A walk starting from outside Keats House and following paths through semi-rural Hampstead past houses and settings which provide marvellous opportunities to eavesdrop on the working lives of poets and writers apart and together. 

Keats dines with Shelley at Leigh Hunt’s house, bumps into Coleridge on the heath and ends up walking with him at his ‘alderman-after-dinner’ pace for nearly two miles. 

Expelled from Cornwall for being overheard speaking German during World War One, Lawrence and his wife Frieda came to London, lived in a house on our route while his publisher was being pursued through the courts for obscenity in The Rainbow, and saw a Zeppelin at night picked out by searchlights. 

Heath House’s threshold is crossed by Crabbe, Cowper, Campbell and Wordsworth. 

Joanna Baillie is visited at her house by Wordsworth, Byron and Keats, and praised by Scott as ‘the best dramatic writer since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger’. 

Constable’s house is here and he is buried in the churchyard of St John’s, where young Gerard Manley Hopkins used to worship. 

We pass the doors where H G Wells moved in after writing just about everything and elsewhere Rabindranath Tagore’s lodgings found for him by Sir William Rothenstein the year before he won the Nobel Prize in 1913.

And we see where Robert Louis Stevenson came when he was 23 and had written almost nothing and tiptoe up the little close where composer Sir William Walton lived.

Baillie, Coleridge, Constable, Cowper, Crabbe, Hopkins, Keats, Lawrence, Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Stevenson, Tagore, Walton and Wordsworth.

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