A great-day-out cafe that’s good value: Kenwood House reviewed

The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country.

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Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the River Fleet, the river of the journalists. Further down the hill the immaculate bourgeois socialists gambol in the swimming ponds, which is apparently a fashionable thing to do. I prefer the lido, but I am not afraid of working-class teenagers.

Hampstead Heath is an excitable woodland. There was a what-is-a-woman debate at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond last year (a Terf was banned) and at West Heath there is now a battle between dog-walkers and gay cruisers so bloody it was in the Daily Mail. Dog-walkers are patrolling a site famous for gay cruising – the Shag Tree – trying to make cruisers go indoors. The cruisers say the Shag Tree is part of their culture and they won’t be forced indoors by dog-walkers and their stupid familiars. All this is the wages of affluence. They have time for such battles.

When the immaculate bourgeois socialists have exhausted themselves fighting, they head to Kenwood House to eat in the servants’ quarters and brew house. The house is pale, long and exquisite. Its proudest hour was surviving the 1780 Gordon Riots when the butler handed out free wine at the Spaniards Inn, thus delaying the rioters, and it was gifted to the nation by the 1st Earl of Iveagh in 1927.