Hampstead Village to Heath & Pergola Walk
From historic cobbled streets to Parliament Hill views and secret Edwardian gardens
London · 11 stops · 4.0 km · ~1.5 h · 31 min audio · Generated
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1. Hampstead Underground Station
Hampstead Underground Station, Hampstead High Street / Heath Street, London NW3 1QG (or NW3 1DL).
Photo: Google
Take a look at the charming red building in front of you. Those ox-blood glazed terracotta tiles... that distinctive façade with its sweeping semi-circular windows. It looks like a perfectly preserved piece of Edwardian London. But what lies beneath it is anything but ordinary. Because Hampstead sits on a steep hill, this station's platforms are the deepest on the entire London Underground network... fifty-eight and a half metres below ground level. That's roughly the height of a nineteen-storey building... straight down. Designed by architect Leslie green, it was opened on the twenty-second of June, nineteen oh seven. Now here's something most people don't know about Green. In just four short years, he was responsible for the design of over fifty stations spread across three separate Tube lines... a remarkable achievement for a man who was only twenty-nine when he started. He died of tuberculosis in nineteen oh eight at the tragically young age of thirty-three. Overwork is thought to have contributed. The stations outlived their creator by more than a century. And here's a lovely detail. Each station was given a unique colour geometric pattern so that even illiterate passengers could recognise their stop by the colours of the tiles. If you ride down to the platform, look carefully at the old tiled signs on the walls. They still read "Heath Street"... the station's original proposed name, never changed! Now, about getting down there. Access relies entirely on twin high-speed lift shafts, the deepest on the system at fifty-five metres, and a spiral emergency staircase comprising three hundred and twenty steps. That three hundred and twenty step climb beats Covent Garden's one hundred and ninety-three steps by a significant margin. There's a warning sign that actually says climbing this staircase is equivalent to climbing a fifteen-storey building! But the deepest secret lies further up the Northern line, between here and Golders Green. There's a never-completed station called North End, commonly known as Bull and Bush, that would have been sixty-seven metres deep... the deepest on the entire network. It was abandoned in nineteen oh six. During World War Two, its tunnels were used to store secret archives, with access only available from the cabs of passing service trains. Then, during the Cold War... access from the surface was finally provided. A spiral staircase of one hundred and ninety-seven steps was installed to give access to a floodgate control room, which would have become operational in the event of a nuclear attack. Its existence was kept secret and the entrance building was disguised as an electricity substation. So next time you ride the Northern line north from here... peer out the window into the darkness between Hampstead and Golders Green. You might just catch a glimpse of a platform-width gap in the tunnel wall... the shadow of London's deepest secret.
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2. St John-at-Hampstead Churchyard
Church Row, London NW3 6UU.
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3. Church Row
Church Row, London NW3 6UP.
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4. Fenton House
Hampstead Grove, London NW3 6SP.
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5. Flask Walk
Flask Walk, London NW3 1HH.
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6. Burgh House
Burgh House, New End Square, London NW3 1LT.
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7. Keats House
10 Keats Grove, London NW3 2RR.
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8. The Magdala
2a South Hill Park, London NW3 2SB (or NW3 2AL).
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9. Parliament Hill Viewpoint
Heath Lodge, London NW5 1QR / Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, London NW3 1JH.
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10. Hampstead Ponds
Hampstead Heath, London NW3 2RJ / NW5 1QR.
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11. Viaduct Bridge
Viaduct Bridge, Hampstead Heath, London NW3 1BS (or NW3 7JR).
