London History, Up Close
Blogs inspired by Cobble's audio walks
“Beware! Beware!” Gluck at Bolton House
Gluck lived at Bolton House on Windmill Hill in Hampstead from 1926, painting, building a modernist studio, and insisting on a single name with no prefix or suffix. Here's the story of one of British art's most remarkable figures.
Bolton House sits on Windmill Hill in Hampstead. It is a comfortable Georgian property, bought in 1926 by a wealthy tobacco-and-catering family for their daughter. She spent the next two decades there, turning it into a studio, a salon, and a stage for one of the more pointed acts of self-invention in twentieth-century British art. The neighbours complained about the architecture. History eventually agreed that was the least of what they had to complain about. Gluck Bolton House Hampstead:...
moreA Straight Yes or No: Joe Orton, Edna Welthorpe, and the Heath Street Baptist Church
The playwright's creation wrote to a Hampstead Baptist church for a hall for a play about gay tolerance. She died. Then her aunt wrote.
In November 1958, the Reverend G.W. Sterry of Heath Street Baptist Church in Hampstead received a letter from a Mrs Edna Welthorpe – a fictional Joe Orton creation – requesting the church hall for three performances of a play called “The Pansy“, described as one which “pleads for greater tolerance on the subject of homosexuality.” Mrs Welthorpe did not exist. She was a persona invented by Orton, the most subversive playwright of his generation, who was then...
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