Cloth Hill

Cloth Hill at 6 the Mount is a 17th-century house in Hampstead in north London. It was built c.1694 as two houses but subsequently combined as a single residence. The house is believed to be the second-oldest house in Hampstead after Fenton House. It was the residence of Quaker cloth merchant William Beech shortly after its completion. Voltaire visited Andrew Pitt, Beech's son-in-law at the house in 1728. It was separated again in 1801. In the late 19th-century half of the house was occupied by The Mount School with the other half the residence of the publisher Edward Bell. The entrance gate of Cloth Hill is depicted in Ford Madox Brown's 1865 painting Work. A sign in the painting shows the house for sale as a "genteel family residence". The centre block of the house dates from 1694 with the northern wing dating from the early 17th-century. The 1998 London North edition of the Pevsner Architectural Guides describes it as a "fine mansion". It has been listed Grade II* on the National Heritage List for England since August 1950. In 1993 it was for sale for offers under £1 million. In 2025 it was for sale for £18 million with the estate agencies Savills and Marcus Parfitt. Writing in Country Life, Carla Passino noted that the price of the property had risen more than nine times higher than would have been ordinarily expected with inflation. The house had only three owners in the 140 years preceding 2025.