny Brawne, the last great love of his life, and almost certainly the subject of a revised version of Bright Star, his most famous love sonnet, which begins:

Bright Star! would I were stedfast as thou art Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

Finally, and taking our cue from Keats’ Bright Star, what better way to end this romantic tour of Hampstead with a little bit of stargazing? Are men really from Mars and women from Venus? Or maybe to gape at our only orbiting satellite – after all, ‘moon-struck’ means ‘romantically sentimental’.

Inspired by the offer of a Newtonian reflecting telescope, the Hampstead Astronomical and General Scientific Society was formed in 1899. They acquired a site for their new public observatory near the Highgate Men’s Pond but, bizarrely, the lack of street lighting and the obscure location meant that few people visited so, in 1910, they finally ended up on top of a Victorian underground reservoir – on the highest point in the capital. In contrast to Keats’ house and the pergola, the observatory is not protected as a historic monument – unlike the moon, perhaps the most popular object viewed through its 6-inch?Cooke?refracting telescope, which is now on the World Monuments Fund World Monuments Fund 2025 Watch (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/moon-gaza-heritage-sites-risk-wmf-b1205034.html)

The observatory is open during winter months on Friday and Saturday evenings, bookable for free via Eventbright, but, be warned, the night skies have to be clear. Fortunately, this year Valentine’s Day falls on a Friday and the long-term weather forecast is good… but then weather forecasting, rather like love, is sometimes fickle…

This is a modified version of an article that appeared in #TheLondonStandard (https://www.standard.co.uk/going-out/hill-garden-and-pergola-hampstead-heath-london-b1211030.html) on 14 Feb 2025