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Keats House, London

This is the house where Keats lived with his friend Charles Brown for seventeen months between 1818 and 1820. It is called Keats House, but in reality Keats never owned a house. He never had the money. Often he could barely afford his lodgings. It is one of the sad facts of his life that apart from his years of early childhood Keats never really had a home of his own. Following the death of his parents Keats lived with relatives or guardians, and then during his short medical and poetic careers, he lived in a series of lodgings. The closest he came to a home was the house now known as Keats House. But even this house was a lodging, called Wentworth Place, and belonging to Charles Brown. It was at Wentworth Place that Keats spent his most creative year, 1819, when he wrote his finest poems. Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale sitting under a plum tree in the garden of Wentworth Place, and the successor of this plum tree stands in the same position in the garden. A colourful display of spring flowers now grows where Keats sat.

 

The Plum Tree in the garden at Keats House

Emile Zola once described a character in one of his books as "camping out in life", and that is my sense of John Keats. Walking round the house I got the feeling that I was visiting a rather elegant student lodging. This was not a family home. This is the house of a young man who had almost cast himself adrift from the normal run of life. And yet he wished to experience life so fully. He sat beneath the plum tree in the garden writing Ode to a Nightingale, where his effort to embrace the world, drink it in, results in a sense that he is disappearing into it. Keats had a contradictory desire to escape life, and live it as fully as possible. Somehow that comes over in the house. It is an unassuming little place which demonstrates Keats' commitment to his art, while also speaking of his reluctance to commit himself to anything. This is no mansion where families would live for generations. There is no sense of roots going down. This is a few small rooms, where Keats had some good times with his friend Charles, had an off and on love affair with Fanny who lived next door, wrote some great poems which he seemed to casually cast aside once completed, and developed the tuberculosis that would end his life at the age of twenty five.

During his final illness Keats left Wentworth Place and went to live with his former publisher Leigh Hunt in Kentish Town. He left Hunt's house after an upset involving opened mail, staggered back to Wentworth Place, and was looked after by Fanny and her mother. Only his illness allowed him to live with Fanny like this. For a brief few months in 1820 he had a kind of family life, but the state of his health promised that it would never last. It was from Wentworth Place that Keats left in September 1820 on his final journey to Italy in a hopeless attempt to find relief in the warmer climate of Italy.

The house has period furniture, although very little of Charles Brown's original furniture survives. There is a time line display, an exhibition on Fanny Brawne, and a collection of poetry books which can be looked at.

Picnics are permitted in the garden.

A poetry reading group meets at the house regularly

Opening Times: Keats House closed on 31st October 2007 for restoration work and will, it is hoped, re-open late summer 2008.

Directions: Keats House is in Keats Grove, Hampstead, north London. Click here for an interactive map centred on Keats House.

Access: There is wheelchair access to the ground floor, but the public toilet is on the first floor, which can only be reached by a steep staircase. Large print guides are available on request. There is an induction loop at the ticket desk.

Pushchairs are not permitted inside the house.

Contact:

web site:www.keatshouse.org.uk