The Wabe, Single-family detached home in Hampstead, England
The Wabe is a detached house on Redington Road in Hampstead, London, combining Scottish Baronial architecture with Arts and Crafts details such as stone-framed windows and handcrafted woodwork. The building includes a double-height ballroom, a guest annex, five bedrooms, and a roof terrace facing Hampstead Village.
The house was built in 1903 by William Garnett, a mathematician and educator who chose its name from Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky. Over the following decades, the property passed through several owners and became known as a gathering place for writers, thinkers, and activists.
The house once welcomed supporters of the women's suffrage movement, with figures like Emmeline Pankhurst and George Bernard Shaw among its guests. Walking through its rooms today, visitors can sense how the space was designed to host serious conversations in a domestic setting.
The house sits in Hampstead, a part of London that is easy to explore on foot, with local shops, cafes, and the open green space of Hampstead Heath nearby. The surrounding streets are lined with late Victorian and Edwardian houses, so the area itself rewards a slow walk.
The name The Wabe comes from a single word in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, a nonsense poem where the word has no fixed meaning. Carroll himself described it as the grass plot around a sundial, but Garnett's choice of the name for a home suggests a playful attitude toward language that was common among educated Victorians.
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