An informal reception will follow. Admission for Friends and all entrants to the Competition is free, by advance ticket. Hampstead As Friends will know Keats House was closed indefinitely to the public on December 1 st for urgent major repairs, following on its transfer in ownership from the London Borough of Camden to the City of London. Long overdue work to the roof was already carried out early in 1997. However further repairs to the four chimney stacks on the main house were begun this year, and a start was made in renewing the roof of the Chester Room, firstly to remove the asbestos.
Progress is painfully slow, and finance for the necessary redecoration is uncertain.
Meanwhile the collections have had to be removed from the House into storage. The Corporation of London have appointed an architectural historian, Sally Jeffrey, to investigate the history of the building of the House and its surrounding properties It is hoped that later this year she will be able to give a talk on her findings to the Camden Historical Society. Turner and his contemporaries evoke the Italy of the generation of the younger Romantics, of its rediscovery by British artists after the Napoleonic wars. It is a vision still tinged by Arcadia and antiquities but sharpened with a new note of realism, of the life of the markets, backstreets, exhausted pilgrims. The range of scenes recalls Keats's arrival in Naples with Severn, when they were appalled by the squalor and noise of a Southern city, yet on the slow journey towards Rome became mesmerised by the beauty of the landscape, by the vines festooned like garlands from tree to tree, by the wild flowers which Severn threw into Keats's carriage as he walked alongside it.