How Agatha Christie spent the war in Hampstead
18th May
2021
HERITAGE
HAMPSTEAD
By Bridget
Galton
Features
Editor and Associate Editor
https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/things-to-do/21333355.agatha-christie-spent-war-hampstead/
Agatha
Christie's wartime stay at the Isokon flats - with fur coat, hot water bottle,
and pillow over her head to drown out the blitz - is explored in a new
exhibition.
Despite
having homes in west London, Oxford and Devon, the famous crime writer and her
Sealyham terrier James spent 1941 to 1947 living in a 25 metre square flat in
what was advertised as the "safest building in London."
An
exhibition opening on May 22 reveals how she enjoyed a prolific stage of her
career, writing novels, stage plays, a memoir and radio play for Queen Mary's
80th birthday - which later became The Mousetrap - while living in Britain's
first apartment block made from steel reinforced concrete.
By day she
did her bit for the war with a part time job in University College Hospital's
dispensary, then returned to her flat to write, often on two books
simultaneously. At night she put a pillow over her head to block out the
falling bombs and clutched her "two most treasured possessions" her
water bottle and fur coat.
Christie's
Devon home Greenway had been requisitioned by the American Navy, her
archaeologist husband Max Mallowan posted to Egypt, and in the first week of
the blitz, her Holland Park home was bombed.
Jack
Pritchard, who commissioned Wells Coates to build the Lawn Road flats in 1934,
promised residents a new, modern way of life. With a celebrated restaurant and
bar, run by Philip Harben, it attracted an extraordinary community of
intellectuals, artists and writers, and newly arrived exiles fleeing Nazi
Germany.
"Pritchard
took out an ad in The Times claiming he had the safest building in Britain - it
wasn't true, if a bomb had landed on it it wouldn't have stood it," says
Magnus Englund, Chair of the Isokon Gallery Trust.
He visited
Christie's only grandson Mathew Prichard to sift through the family archive for
references to the Isokon.
"I
have a bomb map of Belsize Park and there were quite a few, a big one fell on
the tennis courts at the back of the flats. During raids, residents gathered in
the Isobar which had sandbags, but Christie stayed in her flat and continued to
write in her fur coat with a pillow over her head. Extraordinary!"
In letters
Christie wrote: “Coming up the street the flats looked just like a giant liner
which ought to have had a couple of funnels, and then you went up the stairs
and through the door of one’s flat and there were the trees tapping on the
window.”
She also
wrote: “I never found any difficulty writing during the War, as some people
did; I suppose because I cut myself off into a different compartment of my
mind. I could live in the book amongst the people I was writing about, and
mutter their conversations and see them striding about the room I had invented
for them."
Over six
years Christie moved three times to bigger flats eventually knocking 16 and 17
together. She was also the only resident allowed a dog.
"I
think Jack Pritchard gave her special dispensation because she was
famous."
Sadly a
claim that Christie's only spy novel N or M was inspired by Soviet spy
recruiters who were residents is untrue. "It's the most common
misunderstanding, but she wrote more than one book about spies, they were
published in America just before she moved in, and the spies had all moved out
by then."
Englund
adds: "It was a revelation that she had written what became The Mousetrap
at Lawn Road. On his seventh birthday Mathew asked for a bicycle and his
grandmother gave him what he thought a very dull bit of paper - it was the
rights to The Mousetrap.
"She
is the most sold author in the world and lived there for six years, but no-one
had ever looked at this period much before. Now we are telling the whole
story."
The Agatha
Christie exhibition runs May 22 until October 2022 at The Isokon Gallery in
Lawn Road. Entry is free no booking required. The museum is dedicated to the
story of the Grade I listed building and its famous former residents. Opening
times 11-4pm every weekend.
Isokon Flats
The Isokon
building
Isokon
Flats, also known as Lawn Road Flats and the Isokon building, on Lawn Road in
the Belsize Park district of the London Borough of Camden, is a reinforced
concrete block of 36 flats (originally 32), designed by Canadian engineer Wells
Coates for Molly and Jack Pritchard.
Pre-war
years
The designs
for the flats were developed between 1929–1932 and opened on 9 July 1934 as an
experiment in minimalist urban living. All of the "Existenzminimum"
flats had very small kitchens as there was a communal kitchen for the
preparation of meals, connected to the residential floors via a dumb waiter.
Services, including laundry and shoe-polishing, were provided on site.
The
building originally included 24 studio flats, eight one-bedroom flats, staff
quarters, a kitchen and a large garage. The Pritchards lived in a one-bedroom
penthouse flat at the top with their two sons Jeremy and Jonathan next door in
a studio flat. Plywood was used extensively in the fittings of the apartments;
Jack Pritchard was the Marketing Manager for the Estonian plywood company
Venesta between 1926 and 1936, while he also operated the Isokon Furniture
Company, originally in partnership with Wells Coates.
Celebrated
residents included: Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László
Moholy-Nagy; architects Egon Riss and Arthur Korn; Agatha Christie (between
1941 and 1947) and her husband Max Mallowan, art historian Adrian Stokes, the
author Nicholas Monsarrat, the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, modernist
architect Jacques Groag and his wife textile designer Jacqueline Groag. The
communal kitchen was converted into the Isobar restaurant in 1937, to a design
by Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke. The flats and particularly the Isobar became
renowned as a centre for socialist intellectual and artistic life in Hampstead
and regular visitors to the Isobar included nearby residents Henry Moore,
Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.
Espionage
A number of
Isokon residents were later identified as Soviet agents and in the 1930s and
Cold War period the building was subject to surveillance by the British
security services In the mid-1930s Flat 7 was occupied by Dr Arnold Deutsch,
the NKVD agent who recruited the Cambridge Five and Soviet spy Jürgen Kuczynski
lived at Isokon while teaching economics at London University.
Post-war
years
The Isokon
furniture company ceased trading with the outbreak of World War II, but was
restarted in 1963. The British architect Sir James Frazer Stirling was a
resident during the early 1960s. In 1969 the building was sold to the New
Statesman magazine and the Isobar was converted into flats. In 1972 the
building was sold to Camden London Borough Council and gradually deteriorated
until the 1990s when it was abandoned and lay derelict for several years.
Rescue and
refurbishment
In 2003 the
building was sympathetically refurbished by Avanti Architects, a practice which
specialises in the refurbishment of Modernist buildings, for the Notting Hill
Housing Association who purchased it from Camden London Borough Council.
Notting Hill Housing Association remains the freeholder. During the
comprehensive restoration, the services were completely renewed, heating and
insulation discreetly upgraded and the later overcoat of render removed from
the exterior. The building now has a smooth external finish and is the palest
tint of pink in colour, like it first was when it opened, and not pure white as
is often assumed from back and white historical photos. The building is now
partly occupied by key workers under a shared-ownership scheme whilst the
larger flats have been sold outright.
Isokon
Gallery
As part of
the refurbishment, an exhibition gallery was created in the former garage, run
since 2014 wholly by volunteers as a non-profit micro-museum to tell the story
of the building, the social and artistic life of its residents and Isokon
furniture company. The gallery is open weekends only, 11.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.
from the beginning of March until the end of October. Flats in the Isokon
building are private and cannot be visited, except during Open House in
September each year.
Designation
The
building was designated a Grade I listed structure in 1999, placing it amongst
the most significant historic buildings in England. An English Heritage blue
plaque was fixed in 2018 to commemorate the residence of the Bauhaus masters
Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy.
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