“You cannot conceive how dark and hideous London is today, mouldering in a dank fog,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in a 1915 letter. “I am glad we have let this flat.”
The flat in question was 1 Byron Villas, the author’s first residence in London. He and his wife, Frieda, moved in in the summer of 1915 and left at the end of December the same year.
Die-hard D.H. Lawrence fans now have the chance to acquire a piece of literary history, as the flat has been listed for £850,000 with Goldschmidt & Howland.
Lawrence, who is most famous for his novels Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Rainbow, grew up in the former coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire —his family home hit the market in 2023— and first visited Hampstead in 1908.
Lawrence and Frieda paid a modest £3 a month in rent (the equivalent of £262 today) for the two-bedroom flat on Vale of Heath, which borders the parkland.
According to the biography by Paul Delaney, the couple “canvassed their friends for furnishings and searched the second-hand stalls of the Caledonian market”. Clearly, the Lawrences had an eye for interiors, as their friend, the writer and socialite Cynthia Asquith, described their rooms as “delightful”.
For Lawrence, Hampstead was also a convenient place to rub shoulders with prominent literary and psychoanalytic figures. He was introduced to Ernest Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, for example, at a gathering in 1909. Lawrence performed a reading after dinner that “went on and on”, according to an account by Rhys, only finishing when he was asked if he did not “want a little rest”.
The flat, according to Delaney’s biography, was where Lawrence corrected the final proofs of The Rainbow and started Twilight in Italy, his collection of travel essays.
In September 1915, during the First World War, the Lawrences witnessed a Zeppelin raid while they were returning home to the flat.
“We saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds: high up, like a brighten golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of cloud. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst,” he wrote in a letter. “I cannot get over it, that the moon is not queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night”.
Lawrence, beginning to itch to leave England, left Byron Villas in December 1915 and moved to north Cornwall. But, having been exiled from the county on suspicion of signalling to German submarines, the couple returned to London in 1917.
Today, Lawrence’s time at Byron Villas is commemorated with a blue plaque, while the property gained listed status in 1974.
Inside, the ground floor apartment covers 651 square feet with two double bedrooms, a kitchen and reception room all arranged over a single floor. With a private entrance, the property also has direct access to a communal garden.
Built in 1903, shortly before the Lawrences moved in, the flat has recently been refurbished, and retains period features like its high ceilings, wooden floorboards and wide sash windows.
To Bambos Haralambous at Goldschmidt & Howland, the property’s blue plaque is a selling point for prospective buyers. “It highlights the property's historical and cultural significance, which adds a unique charm and appeal,” he explains. “Many buyers see it as a mark of prestige…This not only makes the property more memorable but also increases its desirability for those who value heritage and character.”
Certainly, for those who want to tread the same floorboards as Lawrence, this could be the chance.
“The flat in the Vale of Heath is empty, the furniture sold or given away, the lease transferred to another man. We go back there no more,” he wrote in December 1915. “I find it impossible to sit still in one place.”
