16/07/2025
Members of the Arnold Bax Appreciation Group, and others, might be interested to learn about Bax’s living quarters in Hampstead/Belsize Park.
I recently came across these two David Percy films concerning Belsize Park. They are fabulous, and well worth watching for their own sake, with wonderful photography and a fascinating script, which details the richly artistic and cultural area it has been over the years.
However, there is a reference to Bax in Volume 1 (http://www.belsizevillage.co.uk/belsize_storyvol1.htm) at the 53-minute mark. This relates to IVYBANK, where Arnold spent his early youth. Also, the Hampstead Conservatoire is mentioned on 1 hour 42 - where he first studied at that “institution ruled with considerable personal pomp” by Cecil Sharp, who also lived nearby and is mentioned in the film.
I have often wondered about those 30 odd years that Bax spent “…in that dismal Fellows Road where I sometimes feel almost crazy with boredom.” (Letter to Harriet in 1929).
He resided, apparently, on the 2nd floor of a now demolished 155 Fellows Road, identical to this one in the photo at 146.
What I had not gathered (see Volume 2 at 18.41 http://www.belsizevillage.co.uk/belsize_storyvol2.htm)
was how close this ‘dismal’ abode was to the site of the wonderfully opulent and spacious IVYBANK.
Nor, how only a couple of miles away at Swiss Cottage, was where he had bought Elsita, his wife, a house. Nor, even, that Harriet Cohen lived just a ten-minute walk from Elsita in those early days!
Local living, to be sure, and maybe it is a clue to Bax’s wanderlust.
Watson Lyle visited Bax twice at 155 Fellows Road and interviewed him. He paints a different picture and refers to it as: “A place inducing intimate thought, and so perhaps a study rather than a studio”.
There was a blazing fire and it was a well-lit apartment, and “at the back of the room, was the tall, upright grand pianoforte.”
Bax once told Mary Gleaves that he always needed to compose on his own because he made such a din!
Imagine all those symphonies and tone poems and sonatas, emanating from that ‘dingy’ second floor apartment. Was the building so sturdy and well built that the sound hardly travelled to, or troubled, the other occupants of Fellows Road?!
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