Downshire Hill
Downshire Hill is a street in the London borough of Hampstead , Camden borough . The street has always been a preferred residential address, where the artist Dante Rossetti and the actress Peggy Ashcroft as well as the scientists JD Bernal and Peter Medawar resided. The Pink Floyd -Schlagzeuger Nick Mason grew up in Downshire Hill, after his family in 1946 by Birmingham was moved here.
course
The road runs between the A 502 (Rosslyn Hill) in the southwest and East Heath Road / South End Road in the northeast. The only turns are Keats Grove and Willow Road. While the road ends in the northeast at the edge of the nature reserve Hampstead Heath , it is "continued" in a south-westerly direction by the Thurlow Road.
On the site between Downshire Hill and Keats Grove is St. John's Church Downshire Hill .
history
The road was laid out at the beginning of the 19th century and is likely named after the first Marquess of Downshire , Wills Hill (1718–1793).
Known residents
During the First World War the writers Constance , Edward and David Garnett lived in house number 6.
In the 1930s, the Scottish writer Edwin Muir and then the two-time Wimbledon finalist Bunny Austin lived under number 7.
At the turn of the century, the actor Edward Gordon Craig and the composer Martin Shaw shared house number 8.
The author Sylvia Dryhurst was born in house number 11 . After their marriage to the writer Robert Lynd , the couple moved into the neighboring building number 14 and lived there until 1918.
The artist Roland Penrose lived in building number 21 and the biologist Peter Medawar lived in number 25 . The painter John Constable had stayed in the same house for a short time in the previous century .
The physicist John Desmond Bernal lived at number 35 in the late 1930s and the actress Flora Robson lived in the neighboring house at number 37 around the same time .
The Regency House , located at number 47, was owned by the Carline family from 1914 . In September 1938 it was acquired by the Stuttgart-born lawyer Fred Uhlman and his wife Diana Croft, who came from a wealthy background.
Together with other people who had immigrated from Germany, they soon founded the Artists' Refugee Committee (ARC), which had its official seat under number 47. The ARC gave shelter to persecuted artists. One of them was the German Dadaist John Heartfield . The original plan was to record for two weeks, but ended up spending five years there.
Soon after, the writer Elizabeth Jenkins moved into the Regency House and named her 2004 memoir ( The View from Downshire Hill ) after the street.
It was not until the Hampstead Hill Mansions , built in 1896, that it was possible to move into a single apartment in the local area. The best-known resident of this residential complex was Peggy Ashcroft , who moved there temporarily in 1946. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived for a short time in the neighboring Spring Cottage with his wife Lizzie Siddal .
literature
- Christopher Wade: The Streets of Hampstead . Camden History Society, 2000, ISBN 0-904491-46-3 , pp. 55ff.
Individual evidence
- ^ Hugh Fielder: Pink Floyd - Behind the Wall . Race Point Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-1-937994-25-9 , p. 12.
- ↑ Shulamith Behr, Marian Malet (ed.): Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945 - Politics and Cultural Identity . Editions Rodopi BV, Amsterdam / New York 2005, ISBN 90-420-1786-4 , p. 243 ff.
- ↑ Nicola Beauman: Elizabeth Jenkins obituary. In: The Guardian . September 7, 2010. (English)
Coordinates: 51 ° 33 ′ 20 ″ N , 0 ° 10 ′ 13 ″ W.