Hampstead Heath Family Photography | At home session in Belsize Park
On a lovely sunny but cold Saturday morning back in March, I took the train to London Victoria to do a Slice Of Life session with Hamish and his family in Belsize Park. Taking the tube to North London brought back so many memories of my first years in London, when I lived in a lovely flatshare in Holloway.
I loved living there, I was working in Camden at the time and used to walk to work and also spent a lot of time in Angel, where my husband lived at that time. We later also shared a tiny flat in Islington together (and when I say ‘tiny’ I mean so small that our bedroom didn’t even have a door as it was so close to the bathroom that there was simply not enough space).
Whilst I was on that tube, I began to think about a time when a friend from the Netherlands had visited me. It was Summer and I remember it being really hot. We wanted to go for a picnic and a stroll in the park so we took a bus to Hampstead Heath.
We had a great time, but were getting tired and hot and wanted to get back home (to eat some nachos). So we took our phones out to check how to find our way back to Holloway, but my battery had died and she didn’t have any reception.
How do you get out of Hampstead Heath if you don’t have help from your phone? It proved to be quite a challenge! We had no clue where we were (my sense of direction basically doesn’t exist) and it took us several hours to find our way back home. I mean, how big is this park?!
Thinking about it made me laugh out loud and before I knew it I was already at my tube stop. From there it was only a short walk to the family’s lovely house. Hamish only needed a couple of minutes to get used to me and we started our photo shoot playing with the train set in the living room followed by some reading.
During the second half of the photo session we headed towards the local playground which is always a great spot for unposed natural family photography. I loved every minute of this shoot and, on the train back to Brighton, I couldn’t help but smiling again, thinking of my North London adventures now more than 10 years ago!
If you live in Belsize Park, Archway, Camden, Angel, Finsbury Park, or anywhere else in North London and you would like to book a family photo shoot with a documentary approach to family photography then I would love to hear from you!