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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“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
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