restaurant | Pills & Pillow-Talk

I didn’t know half of them myself till recently – and I live in Hampstead. This part of London is full of surprises.

1 Hampstead is chock full of delightful architecture, much of it Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian. Then there’s 2 Willow Road. Designed by architect Ernő Goldfinger in the 1930s, this modernist home was only made possible thanks to his wife’s great wealth.

Goldfinger was a champagne socialist, which is why he concealed the servants’ bell. You could say that he wasn’t popular with everyone. Ian Fleming, you may recall, named the ultimate villain after him.

2 Nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in the UK. Her crime? Shooting dead her cheating lover David Blakely in 1955 outside the Magdala Tavern. If you wander up South Hill Park in Hampstead, you’ll still be able to see the bullet holes on the wall of the pub, mainly because they’ve been enlarged with a drill.

For a thought-provoking novel set around the Ruth Ellis story, I can highly recommend Jane Davis’s brand-new book At the Stroke of Nine O’Clock.

3 The Whitestone Pond at the top of Heath Street is the highest point in London. It’s a man-made pond with ramps to let horses wash in it. A bit later, it was used for floating model boats and for paddling, earning it the name Hampstead-on-Sea. Now fringed with rushes, nobody much goes into the pond at all, but they do wander up here, and probably tell each other it’s the highest point in London.

4 Hampstead Heath covers 790 hilly acres and has something for everyone, with magnificent views over London as well as woodlands and a string of ponds, three of them for swimming (if you don’t mind cold water). The Heath enchanted author C.S. Lewis, inspiring him to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

5 Fancy a bite to eat? Hampstead has not one Streatery, but two. The Belsize Village Streatery opened for summer 2020 on the paved area of the village to help keep a wide range of local restaurants and cafés running. It brings a continental vibe to this corner of London and is an excellent place to meet friends or celebrate a special occasion. The floor is clean enough to eat off, as the saying goes, but the socially distanced tables and chairs in the square are a better bet.

Following on from the success in Belsize Village, there’s also a second Streatery at South End Green.

6 Hampstead is awash with celebs. Do you know Mrs Newbie? She and her cob lived together in bliss on the Heath, until Mr Newbie died in 2016. At some point, the grieving Mrs Newbie flew off and hurt herself on a nearby roof. While at the swan sanctuary for treatment, she met fellow patient Wallace who had come from Waltham Forest. Their relationship blossomed.

Once both of them were well enough, they were released to Hampstead Heath’s Number One Pond and have since raised seven cygnets. Mrs Newbie had to return to the swan sanctuary earlier this year after she was attacked by a dog, but is now back with Wallace and their cygnets. Vive l’amour!

7 Originally from Suffolk, painter John Constable relocated when his wife developed TB. At the time, the air in Hampstead was considered a lot healthier than elsewhere. Unfortunately there were no anti-TB drugs at the time and Mary didn’t improve. Most of the family is now buried in the family tomb at St John-at-Hampstead.

8 The Royal Free Hospital in Pond Street was founded in 1828 to give free treatment to those unable to afford it. To begin with, the Royal Free was in central London, and then moved near the site of the previous Hampstead Fever Hospital, a name which inspired the title of my novel Hampstead Fever.

For years, the Royal Free was the only London teaching hospital in London to train women doctors. The Royal Free’s pioneering heritage continues. It was the first UK hospital to have a high level isolation unit (HLIU) for infectious diseases like Ebola.

9 Hampstead has cats. Many, many cats. This busy fluffball knows exactly where she is going. You’re lucky the others moved too fast for me to photograph them all.

10 You don’t have to go into the Freud Museum to see a fine statue of Sigmund Freud. Here he is outside the Tavistock Clinic in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, leaning forward in a pose suggesting period pain. I call it womb envy.

If you know Hampstead, please leave a comment with your favourite fact about the area. Meanwhile, until September 9, you can download a copy of Hampstead Fever for just 99p/99c.

My earliest memories of eating out en famille go back to holidays in Europe. Sitting down to eat had to be just so. There were usually five of us: Granny, Grandpa, my mother, my aunt and me. The child I was at the time thought those meals endless. It wasn’t so much the number of courses or the leisurely service, but the time it took to settle at table.

“Let’s sit by the open window” one of the grown-ups would say. “It’s such a lovely view.”

As soon as we were installed, Granny admitted she wasn’t so sure. “I can feel a draught.”

So we’d let the maitre d’ show us to a table at the back. Once we’d sat down, Auntie might say “It’s a little warm here, isn’t it?”

“And maybe a bit too close to the toilets” Mum would add, wrinkling her nose.

We’d smile apologetically and they’d find us somewhere else, not too near the front or the back. Unlike Goldilocks, however, it took us more than three goes. Once installed, Grandpa would find something else wrong. Wasn’t this table a bit small for five? Or else it was too noisy here, what with his hearing aid and everything.

Up we’d get again. While we pondered our next move, the staff would think fondly of retirement.

The scenario repeated itself in every restaurant. I’m not sure why it was this way, as we were a decisive bunch the rest of the time. And once we’d fixed on a table, we’d stick with it, come hell or high water. Literally.

At a lakeside restaurant when I was about 10, my family insisted on having an extra chair brought to the table we’d picked at the water’s edge. Of course, the waiter didn’t place it quite where my mother had in mind, so she scraped it back and forth over the paving.

“That’s enough, Jackie” hissed Granny after several minutes of this.

This only made my mum more determined to position her chair exactly how she wanted. “There!” she finally said triumphantly as she sat herself down, tipping backwards into the lake.

The mishap caused minor modifications in our table behaviour for a little while, but old habits die hard. Fast forward a few decades, and Mum, Aunty and I were again abroad, this time with my three sons and two cousins, already hungry. Mum thought we should look at a posh restaurant she remembered from days gone by. It seemed a tad stuffy for a family meal, but what clinched it was Mum’s observation: “Not enough tables.”

In theory, people only need one table at a time, but by now you’ve got the idea. So we wandered down the road, passing several more restaurants on the way. There was something wrong with each one: only fish on the menu, too dark, or else so sun-drenched we’d all get cancer. By now we were crabby from hunger, which is how we ended up at a fast-food place, eating chicken and chips with our fingers off a greasy table located about 10 inches away from the bins.

Left to my own devices, I would never behave like this. Only last week I went to a café by the river with one of my sons. We sat down right away. Well, almost, because the table he’d first picked was by the water, where the air was thick with midges.

We studied the menu. It was a huge piece of card but there wasn’t actually much on it except for over-priced hamburgers and Caesar salad. We looked at each other over the top.

“Sod it” I said, pushing back my chair. “Shall we go somewhere else?”

Pills & Pillow-Talk

Carol Cooper – trained to observe, born to write.

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