Upcoming Events
20 Feb 2025 by Averil Nottage
Belsize House & Other Local Country Estate
20 Mar 2025 by Karin Fernald
The King, the Queen & the Doctor
THE KING, THE QUEEN AND THE DOCTOR is the dramatic tale of the arrival of the Enlightenment in absolutist Denmark, too suddenly and too soon; in the person of a German doctor, for whom the tale ends badly. But his idealism sows the seeds of a future Denmark.
17 Apr 2025 by Tudor Allen
The Irish in Camden Town
15 May 2025 by Michelene Wandor
Book Talk on Orfeo's Last Act: A Novel in Two Parts
19 Jun 2025 by Leyla Daybelge & Magnus Englund
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.