📍3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London NW1 8YB, UK
1960 – 1961“I grew up by the sea in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and then in Wellesley, a brilliant, driven girl who published her first poem at eight. After Smith College I won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge, where in 1956 I met and married the poet Ted Hughes. In January 1960, after a time in America, we came to London and, with help from the poet W.S. Merwin and his wife, found an unfurnished three-room flat on the top floor of 3 Chalcot Square, in Primrose Hill. The flat was tiny, but it looked over a pretty Georgian square of painted houses, close to Primrose Hill and Regent's Park, and I loved making it a home. On 1 April 1960 our daughter, Frieda, was born there, delivered by a midwife in the bedroom. Ted wrote in a borrowed room nearby, and I wrote whenever the baby slept. That year my first book of poems, The Colossus, was published, and in this flat I began The Bell Jar, my only novel, drawing on my own young life in New York and New England. Those eighteen months at Chalcot Square were among the happiest and most productive of my life: a new baby, a first book, London friends, and the excitement of two young poets making their way. In 1961 we moved to Devon. In 2000, my children unveiled an English Heritage blue plaque on the house, choosing this home because it was where I had truly lived, as a young mother and a poet coming into her own.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today