On day one of my ‘Easter experiment’ I popped over to Finchley Road and Frognal station for a walk around and to see what I could find.
Just south of Hampstead, the area around the station is clearly very wealthy – there are lots of big detached townhouses, some with turrets and towers (I’m not kidding!), that are clearly still in single occupation, and lots of big cars in driveways too. Mind you, the area lacks the spark that you find in the good old East End as the streets were almost empty. Startlingly, the shops were too – apart from the O2 shopping centre the vacancy rate on Finchley Road itself must have been touching around 50%, so wherever the conspicuous wealth is going it clearly isn’t being spent on the local High Street…
For architecture fans its certainly worth wandering around, and there’s something for culture vultures too – the Camden Arts Centre is a very impressive gothic building that hosts several exhibitions, and just up the road is the Freud Museum, a lovely building that had a huge cherry tree blossoming in the garden when I visited, which contains Sigmund Freud’s original consulting rooms, including his psychiatrist’s couch! Although it’s seen better days, now being part of Camden Council’s offices, Cecil Sharp’s home is on the same street too.