Who stole our culture?

”… And then, at the close of the last century the blind will-to-power began to make its decisive mistakes. Instead of keeping strictly to itself the technical knowledge that constituted their greatest asset, the “white” peoples complacently offered it to all the world, in every Hochschule, verbally and on paper, and the astonished homage of the Indians and Japanese delighted them. The famous “dissemination of industry” set in, motivated by the idea of getting bigger profits by bringing production into the market area. And so, in place of the export of finished products only, they began an export of secrets, processes, methods , engineers, and organizers.”

Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, 1929

Occupants from 1824: artists and authors

From 1824 to 1828 it was rented by the painter John Linnell (painter) who befriended William Blake. Blake was a regular visitor to the house until his death in 1827. A portrait of Blake by Linnell shows him outside the house, with Hampstead Heath behind. Other artists including a group known as The Ancients also used to visit, the best known of whom was Samuel Palmer, who later married one of Linnell's daughters whom he first met at the house.

In 1837 Charles Dickens moved in with his wife following the sudden death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Overcome with grief, he dreamed of Mary every night in the upstairs bedroom at Wyldes. He stopped writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and his friends were worried he had given up writing for good. Among those who came to see him at Wyldes were Harrison Ainsworth, Hablot Browne (also known as Phiz), Daniel Maclise, and his future biographer and friend John Forster. But he soon got back to writing and returned to his home in Doughty Street after about five weeks at what was then called Collins Farm. In Oliver Twist, Bill Sikes sleeps in a field near Wyldes while fleeing from London. And in The Old Curiosity Shop, Dick Swiveller moves to a cottage in Hampstead which is probably[citation needed] based on Wyldes.

In 1884 Charlotte Wilson and her husband Arthur moved in. An early executive member of the Fabian Society, she also ran the Hampstead Historic Club, which mostly met at Wyldes. This Marxist study group attracted a range of radical thinkers including Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Edith Nesbit, who described the kitchen as an idealised farm kitchen, where, of course, no cooking is done. In her history of the house, Mrs Wilson lists some of the other visitors including Annie Besant, Olive Schreiner, Ford Madox Brown, and Havelock Ellis. In 1886 Mrs Wilson parted company with the Fabians and, with Prince Peter Kropotkin, founded The Freedom Group of anarchists. Among those who came to Wyldes was the Russian nihilist Stepniak. In 1895 she quit the movement, and started a programme of repairs and alterations to the house and barn, incorporating it fully into a single property.

Mrs Wilson moved out in about 1905 when the Wyldes estate, and the house, were purchased by Dame Henrietta Barnett and others, with part becoming an extension to Hampstead Heath with the further area being developed as Hampstead Garden Suburb. The designer of the garden suburb was the architect and town planner Raymond Unwin, who lived in Wyldes until his death in 1940, using the barn as his office. During his time he welcomed to Wyldes many distinguished guests including Edwin Lutyens, Jan Smuts and Paul Robeson.[8]

A Greater London Council blue plaque, placed in 1975, commemorates Linnell and Blake at the house.[9] A plaque also commemorates Unwin.[10]