A journey through the places where creative giants found solace and inspiration in London.
As Samuel Johnson said in 1777, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” An English critic and writer, Johnson enjoyed the delights of the city from his home at 17 Gough Square, near Blackfriars. The Capital was home to the first collection of words compiled and published in English. It is little wonder that for centuries the city has been a metropolis used by creatives to prime their canvas, jot a poem, or score a song.
Especially in its expansive green spaces – little wildernesses off-the-beaten-track and mouldering park benches – artists have been drawn to the same places, time and time again, across the ages.
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Anthony Bourdain, the illustrious chef and author from New York, claimed London as his “home away from home”. On air with The Layover, his television show devoted to travel and food, he could not help but remark on the city’s adventurous appeal, and its attraction for errant artists like himself. He admired Britain for its food and hotels, but also for its drunkards, in all their brazen glory.
Wander down to Bourdain’s most cherished café, Bar Italia, and admire the not-so-angelic host of students drawing, writing or chatting over an espresso, or something stronger, far too early in the day.
SYLVIA PLATH
Another American turned Anglophile, Plath’s two homes bordered two of London’s greatest parks, Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath. Plath wrote her only novel ‘The Bell Jar’ and raised her two children in her first house without their father, Ted Hughes – a better poet than husband. In January 1961, she set ‘The Heath’, as it has come to be known, into a poem named ‘Parliament Hill Fields’, as a eulogy to the 98-meter-high open parkland, notorious for its panoramic skyline. A view where, as she describes, “the new year hones its edge” each time it comes around.
ZADIE SMITH
Hampstead Heath was also strolled by Zadie Smith, English novelist and essayist who made ripples in the British literary scene, even before leaving Cambridge University: ‘Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy,” she wrote in her 2005 novel, On Beauty.
POETS CORNER
Any walk around London will lead you backwards and forwards across time. Head over to Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, where some of the most famous and self obsessed of London’s writers are buried. Here rest Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Alfred Tennyson, crammed in alongside memorial plaques to Blake, the Brontë sisters, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin.
