Chiang Yee’s Belsize Park via VoiceMap

Posted: March 11th, 2026 | No Comments »

It was from Upper Park Road, Belsize Park, NW3, that Chinese artist Chiang Yee set out for the Lake District to paint and write his first “Silent Traveller” book, The Silent Traveller in Lakeland (1937). It was a big hit with British readers who saw familiar scenes through “a Chinese lens”. Chiang went on to write The Silent Traveller in London, in Wartime, and in the Yorkshire Dales while living on Upper Park Road before he was bombed out in the Blitz and moved to Oxford.

Chiang Yee was just one of the Chinese artists and intellectuals living and working in Belsize Park between the wars alongside the architects of the Bauhaus, Piet Mondrian, George Orwell, Barbara Hepworth, Stella Gibbons, Henry Moore, CR Nevison, Norm Garbo, William Empson, Ben Nicholson, Herbert Read and many more.

All of them, their homes, studios and stories, are featured in my VoiceMap GPS walking tour ‘Historical Hampstead’s “Gentle Nest of Artists”: a Belsize Park Walk’ available on the VoiceMap app here….

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