Living in West Hampstead

West Hampstead's defining feature is the cluster of stations on West End Lane. Within about two hundred metres there is the Jubilee line, the Overground and Thameslink, each with its own station, which means Bond Street and Waterloo, Stratford and Richmond, and St Pancras, Farringdon and Gatwick are all reachable without changing. Few places outside Zone 1 are this well connected.

West End Lane itself is a lively, slightly traffic-heavy high street of cafés, restaurants, gyms, bars and small supermarkets, busy on weekday evenings with people coming home from work. The area has long been popular with young professionals and sharers — it once had a reputation as a first stop for Australians and New Zealanders arriving in London — and it still has that transitional, work-hard, brunch-at-weekends feel.

Housing is dominated by red-brick Victorian and Edwardian mansion blocks and large terraced houses divided into flats, with a newer development of taller blocks around West Hampstead Square by the stations. The three railway lines run through the middle of the area in cuttings and on embankments, so some streets back onto tracks and freight trains pass through at night.

Green space is closer than it looks on a map. Fortune Green and the adjoining Hampstead Cemetery are to the north, and Hampstead Heath is a twenty-minute walk or short bus ride uphill, though it is not on the doorstep in the way it is for Hampstead proper. West Hampstead suits people who commute, value choice of routes and want a busy high street, and who do not need their evenings to be especially quiet or their flat to be especially large for the money.