The Spanish Inn, near Hampstead Heath.

This Elizabethan inn was built in 1585 as a tollgate inn on the border of the Finchley, and it may have been used in plague time by the Spanish Ambassador and had later Spanish owners. The highwayman Dick Turpin is thought to have used the Inn to spy on traffic (compare the Gadshill gang in Henry IV, Part 1). It was visited by Hogarth, Reynolds and Constable, as well as such literary figures as Byron, Shelley, William Blake, Robert Louis Stevenson, - and Dickens, who mentions it in Pickwick Papers, as does Bram Stoker in Dracula. Perhaps Keats wrote his Ode to a Nightingale in the large garden (see next image): the inn stands on the edge of Hampstead Heath, near the house where Keats lived (see previous image). Shakespeare stayed at similar inns on his frequent journeys between Stratford and London, such as the Crown Inn at Oxford(whose brilliant hostess, Mrs. Davenant, is a candidate for the role of the Dark Lady in the Sonnets; her son, Sir William Davenant, was Shakespeare's godson, and even claimed to be his natural son). Courtesy of the Yorck Project, under GNU Free Document License.