Michael White rediscovers a forgotten part of his home city and asks: what else he is missing on his doorstep?
One of the pathways on Hampstead Heath,
a 791-acre green space in London.
Photograph: David Levene/Guardian
I think I may have stumbled on a new (and very eco-friendly) form of tourism. You pack and leave home, then stay somewhere else in your own city, town or neighbourhood in order to catch up on all the nearby places you always meant to visit.
They're not far away, but you never quite do it. For instance, I see the London Eye every working day and pass it on the way to events on South Bank. I keep meaning to give it a go, but it's too busy, I'm too busy or the weather is not quite perfect.
I imagine you have similar places. Visitors tell you it's lovely and you look shifty and say ''I've not been there recently.'' They look amazed and you promise yourself you'll go. I grew up in Cornwall and didn't visit Land's End until I was 17. I've still never been to Lanhydrock, one of Cornwall's best Elizabethan houses (so they say).
As west Londoners, my wife and I recently happened upon the chance to stay in an empty flat in Hampstead, four miles north of central London. London NW3 was always a little above our pay grade (though I used to have a girlfriend whose student hostel was off Rosslyn Hill if that counts).
And so we packed a suitcase, sleeping bags included, and made our wary way up the Northern Line like foreigners newly arrived at Heathrow. I can't remember the last time I pottered round Hampstead, let alone walked the Heath or went to the Everyman cinema where I used to see arty films as a student.
Was it a success? Yes, of course. We tramped around handsome, villagey streets such as Lower Terrace and Upper Terrace behind Heath St which I don't think I'd seen before. We ate in a gastropub and an old-fashioned Greek restaurant and dipped into a few twee shops.
They all seemed emptier than we expected. Were the locals at their country cottages or had many of them been out-priced, we wondered? The neighbourhood famous for housing the liberal intelligentsia for several centuries, has of course suffered the fate of all such vaguely Bohemian corners and been colonised by bankers and the like.
The Heath looked pretty good, though we didn't spend enough time on it, let alone walk as far as Kenwood House and check out the free picture collection again. But we did inspect 300 years of posh property, including Fenton House (1696), one of those grand houses built when Hampstead was still a village. Bequeathed to the National Trust after World War II it and its rigorously-ordered gardens remain a lovely oasis - and one I'd not seen before. Nor Keats' House way down the Hill below the Heath, the place where the poet lived in 1818-20, fell in love with Fanny Brawne and wrote a lot of his best stuff.
En route between the two we stumbled on 2, Willow Rd, also a National Trust property, which you may not know as the modernist block which Erno Goldfinger designed in 1938 and lived in with his family until his death in 1987. Constructed in pre-cast concrete (he was keen on the stuff) and faced in brick, it was always controversial.
Four centuries of housing and home again on the North London line in half an hour. It was pretty good stuff and we resolved to try harder to crack this house-swapping lark which has always eluded us. We plan to start in London ... or at least the bits of it we don't know well enough. Any suggestions?
