Tudor Allen, Archivist at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, will use photographs, art works and archives, many from Camden’s own collections, to reveal the colourful history of Swiss Cottage.

The talk will tell the story of the development of the area from the early nineteenth century when it was still fields through which the River Tyburn ran, through the building of the Finchley Road in the 1820s and 1830s and the area’s subsequent urbanisation in Victorian times, up until the early years of the new Millennium.

Significant buildings and institutions in the history of the locality will be featured including Swiss Cottage Library, Cosmo’s restaurant, the John Barnes department store, the Hampstead Theatre, the Embassy Theatre, the New College, the School for the Blind, St Columba’s Hospital and, of course, the Swiss Cottage Tavern which gives the area its name.

Many notable figures have lived or worked in Swiss Cottage over the years and among those included in the talk will be Lillie Langtry, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, T S Eliot, John and Penelope Mortimer, Sigmund Freud and Tessa Jowell.

The talk was available for free by zoom link on Thursday Jan 28th.