The plain position
People come to the northern ridge for all sorts of reasons: a family visit, a concert at Alexandra Palace, a walk through Highgate Wood, a long lunch in a very old pub on the hill, the cemetery on Swain's Lane. Sooner or later they all ask the same question, which is where to stay, and the answer surprises them. There is no hotel in Highgate village, around Pond Square and the High Street, and there is none on the Broadway at Muswell Hill either. Both places were built as residential suburbs on high ground, both have stayed that way on purpose, and neither has a station in its middle to draw the kind of trade that fills a hotel.
That does not make a stay up here difficult. It means the evening is planned around a short drive rather than a lift, and that the right room depends on what the rest of your visit looks like. What follows is the set of addresses guests really use, grouped by the direction they lie in, with the car times the desk actually quotes rather than the ones a map suggests at four in the morning.
Across the heath in Hampstead
Hampstead faces Highgate across the heath, a twin village on a matching hilltop, and it has a handful of small places to stay that Highgate lacks. On Heath Street a family run guesthouse has been part of the village since the sixties, a few minutes' walk from Hampstead station, with compact rooms in a row of old cottages. On Frognal there is a quieter house a little way downhill towards Finchley Road. Neither is grand. Both put you in a village that is pleasant to walk through in the evening and one short drive from the other hilltop.
From Heath Street to Highgate village the car goes along Spaniards Road across the top of the heath, past the old inn and the tollhouse that narrows the road to a single lane, then down Hampstead Lane past the walls of Kenwood. On a normal evening that takes ten to fifteen minutes. On to the Broadway at Muswell Hill is another ten, down through the woods on Muswell Hill Road, so a guest in Hampstead should allow twenty to twenty five minutes each way to reach N10.
Further down, at Swiss Cottage, the big hotel is the large option: a lobby, a lift, a bar and all the anonymity that size provides. It is fifteen to twenty five minutes from Highgate by car depending on how the traffic through Hampstead is behaving, and a good deal more from Muswell Hill.
Down the hill in Camden and Kentish Town
The other direction is south, towards the canal. One hotel is on the canal in NW1, and an old coaching inn on the corner of Parkway, facing the park, has rooms upstairs. From either, a car reaches Highgate village in fifteen to twenty minutes by way of Kentish Town and the steep climb of Highgate West Hill, and the Broadway at Muswell Hill in twenty five to thirty five, up Archway Road and along the ridge. The Northern line gives you a second option for the return, since Highgate and Archway stations are both on the same branch as Camden Town.
Between the two, at the foot of the hill on Highgate Road, the Bull and Last is a long established pub by the heath with a handful of bedrooms on its upper floors. It is the nearest thing to a room in Highgate that exists, fifteen minutes' walk from Pond Square if you do not mind the slope, and with so few rooms it is worth asking early. We have no arrangement with it or with any of the places on this page; she comes up to your room as a visitor, which in any of them is entirely unremarkable.
The true car times, and why they vary
Every figure above assumes an ordinary evening after seven. At six, with the school run over and the commute at its peak, the roads around Archway and Hampstead can double them without warning, and a night when Alexandra Palace is emptying after a concert does the same to everything around Muswell Hill. Friday is always worse than Tuesday. Rain is worse than dry.
This is why the desk quotes the longer end of every range and suggests a start time with some slack in it. A companion travelling up from the middle of town to Highgate is committing forty minutes to the journey before she arrives, and nearly an hour to Muswell Hill, so she would far rather set out with time to spare and arrive settled than make it with a minute to go and spend the first quarter of an hour recovering from the traffic. Booking in the afternoon for the evening, rather than at eight for half past, makes all the difference up here.
When a private address is simply easier
Very often the question answers itself. A guest who is staying with family on the hill, or has taken a flat for a week, or lives up here and is simply after a quiet evening, does not need a hotel at all. The companion comes to the door, and an evening that would otherwise have involved two car journeys and a lobby involves neither. Residential bookings are the greater part of the work in both villages, and the women who cover them arrive at a front door the way a neighbour would, without a second glance from anyone.
If you do use a hotel, hotel evenings is the booking to read, and ninety minutes at £400 is the length most guests find comfortable when a drive is involved on one side of it. If you are receiving her at home instead, and especially if the home is a flat in a converted house with a shared front door, read the guide to a first booking at home before you send the address. Wherever it is, she is given the fee in person as she arrives, and it is not mentioned again.
Companions who live with the hill
Two companions call Highgate home. Karolina is tall, formal on first meeting and quietly funny by the second drink, and she knows every short cut between Pond Square and the Hampstead hotels. Patricia is thoughtful and unhurried, likes to begin in the courtyard of the old pub on West Hill in summer, and regards the walk down the hill afterwards as the best part of any evening. Lea, up on the Broadway at Muswell Hill, is quick and warm and knows the buses up and down the hill better than the timetable does.
Guests who would rather spend the evening with someone a little older will find four names on the thirties page. Margo among them works around Regent's Park, which puts the big hotel at Swiss Cottage within easy reach, and she is precise, dry and at ease in a hotel bar. Whether you are staying in Hampstead or down in Camden Town, Verity on the evening desk will give you each companion's real journey time before you choose.
Cross filed: most of the names on this sheet also sit in the slim and slender drawer of the moodboard.