Take my VoiceMap walking tour through Belsize Park and Britain’s Cosmopolitanism Modernist Art World of the Interwar Years

VoiceMap’s GPS audio walks are like podcasts that move with you, tell you stories. My VoiceMap walk through Historical Hampstead’s ‘Gentle Nest of Artists’: A Belsize Park focuses on the writers and artists who lived in the area the leading art critic of the interwar years Herbert Read dubbed it “a gentle nest of artists”.

In 1933 Herbert Read and his wife, the musician Margaret “Ludo” Ludwig, moved to the Mall Studios in Belsize Park, NW3 (pictured below). They found themselves in the middle of an artistic community. Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were neighbours, Henry Moore, Irina Radetsky and Piet Mondrian lived around the corner.

By 1935, a stream of European constructivist artists fleeing persecution for their art also settled in the leafy suburb, including Naum Gabo, László Moholoy-Nagy and Walter Gropius as well as refugees from the war in China – the “Silent Traveller” artist Chiang Yee, playwright Shih-I Hsiung and writer Xiao Qian among them. Orwell worked nearby in a bookshop by day and worked on his novels by night. The “close reading” literary critic William Empson, as well as the Bloomsbury-adjacent artist CR Nevison and the sharp, witty chronicler of suburbia Stella Gibbons, all lived in these streets.

Consequently Read dubbed the area around Parkhill and Upper Park Roads ‘a gentle nest of artists’. It was to be a cosmopolitan cradle of British and international modernism.

Download the walk here….