Upcoming Events

Musical Emigres from Nazi Europe in & around Belsize Park

Malcolm Miller, musicologist and pianist, is Hon. Associate and Associate Lecturer in Music at the Open University. He has published widely on Beethoven, Wagner and contemporary music and writes regularly for the musical press. His chapter on emigre musicians 'Music and Memory' appears in The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth Century music (Bohlau Verlag 2014) and he co-edited, with Jutta Raab Hansen, the volume Music and Exile: 1933 to the Present Day (Brill 2023), a collection of essays on refugee musicians who escaped to Britain, USA, Australia and Shanghai. He is author of a monograph on ‘Boundary, Space, and Register in Beethoven’s Piano Works’ (Boydell, 2025). 

A Fascist in the Family

The Tragedy of John Beckett M.P. by Francis Beckett, which details how his father, a former Labour MP, became the propaganda chief for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and later founded a National Socialist League before being imprisoned during the war. The book explores themes of racism, nationalism, anti-semitism, and the impact of the father's controversial career on his family, particularly after the son discovered the extent of his father's Jewish ancestry.  

Isokon & the Bauhaus in Britain - 

The Intriguing Story of the Only Listed Grade I in Belsize Park 

In the mid-1930s, three giants of the international Modern movement, Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, fled Nazi Germany and sought refuge in Hampstead in Britain’s most exciting new apartment block. The hugely influential Lawn Road Flats, or Isokon building, was completed in 1934. It had been commissioned by visionary couple Jack and Molly Pritchard and designed by architect Wells Coates. The building also became home to the crime writer Agatha Christie, as well as no less than five Soviet spies. 

Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund are trustees of the Isokon Gallery, the museum in the building, and have written and lectured extensively both in Britain and abroad on Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain. Their richly illustrated talk is not just about design and architecture but also war, sex, death, espionage and famous dinner parties.