The Hill Garden and Pergola

Stop nine. The Hill Garden, and the Pergola.

You have found the raised walkway. Go up and along it slowly, because this is the strangest thing on the Heath and it takes a minute to work out what you are looking at.

It belonged to William Hesketh Lever, the soap millionaire who became Lord Leverhulme, and who bought the house here in nineteen oh four. He hired Thomas Mawson, the leading garden designer of the day, and told him he wanted a terrace to entertain on, raised high enough to look out over the Heath rather than up at it.

The problem was the material. You cannot raise several acres of ground without an enormous quantity of spoil, and spoil is expensive to buy and ruinous to cart. And then in nineteen oh seven the tube arrived in Hampstead, which meant men digging a tunnel a mile away and no idea what to do with what came out of it. Lever did the deal. The terrace you are walking on is the inside of Hampstead's hill, taken out of the ground to make the Northern line, and stacked up here.

He kept extending it until he died in nineteen twenty five, at which point it was about two hundred and thirty metres of colonnade and nobody wanted the upkeep. It went to the public in nineteen sixty three and it has been gently falling apart ever since, which is precisely why it looks like this. Wisteria in the joints, no roof in places, and the best decayed-grandeur photograph in London.

Free. Open daily from half past eight until dusk, and it is at its ridiculous best in the first two weeks of June.

51.56560, -0.18397 · where this is on a map