The Belsize Society and the Belsize Conservation Area Advisory Committee recently presented an award to David S Percy FRSA ARPS for his contribution to local history at an event to launch his latest book, “Remarkable Homes of NW3”. We recently chatted with David.
BelSoc: We know you grew up in Belsize Park. Do you think the area has changed and what was it like growing up in the area?
DSP: The area has changed to a certain extent, but in some ways not so much. Many of the buildings in the Italianate part of Belsize appear to be rather the same externally and were originally built for single-family ownership. However, since the war, the vast majority have been divided up into flats.
I would say the key difference is that the streets were virtually empty with hardly any parked cars in the 1940s with the roads appearing much wider than they seem today. Now we have wall-to-wall parked cars almost everywhere as illustrated by the photo of Belsize Avenue from that time.
My family lived in the ground-floor corner flat in Manor Mansions on Belsize Park Gardens. The milkman used to stop outside the block. And I remember helping him offer up the nosebag to his horse just before he went on his rounds of the flats. And I recall walking to St Christopher’s school with my nanny to the Village through these virtually empty streets. Until the 1950s Christopher’s took boys and girls; now, of course, it’s just a girl’s school.
BelSoc: Can you give us an outline of your career? How did you become involved in documenting the history of Belsize Park?
DSP: My first film assignment was in the 1960s: it was a documentary filmed in the Middle East that was followed by various other documentaries and fund-raising films that took me all over the world. Some corporate jobs involved travelling to Australia many times. I’ve been a filmmaker for most of my life, although I’ve also had other businesses. I used to run the Classic Cinema on Pond Street in the late ’60s, where we premiered Easy Rider in Europe. This cinema, The Hampstead Playhouse, was one of the oldest cinemas in the UK and boasted a large fan that brought fresh air in from the Heath. Afternoon tea could be served in the balcony and during matinees.
And then in the 1970s, I had a display mannequin company with our factory at 98-100 Belsize Lane (where Ergotec is now). The spray booth exhaust chimney was located on the back wall of the building adjoining Daleham Mews – something that most certainly would not be allowed today!
Having been a filmmaker for most of my life, I thought that in my semi-retirement I would give something back to my beloved Belsize Park. I decided to document the history, people and architecture of Belsize in a broadcast-quality video production. It was to take three years to complete working full-time. I persuaded our neighbour Fiona Bruce to narrate the Belsize Story documentary – it’s free online for anyone to watch on the Belsize Village website. Inevitably, it led to other local history projects and exhibitions etc. My earliest documentary in the area was in 1975 when my film unit was commissioned to document Hampstead Garden Suburb, a production narrated by HGS resident Sir Donald Sinden.
BelSoc: How did you go about doing the research for ‘Remarkable Homes of NW3’?
DSP: I was asked by Michael McHale, a fellow resident also born in Belsize, if I would create a book on interesting houses in Belsize. This grew into a much larger project that incorporated remarkable homes throughout NW3. We sent out invitations to a selected number of homes that are still in single-family ownership and received a surprising number of replies. This local history coffee table book features around 100 houses.
The most enjoyable aspect was meeting the homeowners, hearing their stories and linking them to the area’s history, in some cases to the famous people who lived in their homes or nearby. That led to seeing and photographing for the record what they have done to their homes to make them their own.
Several houses come to mind as being rather unusual. One is on FitzJohn’s Avenue and had previously been a 30-person bedsit hostel. The current owners set about gutting the entire house and rebuilding it inside from the basement up. They managed to create a most magnificent interior, with the upper and lower ground floor extensions served by one enormous set of sliding glass windows six and a half metres high! Everything, including the decor and the furniture, was designed by the owner.
The entire book project was both enlightening and rewarding, for which I took over a thousand photographs. These are going to be added to my extensive library of local photographs, and when I finally put down my camera for the last time, I will ensure that the entire collection is lodged in the Camden Local History and Archives Centre.