A Guide to North London’s Most Pragmatically Pleasant District
Swiss Cottage: The Name Has a Story and the Story Is Gloriously Anticlimactic
Swiss Cottage takes its name from a pub built in 1804 in the style of a Swiss chalet by a landlord who had presumably seen an illustration of Switzerland and thought: that is the aesthetic I want for a drinking establishment on the Finchley Road. The pub still exists, still looks like a Swiss chalet, and is still serving drinks in a manner that suggests the original concept has proven more durable than anyone expected. The neighbourhood that grew up around the pub is considerably more substantial than the architectural inspiration for its name, containing one of the better public libraries in London, a theatre of genuine national significance, and a leisure centre that the residents regard as one of the neighbourhood’s primary assets, which tells you something useful about the character of the people who live here.
The Swiss Cottage Library: Basil Spence’s Civic Gift
The Swiss Cottage Library was designed by Sir Basil Spence — the architect of Coventry Cathedral — and opened in 1964 as part of a civic complex that included the leisure centre and was intended to demonstrate what public investment in community infrastructure could look like at its best. The library is a piece of 1960s civic architecture of genuine quality: open-plan, light-filled, and built with the confidence of a decade that believed public buildings should be ambitious. It remains one of the more distinguished public library buildings in London and functions as a working library serving the community it was built for. Camden Libraries manages it. It is free to use. This is the correct use of public money.
Hampstead Theatre: The National Theatre’s Quieter Sibling
Hampstead Theatre on Eton Avenue is one of the country’s premier new writing theatres, responsible over its history for premiering work that subsequently transferred to the West End, Broadway, and the National Theatre with sufficient regularity to establish it as a reliable indicator of what British theatre will be talking about in eighteen months. The theatre was founded in 1959 and has been in its current building since 2003, a purpose-built glass-fronted venue that announces itself on the street with the quiet confidence of an institution that does not need to shout. Hampstead Theatre runs a Studio alongside the main stage for smaller and more experimental work. Tickets are priced accessibly. The work repays the investment.
The Finchley Road: The Honest High Street
The Finchley Road, which runs through Swiss Cottage as its main arterial road, is a working high street of considerable length and variable character that contains supermarkets, estate agents, coffee shops, and the specific mixture of international restaurants that reflects north London’s genuinely diverse population. It is not pretty in the way that Marylebone High Street is pretty. It is useful in the way that a high street should be useful, serving the people who live along it rather than the people who visit to photograph it. This is the less glamorous but more defensible function of an urban commercial strip and Swiss Cottage’s Finchley Road performs it reliably.
The Leisure Centre: Local Pride Made Concrete
The Swiss Cottage Leisure Centre, part of the original Basil Spence civic complex, contains a swimming pool that has been used by the neighbourhood for sixty years and a fitness facility that the local population regards with the possessive affection usually reserved for a pub or a market. Public leisure centres of this quality — genuinely used, genuinely valued, genuinely maintained — are rarer in London than they should be and worth noting when encountered. Swimming in a Basil Spence building is an unexpectedly elegant way to spend a morning.
Getting There
Swiss Cottage station (Jubilee line) deposits you on the Finchley Road beside the pub that named the neighbourhood. Finchley Road station (Jubilee and Metropolitan lines) is two stops south. Belsize Park (Northern line) is a pleasant fifteen-minute walk east through the residential streets. The neighbourhood is also well-served by buses along the Finchley Road corridor that connect it to central London and to Hampstead.
Final Verdict
Swiss Cottage is a neighbourhood for people who appreciate civic infrastructure and good theatre and the specific north London quality of getting on with things without making a fuss about it. It has a library designed by a cathedral architect. It has a theatre that discovers playwrights before anyone else. It has a pub shaped like Switzerland. These three things are sufficient justification for a visit and more than sufficient justification for living here.
More: Londonist | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
