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Themes	Explorers and Adventurers	Nobel Prize Winners
Actors and Directors	Famous People	Places of Interest
Anglo-Saxons and Danes	Historic Events	Prime Ministers
AONB (National Landscapes)	Inventors and Scientists	Royal Consorts and Heirs
Artists and Architects	Monarchs	World Heritage Sites
Composers and Musicians	National Parks	Writers and Poets

Nature

London
Wildlife Trust

Books
	Set in Hampstead in the 1930s where Orwell lived and worked in similar circumstances to his character Gordon Comstock. Comstock rebels against his middle-class background. He rejects society's obsession with money, status and a materialistic lifestyle but finds that poverty is also not the solution.	KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING by George Orwell (1936)

London | Camden

The County of London was formed in 1889 from parts of the ancient counties of Middlesex, Kent and Surrey, with the City of London remaining an independent body.

In 1965 Greater London was formed, taking in the rest of Middlesex (which no longer existed as a county) together with parts of Essex and Hertfordshire and further areas of Kent and Surrey.

Greater London is made up of 13 Inner and 19 Outer London boroughs together with the City of London.

Camden once lay in Middlesex and is today one of the 13 boroughs making up Inner London. It borders the City of Westminster to its south.

London Boroughs

Anglo-Saxons and Danes

Anglo-Saxon Kings

Danish Kings

The borough once lay in Middlesex which once formed the kingdom of the Middle Saxons, so named because their kingdom lay between those of the East Saxons (Essex) and the West Saxons (Wessex).

Artists and Architects

The landscape painter John Constable died in Bloomsbury in 1837 and is buried at Hampstead where he lived later in life.

John Constable

Composers and Musicians

The youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Christian Bach was buried in 1782 in St Pancras. He had been born in Leipzig in Germany in 1735 and had lived in London since 1762.

Johann Christian Bach

Famous People

Karl Marx was buried at Highgate Cemetery in 1883. Born in 1818 in Trier in what was then Rheinish Prussia (now Germany) he had lived with his family in London since 1849.

Karl Marx
Famous London cemeteries

A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.
The Communist Manifesto (1848)

The primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall was born in Hampstead in 1934. She began her career as one of what became known as the Trimates: three woman given the task of studying the great apes by the anthropologist Louis Leakey in the 1960s.

In 1960 Jane Goodall settled in Tanzania to study the chimpanzees and later Dian Fossey would go to Rwanda to study the mountain gorillas and Biruté Galdikas went to Borneo to study the orangutans. All three carried out decade-long, ground-breaking work in their fields and all saw the essential need for nature conservation. In 1977 Jane Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute. Jane Goodall died aged 91 during a stay in Los Angeles in 2025.

Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall Institute

The mountaineer Chris Bonington was born in Hampstead in 1934. In 1962 he made the first British ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger and went onto lead and co-lead many pioneering expeditions including in 1970 the first expedition to climb the South Face of Annapurna and in 1975 the expedition which climbed the Southwest Face of Everest, something which had never been done before. He took part in four Everest expeditions reaching the summit himself in 1985.

Chris Bonington
Chris Bonington

The founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud died at his home at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead in 1939. He he had lived there since the previous year having had to flee his home in Vienna due to the annexation of Austria by Germany. In 1856 he had been born in Freiburg in Moravia, a part of the Austrian Empire which now lies in the Czech Republic. He was interred (as later his wife Martha and daughter Anna) at Golders Green Crematorium.

We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast, and only very little from a state of things.
Civilization and its Discontents (1930)

..., but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
all he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children.
W.H. Auden: In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1940)
The Communist Manifesto (1848)

In 1982 Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna Freud also died at 20 Maresfield Gardens, her home in Hampstead. The youngest of Freud's six children was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis and had fled Vienna for London with her parents in 1938. Born in Vienna in 1895 she was interred with her parents at Golders Green Crematorium.

Inventors and Scientists

The inventor John Harrison died in Red Lion Square in 1776. In 1759 he had invented the marine chronometer, a clock accurate enough to keep time even after months at sea. The clock, called H4, would revolutionise shipping as it enabled longitude to be measured for the first time.

Nobel Prize Winners

Doris Lessing, the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, died at her home at 24 Gondar Gardens in Hampstead in 2013. Born as Doris Tayler in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 she moved to England in 1949 publishing her first novel The Grass is Singing the following year and in 1962 her masterpiece: The Golden Notebook. She was only the 11th woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in its more than one century existence. Doris Lessing was interred at Golders Green Crematorium.

Doris Lessing

Places of Interest

Historic Locations

Highgate Cemetery was opened in 1839 the third of what became known as the "Magnificent Seven", seven new London cemeteries needed due to the booming population of London. All were built within a decade: the first in 1832, Kensal Green Cemetery, and the last Tower Hamlets Cemetery in 1841.

Universities

The University of London received its Royal Charter in 1836. This would make it the third oldest university to be founded in England after Oxford and Cambridge over 600 years before. This claim is disputed as Durham University was founded in 1832, although it didn't receive its Royal Charter until 1837. The capital's new university was created out of many different institutions (some dating back to the 12th century) including two colleges which also have claims to being England's third oldest university: University College London (founded 1826) and Kings College London (founded 1829).

Prime Ministers

Prime Ministers

18th Century

The Duke of Newcastle, twice Prime Minister in 1754-56 and 1757-62, died in 1768 in Lincoln's Inn Fields. In 1754 he had succeeded his brother Henry Pelham as Prime Minister.

Duke of Newcastle

19th Century

Prime Minister from 1801-04, Henry Addington was born in Bedford Row in Holborn in 1757.

Henry Addington

Benjamin Disraeli was born in Bedford Row, Holburn in 1804. He would become twice Prime Minister in 1868 and 1874-80.

Benjamin Disraeli

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.
Coningsby (1844)

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.
Lothair (1870)

Writers and Poets

For Doris Lessing see Nobel Prize Winners

In 1797 the pioneering feminist and writer Mary Wollstonecraft died at her home she shared with her husband William Godwin in Somers Town shortly after giving birth to her daughter. Her daughter was Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft

I do not wish them (women) to have power over men; but over themselves.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

From 1818 until 1820 John Keats lived at Wentworth Place in Hampstead before leaving for Italy to try and alleviate his tuberculosis.

John Keats
John Keats website

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Endymion (1818)

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
Isabella (1820)

In 1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge died at 3, The Grove in Highgate, his home for the last eighteen years of his life. The house belonged to his doctor who was treating him for opium addiction. Coleridge is buried at St Michael's Chruch in Highgate.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Friends of Coleridge

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

In 1880 the author of Middlemarch George Eliot was buried at Highgate Cemetary.

George Eliot
Famous London cemeteries

The poet Christina Rossetti died at her home at 30 Torrington Square in 1894 and she is buried at Highgate Cemetary.

Christina Rossetti
Famous London cemeteries

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land.
Remember (1862)

Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Remember (1862)

The writer Alan Sillitoe - author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - was buried in 2010 at Highgate Cemetery.

Alan Sillitoe

If I had the whip hand... I'd get all the cops, governors, posh whores, army officers, and members of Parliament and I'd stick 'em up against this wall and let 'em have it.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)

They think they've got me house-trained.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)

The novelist Beryl Bainbridge was buried in 2010 in Highgate Cemetery. After an early career acting in the theatre she became a writer and six of her books were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Beryl Bainbridge