Cosmopolitan Modernist & Chinese Belsize Park with VoiceMap

Posted: February 21st, 2026 | No Comments »

The weekend’s coming…. Piet Mondrian, Irina Radetzsky, Norm Garbo, Walter Gropius, Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer – the international artists and architectural talent that gathered in Belsize Park in the 1930s was incredible. You’ll meet them all on my VoiceMap GPS walking tour “Historical Hampstead’s ‘Gentle Nest of Artists’: a Belsize Park Walk”.

But too often forgotten (though not by me!) are the group of émigré Chinese artists and intellectuals who lived there too. It was the playwright Hsiung Shih-I who first found lodgings in Belsize Park when he arrived in the summer of 1932 to study at University College London. He was accompanied by his wife Dymia, who later became the first Chinese woman in England to write her autobiography-“Flowering Exile.” He later became well known in England for his popular West End hit play “Lady Precious Stream” and is known in China for being the translator of J.M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and several Thomas Hardy novels.

Shelley Wang Lixi and his wife Lu Jingqing, both poets, arrived shortly after. They stayed in some decidedly substandard lodgings before taking an attic room on Upper Park Road house with the Hsiungs.

The writer and reporter Xiao Qian traveled around Britain, noting his impressions for Shanghai newspaper readers-pantomimes, pubs, wartime experiences, London’s infamous “Pea Souper” fogs – all from Belsize Park. And of course the “Silent Traveller”, artist, calligrapher and writer Chiang Yee.

Do take the tour to discover this fascinating slice of north London history, the British and international artists, writers, architects and critics who lived there and how they intermingled and overlapped between the wars.

Click here to see details and download the whole tour from VoiceMap….

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