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Published: 23 July 2009

The poet Keats’s last home in England

Keats’s 19th century recaptured

IF the poet John Keats were to step out of a time machine, he may be shocked by the plethora of 4 X 4s clogging up the streets of Hampstead.
But should he meander along to Keats Grove, where he lived for two years in the early 1810s, he’d be pleasantly surprised: because a renovation project has just been completed and has restored the Romantic poet’s last home in England to how it would have been in his day.
The House, managed by the City of London, reopens this week and project manager Geoff Pick says the restoration required some major detective work: “The main aim was to reflect new research about how the home would have looked and felt the time Keats lived here.”
Keats had moved in as a lodger with his friend Charles Brown in 1818 and the two years the poet spent in the home are recognised by Keats scholars as his most productive.
But his happy days in Hampstead were cut short by diagnosis of his tuberculosis: he was told he’d benefit from living in warmer climes, and so headed to Italy in 1820 and died the following year.
Historians carefully peeled off flecks of paint in many of the rooms and took them to a lab. There they studied what the paint was made from and the colours used.
When Keats moved in, the house had recently been built – it was just two years old – so they had a good idea that the lowest layer was how it would have been decorated.
Mr Pick said: “It was like looking at a lasagne under the microscope – years and years of paint could be seen, and we worked backwards until we found what it would have looked like in 1815.”
And they also found minute spots of the original paint on a fireplace, proving they had been installed when the home was first built.
There were also some surprises.
The house had not been renovated since the early 1970s, which meant there was a lot of maintenance and repair work to be done – and builders removed plaster board from one ceiling on a staircase to discover the original panelling intact.
DAN CARRIER

• The work was paid for partly by a grant
from the Heritage Lottery fund for £424,000, and the house at Keats Grove, NW3,
re-opens tomorrow (Friday)

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