History of Belsize Park
 Belsize Park is a suburb of North London in the London Borough of Camden, located 3.4 miles (5.5 km) north-west of Charring Cross. It stretches roughly from Lyndhurst Road in the north to England’s Lane and Eton Avenue in the south and from Haverstock Hill in the east to Finchley Road in the west.
The name comes from the original 16th century manor house and parkland which once stood on the site and is derived from the French, Bel Assis, which actually means “beautifully situated”.
In the early part of its existence, until the more affluent late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was the only house in Belsize and Hampstead of aristocratic class and size.
The house stood at a point somewhere between the present day St Peters church and the junction of Belsize Park and Belsize Park Gardens. Belsize Avenue was the carriage way leading to it from the Great Road to Hampstead (Haverstock Hill). Belsize Park Gardens lies close to one of the boundaries of the park, and parts of the old park wall can be traced in some of the back gardens. The irregular pentagon of the park can be recognized on various old maps. Present day ‘Belsize village’ marks the rear entrance to the grounds of the house, giving access from the ancient Belsize Lane, where the buildings of Belsize Farm stood.
Over the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a number of large houses were built on the Belsize lands nearest to Haverstock Hill, for wealthy lawyers and merchants wishing to escape from the increasingly polluted city to the nearby countryside, but large areas of farmland still remained, notably at Chalcotts Farm and further up the hill towards Hampstead.
The first proper streets of Belsize were laid out in the 1850s and most of the main thoroughfares were quickly established within less than two decades. By 1870 Belsize had become Belsize Park, thanks mainly to the efforts of one Daniel Tidey, a builder and property developer. Tidey is responsible for the Belsize Tavern (where he would die after falling on hard times) and the Washington Hotel, which was named after his home town in Sussex.
From 1870 to 1900, the surviving stretches of greenery were systematically eroded and by the turn of the century, Belsize Park had become pretty much the place we see today – a magical selection of streets, reflecting the transient architectural and social trends of the 19th century.
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