Flask Walk
Flask Walk, London NW3
Hampstead High Street may have been taken over by the chains, but Flask Walk, a pedestrian alleyway just off the street, keeps a quirkier, more independent identity. Here you’ll find a strip of small shops including Keith Fawkes’ old established secondhand bookshop, JM Pennifeather’s pen shop, Judy Green’s upmarket garden shop, a designer secondhand/samples clothes store called Exclusivo, Zana fashion (where Kate Moss has apparently shopped), Joule contemporary jewellers, an ice cream parlour, and a stratospherically pricey shop devoted to Mystical Fairies. These aren’t perhaps the essentials of life but they do have a bit of character. As, of course, does the street’s largely unreconstructed Victorian boozer, the Flask pub.