Holly Bush Hill

Stop four. Holly Bush Hill, and the painter who ran away twice.

The large weatherboarded building behind the pub is George Romney's house. In seventeen ninety six Romney, who was one of the three most fashionable portrait painters in England, bought the site up here and built himself a house with a picture gallery and a studio in it, which was an odd thing for a sick man in his sixties to do.

He is here because of one face. From seventeen eighty two he painted Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, later Nelson's mistress, something like sixty times, as Circe, as a bacchante, as Joan of Arc, as anything he could think of. You will be told he came to Hampstead to recover from an affair with her. He did not. She was his model and his obsession and, so far as anybody can show, nothing else, which is stranger and rather sadder.

The ending is the part nobody puts on the plaque. In seventeen ninety nine, after three years in this house, Romney gave it up and went home to Kendal, to the wife he had walked out on roughly thirty-five years earlier and barely seen since. She took him in and nursed him until he died.

The pub in front of you is the Holly Bush, late seventeen hundreds, gas-lit, partitioned, and almost untouched. It is on most people's list of the best pubs in London and it deserves to be.

And round the corner on Windmill Hill is Bolton House, where Joanna Baillie lived for about sixty years. She was the most performed woman playwright of her age. Byron, Wordsworth, Keats and Walter Scott all came up this hill to see her, and Sarah Siddons acted her work. Her plaque went up in nineteen hundred and was only the fourth in London given to a woman.

All free. The pub is not, but that is your own affair.

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