Heathwood is the Hampstead Garden Suburb home where Elizabeth Taylor was born on February 27, 1932. In 1929, Elizabeth’s mother, Sara, fell in love with what she would call the family’s “dream house”—a 1926 red-brick, Georgian-style home designed by architect Matthew Dawson at 8 Wildwood Road. The more than 5,000-square-foot home boasted six bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living room, sitting room, large kitchen/breakfast room, and servants’ accommodations. It had been built for a man named Kadesh and was previously the home of the Welsh portrait painter Augustus John, some of whose works still lined the walls when the Taylors took up residence. (The Taylors would come to know John, who Francis would later introduce to and exclusively represent for the American market.)

The front garden, Sara wrote, had “tulips almost three feet high, forget-me-nots, yellow and lavender violas, flaming snapdragons, rich red wallflowers, and a formal rose garden that terraced down to [the] heath”. Additional herbaceous beds thrived out back, which also sported a tennis court, but most enchanting of all, the Taylors could access Turner’s Wood through a small gate nestled in a hedge. Dubbed “The Sanctuary,” the nearly six-acre gated nature reserve, which attracted all sorts of birds and animals, featured a brook and a pond. Elizabeth, who was a patron of the Hampstead Garden Suburb centenary celebrations held in 2007, said: “The happiest days of my youth were when my brother and I would run through the woods and feel quite safe. I wonder whether it’s still like that now. I do hope so. It was heaven for this child and her brother”.

In 2015, the Hampstead Garden Suburb Residents Association commemorated Elizabeth’s birthplace with a blue plaque, which reads: “Dame Elizabeth Taylor / Actress / was born here in 1932 and lived here until 1939”.