Piers Plowright and Poh Sim on Hampstead Heath
- Credit: Antoinette Eugster
Piers Plowright was the most amazing listener , a lover of music, books and art, and most of all the sort of man who would march a gaggle of sleepy children up Parliament Hill in order to give them a precious memory or two.
The BBC radio producer died aged 83 in July, and he is remembered by his wife Poh Sim, family and friends as a figure like no other.
Piers Plowright, one of Hampstead s most distinctive characters
- Credit: Lucy Tizzard
One of his three children, Natasha, told the
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Published:
6:00 AM May 13, 2021
Updated:
10:49 AM May 13, 2021
Fewer businesses will have to pay the Hampstead BID levy if it is voted back in later this year
- Credit: Archant
The bosses of the Hampstead Village Business Improvement District (BID) have released the business plan they hope will persuade local firms to back the controversial scheme for another five years.
A vote will be held in June on the scheme, which charges a levy on traders and aims to promote business in the area.
The document includes detailed spending plans for the next five years and also explains the BID – which has previously been challenged in court – is also planning to raise the business rates threshold, meaning fewer businesses would have to pay.
Though we can t sit inside just yet, use a trip to the toilet to check out the walls - still dedicated to the people of Hampstead with more than 100 portraits. Perfect for Sunday lunch or even a drink after work.
The Wells Tavern, Hampstead
Not much beats being sat outside of the Wells Tavern in Well Walk
- Credit: The Wells Tavern
This pub in Hampstead s Well Walk (no surprise there) has a wide range of beers available. Tables are only available to book for dining, but the landlords have a new menu launching on May 17 - just in time for indoor seating.
Hampstead then was very rural and the brothers moved to get away from the fumes and noise of the city. Keats had seen a lot of suffering in his medical training and TB was a plague at that time affecting young people. His poetry seems very contemporary and close to our times now there is a plague affecting old people.
Keats took daily walks across the Heath, visiting poet and mentor Leigh Hunt in the Vale of Health where he took part in sonnet competitions with Shelley, his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke at Wentworth Place, and even a stroll with Highgate resident Samuel Taylor Coleridge who complained about the nightingales keeping him awake. Charles Brown lived in the other half of semi-detached Wentworth Place and invited Keats to live with him after Tom s death in December 1818. There he fell in love with neighbour Fanny Brawne and they became secretly engaged. Brown maintained that Keats composed his famous Ode to A Nightingale while sitting under a plum tree in t