Chapter Eighteen
Swiss Cottage
The Tavern That Lent London the Alps
Why is Swiss Cottage called Swiss Cottage?
In brief: Swiss Cottage is named for a chalet-style roadside tavern that became a well-known local landmark. The tavern’s name spread to the neighbourhood and its railway stations.
Transport context: London Underground station.
Around 1840, a traveller heading north from London may pay a toll beside a piece of Switzerland.
The road is new. Finchley New Road has been driven across the lower ground west of Hampstead to avoid the steeper route over the hill. Horses pulling coaches and laden carts no longer need to climb through the village before continuing towards Finchley. At the junction with Avenue Road, near a tollgate, stands a tavern made to resemble a Swiss chalet.1
It is not Swiss.
Its customers are not crossing an Alpine pass. The nearest mountains are painted, printed or remembered from travel. The building belongs to a London taste for the picturesque: architecture borrowed from elsewhere, simplified into a shape that can be recognised from the road.
The cottage is an advertisement before it is a district.
Accounts disagree over the precise beginning. Some later sources place a Swiss-style tavern on the site earlier in the century. Camden Council dates the pub to 1840, while documentary traces and a British Museum drawing place a Swiss Cottage tavern beside the new road by the late 1830s and early 1840s. The strongest evidence establishes the landmark in that period, not an exact opening day.2
Uncertainty has not weakened the name.
The building is distinctive enough to become directions. A traveller can be told to stop at the Swiss Cottage without knowing its landlord, its licence or the difference between a genuine chalet and a London imitation. The description hardens into a proper noun.
A roadside metaphor has given an entire neighbourhood a nationality it does not possess.
Before the tavern, the place is an exposed road junction on the edge of Hampstead’s fields. The old route north passes through the village and over difficult gradients. The Finchley Road Act of 1826 authorises an alternative; the new turnpike is completed in the 1830s. Road engineering creates a site where coaches slow, tolls are collected and travellers may be persuaded to buy food or drink.3
A public house beside a tollgate does not need ancient roots.
It needs delayed customers.
The Swiss form gives them something to remember. Deep eaves, gables and decorative timber suggest a mountain refuge rather than a roadside business surrounded by Middlesex clay. The effect depends upon distance. Switzerland has become fashionable in British imagination through travel writing, landscape art and the expanding possibility of continental tourism. A chalet can signify clean air, romantic scenery and escape without reproducing any particular Swiss building.
London borrows the idea and sets it beside a toll collector.
The first landlord remembered in the local history is Frank Redmond, a former pugilist.4
The combination is appropriate. The cottage looks delicate; its keeper has made a profession from blows.
The Boxer at the Tollgate
Frank Redmond belongs to the world before organised sport becomes respectable by acquiring committees, standard rules and purpose-built grounds.
Prize fighting is public, illegal or semi-tolerated according to circumstance, and closely connected to inns. A contest requires patrons, wagers, transport, drink and a place from which participants and spectators can depart before authority intervenes. Publicans understand crowds because crowds are their business.
By the early 1840s Redmond is at the Swiss Cottage. The tavern becomes associated not only with travellers but with pedestrians: professional runners and walkers who compete for money and reputation. Local history records it as a celebrated starting point for foot races.4
Pedestrianism can be arduous, theatrical and strange.
Competitors race measured distances, walk against time or accept elaborate challenges designed to sustain betting. Their performances take place on roads and enclosed grounds before athletics has settled into the forms later generations recognise. An inn at the edge of built London is a useful headquarters. Routes can extend into open country; spectators can gather; wagers can be arranged; food and drink wait at the finish.
The Swiss Cottage therefore serves two kinds of movement.
The turnpike carries travellers north.
Redmond sends competitors out on foot.
The tavern’s sporting reputation gives the picturesque building a harder social life than its appearance suggests. This is not an ornamental cottage placed for silent admiration. It is a commercial place of noise, appetite and contest. Coaches draw up. Toll money changes hands nearby. Pedestrians depart under scrutiny. The landlord’s past in the ring adds another form of performance to the address.
No mountain is required.
The tavern’s name travels farther than many of the races.
As houses spread along Finchley Road and across neighbouring estates, the junction needs an identity. The old parish boundaries are not useful to every newcomer. The cottage is. Maps, advertisements and transport services begin using the name. Swiss Cottage ceases to mean only the tavern and starts to mean the place around it.
The imitation has created something authentic.
By the middle of the nineteenth century north-west London is being reorganised by roads, railways and speculative building. Hampstead remains a destination associated with height and clean air, but the lower ground around Finchley Road develops its own urban life. Villas and terraces appear. Omnibuses connect the growing district to the centre. A road built to avoid a settlement begins producing another settlement along its sides.
The railway confirms the name.
On 13 April 1868, the Metropolitan and St John’s Wood Railway opens a branch from Baker Street to a new northern terminus at Swiss Cottage.5
Only thirty years earlier, the words identify a conspicuous tavern beside a turnpike. Now they are printed on tickets and timetables. The station does not name itself after Hampstead, the older and more famous place uphill. It uses the landmark beside the road.
Railway language enlarges small names.
A passenger may travel to Swiss Cottage without intending to enter the Swiss Cottage. The station makes the phrase independent of the building. Development follows transport; transport repeats the name; repetition gives the district boundaries that were never formally drawn at its beginning.
The original station is shallow, built for the Metropolitan Railway’s steam-hauled expansion beyond Baker Street. It remains a terminus until the line is extended in 1879. Over time, Metropolitan trains travel much farther north-west, and the local station becomes one stopping place within a network reaching deep into the suburbs and countryside.5
That success creates congestion closer to central London.
By the 1930s, trains from several Metropolitan branches must share limited tracks between Finchley Road and Baker Street. London Transport responds by constructing deep-level tunnels and transferring the Stanmore service to the Bakerloo line. A new Swiss Cottage station opens on 20 November 1939, beside and below the older one.6
For a short period, two Swiss Cottages operate together.
The sub-surface platforms belong to the Metropolitan line. The new deep platforms belong to the Bakerloo. One name serves two generations of underground railway separated vertically and technologically.
War shortens the arrangement.
After the last train on 17 August 1940, the old Metropolitan station closes as an economy measure. The newer station keeps the name and the passengers. Parts of the abandoned platform space survive out of public view, a buried predecessor beside the railway that replaced it.7
On 1 May 1979, the Stanmore branch transfers again, this time from the Bakerloo to the new Jubilee line. Swiss Cottage changes colour on the Tube map without changing identity.8
The cottage has now named a tollgate landmark, a neighbourhood, two Underground stations and a succession of railway services.
The building itself has been less stable than the name suggests.
The chalet visible in modern photographs is not Frank Redmond’s tavern preserved untouched. The premises have been rebuilt and remodelled, with the familiar large chalet-style exterior substantially renewed in the later twentieth century. Continuity resides in shape, site and name rather than original fabric.9
That distinction matters because picturesque architecture encourages false age. A timbered gable can appear older than it is. The words Ye Olde can make commercial succession resemble survival. Swiss Cottage has repeatedly reconstructed the object required to explain itself.
In February 2025, the public house closed.
The closure produced petitions and local campaigning to protect the premises as an Asset of Community Value. Campaigners explored a community purchase, but by 2026 the pub remained closed and the future of the building was unresolved.10
The event reverses the original naming process.
For nearly two centuries the pub gave the district a reason for its strange name. Now the district may have to preserve the memory of a pub no longer operating. The station continues announcing Swiss Cottage while the cottage itself stands closed.
This is not unusual in London.
Names routinely outlive the businesses that created them. Elephant & Castle survives the inn; Angel survives a coaching house; Maida Vale survives the Hero of Maida. A transport map becomes a shelter for vanished commerce.
Yet Swiss Cottage feels more exposed because the explanation remains visible.
Leave the Jubilee line station and emerge into the traffic system at Finchley Road and Avenue Road. Roads divide, merge and bend around the junction. The scale belongs to the twentieth-century city: lanes of vehicles, pedestrian crossings, large buildings and routes carrying traffic towards the north-west.
Within it stands the chalet-shaped successor to the tavern.
It looks stranded from another geography. That was always the point.
The first Swiss Cottage was not a remnant of rural Switzerland overtaken by London. It was a deliberate novelty placed beside a new road. The apparent anachronism was present from the beginning. Coaches once passed an Alpine fantasy at a Middlesex tollgate; cars now pass its later reconstruction within a gyratory.
Below, the station has no need to depict mountains. The roundels state the name with institutional certainty. Passengers accept that Swiss Cottage lies between St John’s Wood and Finchley Road. Geography created by metaphor has become geography printed as fact.
Pause before laughing at the absurdity.
Cities need memorable mistakes.
A literal name might have described the road, the parish or the landowner and disappeared among hundreds like it. Swiss Cottage survives because the first building was unnecessary. Nobody needed a chalet beside the Finchley turnpike. Its useless foreignness made it useful as a landmark.
The Alps never came to London.
A publican borrowed their roofline.
The public house may close. The original fabric may vanish. The station may change lines again.
Swiss Cottage has already escaped them all.
Notes and Sources
London Borough of Camden, “Camden’s history”. Camden records that the district was named after a public house on Finchley Road beside a tollgate, built in 1840 in the style of a Swiss chalet.↩
London Borough of Camden, “Camden’s history”; British Museum, drawing and location map of the Swiss Cottage Tavern; and A. P. Baggs et al., “Hampstead: Social and cultural activities”, A History of the County of Middlesex, volume 9. Sources differ over an exact founding date. The evidence securely places the named tavern at the junction by the late 1830s or early 1840s; the chapter avoids asserting a more precise date.↩
A. P. Baggs et al., “Hampstead: Communications”, A History of the County of Middlesex, volume 9. The Finchley Road Act was passed in 1826 and Finchley New Road was constructed as a turnpike alternative to the steep route through Hampstead, opening during the 1830s.↩
A. P. Baggs et al., “Hampstead: Social and cultural activities”. The account identifies former pugilist Frank Redmond as the tavern’s first landlord in the early 1840s and records its reputation as a starting point for foot races.↩ ↩
Alan Jackson, London’s Metropolitan Railway (David & Charles, 1986), and Douglas Rose, The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History (Capital Transport, later editions). The Metropolitan and St John’s Wood Railway opened from Baker Street to Swiss Cottage on 13 April 1868; the line was extended beyond the terminus in 1879.↩ ↩
London Transport Museum, photograph record for Swiss Cottage Underground station, and Douglas Rose, The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History. The present deep-level station opened on 20 November 1939 when Stanmore branch services were transferred from the Metropolitan to the Bakerloo line.↩
Alan Jackson, London’s Metropolitan Railway, and Douglas Rose, The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History. The older sub-surface Swiss Cottage station closed after the last train on 17 August 1940 as a wartime economy.↩
Douglas Rose, The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History. The Stanmore branch, including Swiss Cottage, transferred from the Bakerloo line to the newly opened Jubilee line on 1 May 1979.↩
The Belsize Society, “Ye Olde Swiss Cottage pub — an update”, and Camden New Journal, “Race against time to save Ye Olde Swiss Cottage pub”. The present building is a later successor and remodelling on the historic site, not the unaltered tavern of the 1830s or 1840s.↩
CAMRA, “Olde Swiss Cottage, Hampstead”, records the long-term closure on 1 February 2025 and describes the pub’s future as uncertain. The Belsize Society, “Saving the Swiss Cottage pub”, documents the Asset of Community Value campaign and the period during which a community bid was explored.↩