The Heath: My Year on Hampstead Heath

By Hunter Davies

An engaging portrait of Hampstead Heath – a place rich not just in natural wonders but in history and monuments, emotions and memories, people and places.
'I enjoyed every inch of the way, from Parliament Hill to the Pergola... A late-life little masterpiece' Ferdinand Mount

'A love letter, both to the Heath and to his late wife' Islington Tribune

'An affectionate book which blends personal anecdote, history and interviews' Ham & High

The eight hundred acres of Hampstead Heath lie just four miles from central London; and yet unlike the manicured inner-city parks, it feels like the countryside: it has hills and lakes, wild spots and tame spots.

Hunter Davies has lived within a stone's throw of Hampstead Heath for more than sixty years and has walked on it nearly every day of his London life. For him, it is not just a place of recreation and relaxation but also a treasure-house of memories and emotions. In The Heath, he visits all parts of this, the largest area of common land in Britain's capital city: from Kenwood House to the Vale of Health, from Parliament Hill to Boudicca's Mound, and from the Ladies Bathing Pond to the fabulous pergola. As he walks, Davies talks to the diverse array of individuals who frequent the Heath: regulars; visitors; dog walkers; stall holders at the weekly farmer's market; famous faces having their morning stroll; twenty-first-century hippies spreading peace, love and happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838934811

Hunter Davies

Hunter Davies was at the heart of London culture in the Swinging Sixties, becoming close friends with The Beatles, and especially Sir Paul McCartney. He has been writing bestselling books, as well as widely read columns for major newspapers and magazines, for over fifty years. He lives in London and was married to the author Margaret Forster.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Summer swimming

img2.jpg

Highgate Men’s Bathing Pond, October 2011 (Gregory Wrona/Alamy)

2019

The water is so green and brown and thick, yucky and murky and horrible, that I am always surprised by just how many people swim in it every day, all the year round. Especially, of course, in the summer. Put your hand just two inches below the surface and it has gone, your hand has disappeared, you can’t see it, the dirty depths have swallowed it up.

I always worry that if I don’t concentrate, don’t keep flapping away, as my swimming is appalling, that the whole of my body will disappear from sight.

I also worry about a giant pike having a nibble at my willy. But then I remind myself that the giant pike in the Men’s Pond is probably just an urban myth. All the same, who knows what might be lurking down there, twenty feet under?

I am also rather scared of the ducks. As a rubbish swimmer I move in a large circle, clockwise round the pond, going from lifebuoy to lifebuoy, holding on to each one as if I am just pausing to enjoy nature, observing the wildlife, plants and trees, but really I am holding on to get my breath back. I get furious if one of the lifebuoys has been grabbed by a couple of lads; mucking around, splashing each other. Don’t they know that it’s my buoy? At my age I need it. They might well give up a seat for me on the bus, so why not a lifebuoy in the Men’s Pond? I suppose it is because swimming is an equalizer. You can’t immediately quite tell someone’s age and condition.

Often there is a mallard on my buoy, but I can deal with them. You have to stare them out, look serious and don’t be taken in when they look the other way. Ducks have a wide field of vision; they can see you without looking at you. It becomes a game, both of us facing the other out. He knows perfectly well that I want that particular buoy, but he thinks it belongs to him – he was probably born and bred here. They get so bold and daring, those animals that live their lives in close proximity to humans. Just think of the gulls at the seaside which fly off with newborn babies. Allegedly. I am sure that is also an urban myth. But they will steal the hot chips from out of your hands if you are not careful.

I get nearer and nearer to the mallard who continues glowering and glaring sideways, daring me to get any closer. I get to within three feet – then suddenly splash him, tell him to bugger off. Doesn’t he know who I am? I’m a regular in this pond. He flaps and flounces away, muttering mallard oaths to himself. One day I suspect he won’t fly off. They will evolve to have no fear. They will fly straight at me and give me a good old bashing with their beaks and wings.

It is now sixty years since I first swam in the Men’s Pond. I have done so every summer since and, despite my fears, nothing awful has ever happened to me. I have never caught anything nasty, either disease or infection. Strangers often think of the lack of chlorine when they first see the pond and go, ‘Yuck, no chance; I’m not swimming there.’ Nor have I heard of anyone else catching anything. It must be clean, despite its dodgy colour. It is not stagnant, which helps, fed by the underground streams that flow into the old River Fleet which, further along its route, is long covered over and turned into a sewer, though remembered in local street names and a primary school name. And, of course, in Fleet Street.

When I first arrived to work there in 1959, Fleet Street was not just a street but a locality, an industry, a way of life, an abstract concept, which most newspaper people out in the provinces wanted to reach at some stage in their lives, to say they had done it. I don’t think there are any national newspapers’ offices left in Fleet Street today. I wonder if Harley Street will lose all its doctors in the decades to come, or the City its hedge-funders?

Though the Men’s Pond is kept clean by its fresh running water, awful tragedies do happen, as they do in every stretch of swimmable sea or water. In June 2019, a fit local man in his fifties, Chris – an architect with two kids – lost his life. He was swimming that day with a friend of mine, James, who often does my garden. They were swimming round and round, with James going slowly. James does not need the exercise, as gardening keeps him fit. He goes for spiritual reasons. But his friend had a sedentary job and swam and exercised constantly and energetically to keep himself fit.

James got out first, looked back across the pond for his friend, could not see him and decided he must be out in the far reaches, amongst the reeds and the ducks. It was only later that evening he heard his friend had drowned. And no one had seen him disappear. A heart attack had got him. Down he went. The pond was closed for a day while they dredged it for his body. James later had to attend the inquest to give evidence.

I first remember swimming in the Men’s Pond in the summer of 1960. That was the year my wife Margaret and I got married and moved into our first flat in the Vale of Health. We were new to London, did not know the Heath; how big it is, what it contains, how to get around it.

It was an incredibly hot day and I was desperate to cool off. Someone said there were open-air ponds on the Heath, free to all. We set off to search for them from our side of the Heath and we seemed to walk for ages across its expanse, getting lost several times, until we came upon an inviting stretch of open water. In the distance, across the pond, I could see people diving from a remarkably high board at the end of a little pier. Shows you how long ago this must have been: that diving board only exists now in old photographs.

I had no swimming costume or towel with me, as this was really just an exploratory walk to see what the Heath had to offer, but I was so hot and sweaty after the long trek that I stripped off to my underpants and went in. It was shallow, muddy and reedy, and my feet were starting to sink, but eventually I reached some deeper water and was able to start swimming.

There were some kids nearby on the bank who were fishing and had watched me strip off. As I started swimming, one of them shouted at me: ‘Don’t go in there mister! There are noods over there.’

I was not quite used to London accents, but assumed this was cockney for naked people. I could see no sign of noods and carried on swimming, showing off my rubbish crawl, in the belief that my wife would be impressed and be jealous.

Then I heard more shouting. An irate lifeguard was standing on the little pier, waving and yelling at me. He was telling me to get out, at once, I was not allowed to enter the pond from that side. I turned and swam back to where Margaret was sitting. Far from being impressed, she had, of course, already said that stripping off was a stupid thing to do, as was going into a strange pond I knew nothing about – and in my awful underpants. Ugh, the embarrassment. Anyway, I would probably drown, as I was hardly able to swim properly. As a girl, Margaret had swum for the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, Cumbria; her stylish breaststroke was the talk of the Carlisle Baths at every school swimming gala.

I dragged myself back, slowly, as I was already out of breath as a result of trying to show off with my pathetic swimming. The scruffy cockney kids cheered ironically. Margaret greatly enjoyed my humiliation.

I normally swim three times a week, all year round. In the winter months I go to the public pool in Kentish Town. It’s much cleaner and nicer these days. I can remember seeing a handwritten notice on the door of one of the cubicles, some twenty years ago, when they were still health traps, instructing swimmers not to leave their needles inside the cubicle. A twenty-million-pound revamp completely cleaned up the pools, in every sense. Of course, you still tend to smell of chlorine after your indoor swim. It can get very crowded, too – even in the slow lane. You get these over-exuberant thirty-somethings, both men and women, who bash up and down furiously, splashing everyone. As soon as summer comes, I swim on the Heath, if it’s not too cold. We are so lucky, we Heathans, having four places for open-air swimming. Apart from the Men’s Pond, there is the Mixed Pond, the Women’s Pond and the Lido.

This particular summer day, in 2019, I used the fact that there were so many people queueing as an excuse not to pay. The City of London Corporation, who run the Heath, had introduced voluntary payments via a little green ticket machine at the entrance to the pond, but it was pretty clear that most of us swimmers were ignoring it. Voluntary payments, of any kind, rarely work. Humans are so… well, er, human… You do have to pay for Kentish Town pool and there’s no way around that, but I have a season ticket as a local pensioner. I don’t pay for a locker, though. What a cheek. I just hang up my clothes in the changing room and take my chance. Who would want to pinch my awful rags anyway?

Over the summer, as I began The Heath, we had an incredibly hot spell during which it reached thirty-three degrees in the capital. I think in old money that means more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Goodness, how we sweltered! Every day I thought, Thank God I have the Men’s Pond so handily placed nearby. I don’t have to drag myself through the awful heat and dirt, through the crowds and the traffic, to the public pool in Kentish Town.

I have got into the habit of making the short, pleasant walk to the pond in my swimming shorts, T-shirt and sandals – Birkenstock’s, of course. I’m a middle-class north Londoner, don’t you know? I carry only a towel and a dry change of shorts. I suppose, during those really hot days, I could even have walked back in my wet cossie, which I used to do at Loweswater in the Lake District, during a really hot summer when I had been swimming in Crummock Water. Somehow, it does not seem appropriate for an elderly man to be walking in public in London in a wet swimsuit.

That day, as I swam slowly round the pond in the tropical heat, I was thinking, as I always do, about all the men who have swum here before, splishing and splashing away in this very same pond in this very same water, over the last 130 years. I feel I am communing with all those who have gone before, who did what I am now doing, and who got the same pleasure out of it as I experience.

I have the same thoughts when I go to White Hart Lane or attend any football match anywhere in the world. I think of all the football fans who have stood or sat in the same place, watching the same sort of game, over the last 150 years, since football as we now know it was first organized. Yes, the rules have slightly changed, the players wear different strips, but essentially it is the same game. Someone from 1863, when the Football Association was first formed, could watch the modern game and still make sense of it, still get excited when a goal is scored.

It’s the same with swimming. The strokes might be a bit different and costumes have certainly changed, but someone swimming – slowly and gracefully – the 100 yards around the perimeter of this pond can be watched and admired today just as he was in the year 1893, when the Men’s Pond was added to Hampstead Heath, then run by the London County Council, and opened to the public.

It was part of a parcel of land that had been bought for public use three years earlier, along with the pond for sailing model boats and the dog pond. Presumably people had swum in what was to be the Men’s Pond much earlier, illegally or otherwise, when it was private land, but open-air swimming had suddenly caught on across the nation. Local councils encouraged it since it was clearly such a healthy activity for local citizens, although the Men’s Pond authorities began to get worried about the presence of naked bathers.

‘It is difficult to gauge the fibre of grown men’, harrumphed a local newspaper, ‘who expose themselves before respectable women and children when for a shilling a decent bathing costume can be bought.’ Perhaps those kids who warned me back in my early days on the Heath were repeating an old legend about naked men jumping into the pond. It was not long before the council created a proper changing room and the pond was open for swimming all the year round.

The new century brought some exciting developments. In 1905, the changing room was enlarged and the pond dredged and deepened – an operation that revealed the presence of an eleven-pound pike. By now national swimming races were being held in the pond, including the one-mile championship of England. One of the earliest and most popular features was a proper diving board – it was fifteen feet high and was the first professional diving board in England. Diving exhibitions and contests were held in the pond with paying spectators. Later another – much higher – diving board, thirty-three feet high, was installed for the summer.

Huge crowds turned up to watch the professional divers train and admire the swimmers as they performed stunts and showed off their prowess at ornamental and exotic strokes. These might include holding their breath under water for long periods, swimming like a duck, swimming like a torpedo or swimming with both legs out of the water. Male and female Olympic divers used the Men’s Pond for their training for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics – one of whom, Isabelle White (a Londoner) won a bronze medal. British Olympic swimmers continued to train there during the 1920s and 1930s.

The Men’s Pond became a focal point for visitors to Hampstead Heath. People came not just to watch the swimmers but to sit by the banks and have a picnic. They would also listen to a brass band. I have a collection of some 200 old postcards of the Heath, one of which clearly shows a bandstand near the Men’s Pond, on the slope down from Parliament Hill. It’s no longer there today, but there is a bandstand on the other slope of Parliament Hill, well away from the Men’s Pond.

In 1920, the old wooden diving board was replaced by a concrete version – probably the one I remember when I first used the Men’s Pond in 1960. In my mind, that side of the pond, where I first waded in, was much more open than it is today. Now it is all trees and bushes.

Back in the 1970s, one of the early morning sights at the Men’s Pond was world champion boxer John Conteh doing his training. His manager and trainer, the late George Francis, lived locally, on the Holly Lodge estate, and ran a training camp with a lot of young boxers, many from Africa, who did their workouts on the Heath and finished off with a swim in the pond.

Today, the male bodies beautiful tend to disport themselves on the grassy verge ouside the Men’s Pond on sunny summer’s days. On this particular day, there were about 200 of them, all nicely oiled, sitting, drinking and playing music, all happy and friendly, waiting for something nice to turn up. Few of them venture into the pond itself, though they are always in the skimpiest of swimming costumes.

Historically, the Heath has always been known for gay cruising, but for much of its history those encounters were illegal. Certain bushes and clearings were popular and secret signs and signals would guide newcomers to the right spots. Today, homosexual acts themselves are no longer illicit, but those engaging in sex on the Heath (whatever their gender or orientation) run the theoretical risk of being prosecuted for a public order offence.

The Men’s Pond was traditionally a very Londoner-dominated attraction, used by men from north London or the East End for their morning swim, just like the many generations of locals who had gone before them. These days, when I walk past the bodies beautiful on my way to the pond, their wine bottles open, their towels laid out, I hear quite a lot of foreign accents. London is now of course a cosmopolitan city. Word of mouth and online tips attract newcomers to London, those who have come here to work from Europe or wherever and they very quickly hear about the Heath and its various summertime attractions.

Inside the changing room area there is a separate section for men to sunbathe and exercise naked, but those who use this facility tend to be wizened wonders and keep-fit fanatics, not men looking for an interesting encounter. The whole compound is, in fact, rather brutal and ugly; decidedly unattractive, which is its preferred state for regular swimmers such as the members of Highgate Lifebuoys club, which has been going since 1903. The showers here are particularly cold and intimidating, which the Lifebuoys also like. Back in 1989, the City of London Corporation took over running the Heath and suggested modernizing the compound and installing hot showers. I thought this was a great idea, being a wimp, and signed a petition in favour. However, the hardcore, all-year-round swimmers were dead against the proposal and they prevailed. To this day, hot water has yet to reach the changing room at the Men’s Pond.

Many years ago, when I was getting dressed after my swim in that horrible concrete communal changing room, I vaguely recognized the elderly man who was drying himself beside me. I knew he was a writer, as I had seen him at some literary event, but could not place him at first. Then I remembered his first name was William... William Cooper! That was it, the author of Scenes From Provincial Life, which was greatly admired when it was first published in 1950. I said, ‘Are you William?’ ‘Did you enjoy your swim?’ ‘Do you come here often?’ And so we began chatting. He was modest and unassuming, which I supposed fitted his character, as I remembered that he had come late to writing, having been a civil servant for many years.

In passing, he happened to mention that he had just turned eighty. I was astounded. That meant he was then more than twenty-five years older than me – and still swimming in an open-air pool. Wow. I hoped that when I got to eighty I would still be doing such things. He was on his own, he said, and was now going to walk back to Kentish Town to catch the Tube home. I said I was just leaving as well and, since the walk to Kentish Town would take him near my house, why not pop in for a cup of tea?

My wife was rather surprised when I arrived home accompanied by an elderly man with wet hair and a swimming bag. As I introduced him to Margaret, I whispered to her, ‘He’s eighty, you know. Amazing – eighty years old! Who would have thought it?’

His books were well-regarded for many years, won prizes, got nice reviews, but he was never as well-known as some of his contemporaries, such as Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow and John Braine. I should think few people today have even heard of him. William Cooper was just his writing name. His real name was Harry Hoff. I never saw him again following that chance meeting at the Men’s Pool in 1990 and our brief cup of tea. He died in 2002 aged ninety-two. All that open-air swimming can’t have been bad for him.

And, yes, I have somehow managed to reach my eighties myself – who would have thought it? I was eighty-three when I began this book and am eighty-five at the time of writing, in 2021. Every day in the summer of 2019, when I was getting dressed after my swim at the Men’s Pond, I wondered if any of the young shavers around me in the changing room were thinking, Goodness, look at that old bloke, swimming in the ponds at his age. I wonder how old he is – amazing! I hope I reach his age, whatever it is.

Of course, being eighty these days is not remarkable in the way it was when I was young. The estimate is there will be three million octogenarians in a few years’ time. There are already loads of oldies who are older and fitter than me who swim all the year round.

But not many of them are lucky enough to live as near as I do to Hampstead Heath. To have