Keats House 100 exhibition brings Hampstead’s poetic legacy to life

A century after it first opened its doors to the public, Keats House in Hampstead is marking the milestone with a new immersive exhibition that takes visitors back to the year 1925. The Keats House 100 exhibition opens on 9th May and invites Londoners to explore the villa where Romantic poet John Keats lived and wrote some of his most famous verses, including Ode to a Nightingale, as it looked a hundred years ago.

The story of Keats House is of course about literary nostalgia but it is also about the preservation of cultural memory through civic responsibility. At one point in the early 20th century, the building was nearly lost to redevelopment, labelled merely as an “Eligible Building Site.” However, a campaign to save it, led by dedicated residents and eventually handed over to Hampstead Borough Council, ensured that the house would become a permanent public memorial. The effort to preserve it reflects the kind of cultural investment still made today by City institutions.

Visitors to the new exhibition will get a glimpse of Keats House as it appeared when it first became a museum. Original furniture and objects from 1925 have been brought together in fresh displays, recreating the feel of that early post-war moment when Keats’s legacy was given physical space in the public imagination. Among the pieces on display is the first guidebook published when the house opened, proudly noting that it had been “secured for the public use for ever.”

The story doesn’t stop with Keats himself. After he left Wentworth Place in 1820, his fiancée Fanny Brawne and later his sister, Fanny Keats, continued to live there until the early 1830s. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that the wider literary and civic community rekindled interest in the house and what it represented—not only as the home of a great poet, but as a symbol of public guardianship over culture.

Since 1997, Keats House has been managed by the City of London Corporation. That link to the City underscores its wider cultural commitment. Each year, the Corporation invests heavily in heritage and the arts across London, supporting everything from the London Symphony Orchestra to Tower Bridge. Keats House forms part of that ecosystem, offering a place where global visitors and local residents alike can engage with poetry, literature, and history.

The new exhibition is expected to draw both longtime admirers of Keats and those curious to discover what makes the house such a significant landmark. For anyone who has wandered through the streets of Hampstead or found themselves drawn to a line of verse, Keats House 100 offers a thoughtful and quietly powerful way to connect past and present.

For more information on visiting, including opening hours and events, see the official Keats House page.

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