An exact walking route from Hampstead Station through Flask Walk and Hampstead Heath to Parliament Hill’s famous London skyline view
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat present the walk where London briefly forgets it is a capital and remembers it is a village that got ambitious.
The Hampstead Heights Walk
Hampstead is where London puts its poets, its lawyers, its surviving intellectuals, and its most dramatic clouds. The Heath is 790 acres of semi-wild green on a hill tall enough to give you a skyline view better than any rooftop bar.
Start and Finish
Start: Hampstead Station (deepest station on the Underground, 58 metres below street).
Finish: Gospel Oak or Belsize Park.
Distance: 2.5 miles.
Time: 1 hour walking, 3 hours with swim and view.
Exact Directions
Exit Hampstead Station. Take the stairs unless you love lift waits. Walk north into Hampstead Village. Turn right onto Flask Walk, a narrow lane of Georgian cottages, a pub (the Flask, obviously), and one bookshop that probably knows you better than your last relationship.
Continue east through Well Walk, crossing East Heath Road, and you enter Hampstead Heath. Follow signed paths south-east toward Parliament Hill Viewpoint. The climb is modest, the reward enormous: 360 degree London views with The Shard, St Paul’s, Canary Wharf, and the BT Tower all framed neatly.
From Parliament Hill, descend south-east through the Heath’s open meadows toward Gospel Oak Station. For a longer walk, detour past the Hampstead Ponds (three swimming ponds: Men’s, Women’s, Mixed). See the City of London Heath page.
Alternatively, from Parliament Hill descend west-south-west back through the Heath to Belsize Park via South End Road.
What to See
Hampstead Village. Flask Walk. Keats House (25 Wentworth Place, where Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale). Hampstead Heath. Parliament Hill Viewpoint. Kenwood House (free, English Heritage, contains a Vermeer and a Rembrandt). The three bathing ponds. The Spaniards Inn (1585 pub, Dickens and Keats both drank here).
Coffee, Toilets, Survival
Coffee: Ginger & White, Coffee Cup, Pavilion Cafe on the Heath. Food: The Holly Bush pub, the Wells, Kenwood House cafe. Toilets: Hampstead Village pubs, Kenwood House, Parliament Hill Lido area.
The Humour Interlude
Hampstead is the only London district where a man can wear a cravat on a Tuesday and it is not a costume. Every third resident has written a novel, every fifth has been on Radio 4, and every café has at least one retired BBC producer trying to adopt a dog. A London village satirist once observed that Hampstead is a place where property prices create a specific kind of politeness.
The Heath in winter is for dramatic walkers in long coats. In summer, it is for picnickers, swimmers, and one violinist who plays on Parliament Hill at exactly the wrong moment. Both versions are correct.
Local Wisdom
Weekday mornings for peace, Sunday afternoons for dogs and their owners’ conversations, autumn for the best light. The Mixed Pond is open year-round and swimmers include actual octogenarians, which either inspires or worries you depending on temperament.
For village-level British satire, see NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Staff Writer at The London Prat
The footnotes suggest someone’s spent their free time reading actual government documents, which is either extreme discipline or a complete descent into madness.
My gran asked why I was laughing at LONDON PRAT material about London governance. I explained and she said “are they still mismanaging this city?” with certainty.