NW3: A British–Jewish Cultural Melting Pot

Viennese analysts, Bauhaus architects, Russian-Jewish translators and Austrian painters arrived, many of them refugees, and in barely a square mile they helped remake what "British" modernism would come to mean.

This walk follows that transformation street by street. You will stand outside the flat where D.H. Lawrence lived in 1915, beside the Jewish translator Samuel Koteliansky, to whom he wrote more letters than to anyone outside his own family. You will reach the bookshop corner where a young George Orwell worked alongside Jon Kimche, who would later smuggle Jewish refugees to Palestine and write a standard history of the Balfour Declaration.

You will see the Modernist house that gave a James Bond villain his name, and the garden where Keats wrote "Ode to a Nightingale".

It is not a tidy story. The English writers who lived here held the casual prejudices of their class and time, from the family that created Svengali to Orwell's own diaries.

The walk meets that contradiction head on. The friction is the point. So is the fusion.