‘You have chosen one of the most expensive parts of London,’ said Marcia, who encouraged me to look further north in Finsbury Park, Muswell Hill, or close to them in Crouch End, but I was determined to live in Hampstead. When I saw an ad in the local paper for someone to share a garden apartment in a big old house on one of the back roads, I was over the moon. I was interviewed by two women, Katie and Heather, who were also in their twenties and, like me, were eager to get out there, find lovers, find our careers, be part of the buzz. I passed their test, moved in, and couldn’t have been happier. The world seemed full of possibilities as a single woman in a big city. NW3 was the home of the famous and the fashionable, and I aspired to be one of them. I trod the cobbled back streets, met friends in the olde-worlde pubs, was in awe to discover the many famous people who had stayed or lived there in different centuries: Gerald du Maurier, actor and father of Daphne, authors H. G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, actor Peter O’Toole, musicians Boy George and Sting, and the film director Ridley Scott, to name only a few. I’d often spot comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on the pavement outside a restaurant, always laughing; they clearly relished each other’s company. I loved to walk down Church Row with its tall red-bricked houses, then through the gates and into St John’s Church at the end, where there was an overgrown graveyard in which the artist John Constable was buried. I discovered the open-air ponds on the Heath where we swam amongst the reeds, birds and dragonflies in summer. One afternoon, I came across the Vale of Health, a village of individual cottages and hidden gardens built in the 1800s. I was captivated by their names – Rose Cottage, Woodbine Cottage, Vale Lodge. I saw a plaque on the wall of one house that said that the novelist, D. H. Lawrence, had spent time there; nearby was a house that the Romantic poets, Shelley, Byron and Keats had frequented; in another the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore had lived. I found Keats’s House, the home of the poet, had tea in the café at Kenwood House, a white stately home built in the 1700s, which stood in the middle of the Heath and displayed paintings by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Vermeer, Rembrandt. Hampstead High Street was alive with cafés, independent and quirky shops, butchers’, bakers’, florists’, and art galleries.