Culture
The 1968 film "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize" was mainly filmed in Hampstead Village, and Belsize Park.
The 1990 film It, an adaptation of the book by Stephen King, featured a fictional American writer who takes up residence at Hampstead Heath.
The film Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006) was shot entirely on Hampstead Heath. Notting Hill (1999) featured scenes shot at the Heath, located primarily around Kenwood House.
Hampstead Heath was featured on the television programme Seven Natural Wonders as one of the wonders of the London area, with a focus on Parliament Hill to the south. The episode was presented by Bill Oddie, who lives in nearby Gospel Oak, and watches birds there regularly.
In 2005, Giancarlo Neri's sculpture The Writer, a 9-metre tall table and chair, was exhibited on Hampstead Heath.
Whilst living in London, Karl Marx and his family went to the Heath regularly, as their favourite outing.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Victorian era painter, painted an elaborate night-time scene of Hampstead Hill in oils. Hampstead Heath also provided the backdrop for the opening scene in Victorian writer Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman in White.
Hampstead Heath forms part of the location for Gilbert Keith Chesterton's fictional story The Blue Cross from The Innocence of Father Brown.
Hampstead Heath forms part of the main location for Will Self's 2006 novel The Book of Dave. Half of the book is set 500 years in the future, when all of London has been submerged by a catastrophic flood, leaving only the hilltops of Hampstead and the Heath as a tiny island - The Island of Ham. The parts of the book set in the present-day also make references to the Heath's high and dry location which would preserve the area in the event of sea level rises over 100m. Self writes, "...the Heath...this peculiar island, a couple of square miles of woodland and meadow set down in the lagoon of the city."
The radio story titled The Strange Case of the Murder in Wax written by Denis Green and Anthony Boucher and broadcast on January 7, 1946, featured a murderer who killed women on Hampstead Heath.
Mrs. Miniver, by Jan Struther, includes a chapter called "On Hampstead Heath", where actions take place.
A crucial event at the beginning of the novel Smiley's People, by John LeCarre (1979), takes place on Hampstead Heath, which is also the site of subsequent investigations. These scenes are also depicted in the BBC mini-series of the same name (1982).
Hampstead Heath is also featured in Vercors's novel Les Animaux dénaturés (translated variously into English as You Shall Know Them, Borderline, and The Murder of the Missing Link).
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)