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31 chapters
PREFACE.
PREFACE.
As illustrating the very common axiom that extremes meet, a preface at the beginning of a book is, as a matter of course, the last thing that is written. In the present instance, having stated my reasons for writing ‘Sweet Hampstead’ in the introductory chapter, a preface seems almost redundant. Moreover, I have an idea that prefaces as a rule are not popular reading, but literary custom being stronger than private opinion, I must revoke my heresy. It is very many years since the thought of writ
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INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
To the inhabitants of London and its suburbs a history of Hampstead and the Heath may seem wholly unnecessary. What London lad who has not fished in and skated on its ponds, played truant in its subrural fields and lanes, gone bird-nesting in its woods, or spent delightful, orthodox half-holidays upon the heath? As for the free brotherhood of the lanes and alleys before the plague of Board schools afflicted them, or the Board of Works stood sponsor for the preservation of the Heath, what hand’s
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CHAPTER I. HAMPSTEAD AND THE HEATH.
CHAPTER I. HAMPSTEAD AND THE HEATH.
Hampstead, situated in the Hundred of Oussulston and County of Middlesex, is separated from London by St. Pancras and Marylebone, and otherwise bounded by Finchley, Hendon, Willesden, and Paddington. In the account of the several districts into which the Registrar-General has divided London, Hampstead claims the greatest elevation, standing 400 feet above Trinity high-water mark, a circumstance that, in connection with its gravelly soil, accounts for its dry, salutary air. It contains in its par
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CHAPTER II. THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD.
CHAPTER II. THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD.
The oldest maps of London extant show two roads to Hampstead; Aggas’s (time of Elizabeth) has four. The most easterly of these roads ran out by Gray’s Inn Lane, past old St. Pancras and Battle Bridge, through Kentish Town and part of Holloway to Highgate, touching Caen Wood, and so by Bishop’s Wood and Wild Wood Corner to Hampstead. Later on a branch of this same Gray’s Inn or Battle Bridge Road ran off by St. Pancras a little to the west, into a country lane running up from Tottenham Court Road
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CHAPTER III. THE DESCENT OF THE MANOR.
CHAPTER III. THE DESCENT OF THE MANOR.
From the earliest times until after the Reformation we find Hampstead an appanage of the Church. At the dissolution of the Abbey and Convent of Westminster, Henry VIII. granted the Manor of Hampstead, combined with those of North Hall and Down Barnes, in part support to the newly-made bishopric of Westminster. In 1551, two years before the death of Edward VI., they were surrendered to the Crown, and in the same year granted to Sir Thomas Wroth as a mark of the young King’s favour. This gentleman
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CHAPTER IV. CHURCH ROW AND ST. JOHN’S CHURCH.
CHAPTER IV. CHURCH ROW AND ST. JOHN’S CHURCH.
The High Street, Hampstead, is a continuation of Rosslyn Street, as Rosslyn Street is of the Hampstead Road. In my earliest days the way to Church Row and the church—which, being the oldest part of the town, deserves the earliest notice—was through some narrow passages to the left of High Street, called Church Lane and Perrin’s Court, disagreeable purlieus now happily altered. Church Row was then the private and superior part of the old town of Hampstead, which, lying under the shadow of the chu
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CHAPTER V. FROGNAL AND WEST END.
CHAPTER V. FROGNAL AND WEST END.
Frognal claims to be considered the very heart of Hampstead, the site of its first settlement, the spot on which the ancient manor-house and the humble little chapel to St. Mary primitively arose, and around which gathered by degrees the wattle and dab cottages that succeeded the ruder huts of the villani and bordarii of the Conqueror’s time. The path through the churchyard leads straight to the entrance of a narrow lane, guarded in my time by a small toll-house and gate. This lane is partly mad
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CHAPTER VI. WEST END TO CHILD’S HILL AND THE WEST HEATH.
CHAPTER VI. WEST END TO CHILD’S HILL AND THE WEST HEATH.
Although lying wide of Hampstead proper, West End is an integral part of the parish of St. John, and the western boundary of the original demesne lands of the manor. It is accessible from the Heath by two or three charming field-paths, and when in the neighbourhood of Frognal Priory, at the period these lines were written, the first turning to the left led straight to it. In those days not even the blank walls and close-clipped garden hedges at the entrance could deprive West End Lane of the cha
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CHAPTER VII. HEATH STREET TO THE UPPER FLASK AND SPANIARDS.
CHAPTER VII. HEATH STREET TO THE UPPER FLASK AND SPANIARDS.
Heath Street [116] is long and straggling, with nothing remarkable in it but the florid-looking new fire-brigade office at its entrance on the left, in a line with what is called the Mount, [117] one of the several little hills on which Hampstead is built, and which has been cut through to form the roadway and street beneath it. Some good private houses and gardens crest the Mount, and some fine old elm-trees, for the growth of which Hampstead has always been remarkable, remain on the same side
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CHAPTER VIII. HOLLY-BUSH AND WINDMILL HILLS.
CHAPTER VIII. HOLLY-BUSH AND WINDMILL HILLS.
Leaving Heath Street upon the right (at the end of High Street), and Mount Vernon on the left, the ascent of Holly-bush Hill, in the years I am writing of, led through into an open space with a bit of the waste running in upon it, with three tree-sheltered and old-fashioned red-brick houses on the very brow of Windmill Hill. One of these, the centre one of the three—Bolton House—was for many years the home of Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, where Lady Davy often visited them to the very las
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CHAPTER IX. NORTH END.
CHAPTER IX. NORTH END.
When Leigh Hunt wrote of Hampstead that it ‘was a village revelling in varieties,’ he summarised in a sentence its chief characteristic and charm. Behind the High Street, to the right, there lies a labyrinth of lanes, passages, courts, roads, groves, and squares. The map of the place shows its complications, and the irresponsibility of the builders. Houses seem to have been run up without design or order; a so-called road ends in a cul-de-sac, a square is represented by a malformed triangle, the
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CHAPTER X. FINCHLEY ROAD, CHILD’S HILL, AND NEW END.
CHAPTER X. FINCHLEY ROAD, CHILD’S HILL, AND NEW END.
At the hand-post on Golder’s Green—a bit of the original waste in 1859—Hampstead parish ends in this direction. Here Finchley Road, running north and south, divides the road to Hendon from North End Road. The name of Hendon reminds me that John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet,’ in his curious poetical production ‘The Fearful Summer; or, London’s Calamitie, the Countrie’s Discourtesie, and both their Miserie,’ while including the inhabitants of Hampstead with the other country people around London as ‘be
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CHAPTER XI. THE VALE OF HEALTH.
CHAPTER XI. THE VALE OF HEALTH.
From Hampstead Heath Station a branch of the East Heath Road leads direct to this popular and well-known part of the Lower Heath, while innumerable pathlets traced by the feet of visitors impatient to reach the goal of their pilgrimage all trend in the same direction. The present name of the Vale dates back to the period of the wells fashion, a period when sheltered places were believed to be more conducive to health than more open ones, especially for invalids. When the fame of Dr. Gibbon’s ‘Fo
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CHAPTER XII. CAEN WOOD.
CHAPTER XII. CAEN WOOD.
Caen Wood (or Ken Wood, as Lord Mansfield always spelt it), lying between the villages of Hampstead and Highgate, belongs to neither, but is situated in the parish of St. Pancras, which adjoins Hampstead Heath at the upper corner of Lord Mansfield’s demesne. Part of Caen Wood comes out upon the Heath, from which it has been emparked, and the whole is so nearly connected by neighbourhood and association with the local history of Hampstead, that in writing of the one it is impossible to ignore the
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CHAPTER XIII. THE GEOLOGY OF THE HEATH.
CHAPTER XIII. THE GEOLOGY OF THE HEATH.
The appearance of the Upper Heath, as that portion of it beyond Jack Straw’s Castle to the north-west is called, shows that the purchase of it for the sake of its preservation was not a day too soon, while as far as preserving the primitive beauty of the Heath, it was years too late. The surface, originally flush with the paddock near the North End Hill, has been delved by sand and gravel diggers into a series of pits and hollows, with corresponding mounds and hillocks. At one period (1811), owi
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CHAPTER XIV. THE PONDS AND WATER-WORKS.
CHAPTER XIV. THE PONDS AND WATER-WORKS.
In the chain of ponds which make so charming a feature between Highgate and Caen Wood, or in some of them at least, we have, according to the brothers Storer, [226] all that remains visible of the river Fleet, which originally formed them. The others are as old as the time of Henry VIII., and owe their existence to the necessities of the citizens of London for a better water-supply. The ancient springs, which previous to 1544 abundantly supplied the city, had about that time ‘diminished and abat
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CHAPTER XV. THE WELL WALK—THE EARLY PERIOD.
CHAPTER XV. THE WELL WALK—THE EARLY PERIOD.
Every period has produced some specific or other for ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,’ and during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the early years of the present, mineral waters were the fashionable panacea. From traditional times the curative properties of the spring in Well Walk had been known to the inhabitants of Hampstead and the neighbourhood. It oozed out of the green hillside to the east of the village into a self-made pool, whose surface was covered with
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CHAPTER XVI. THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD.
CHAPTER XVI. THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD.
Although it could not be said that the Wells were ever actually closed till subsequent to 1809, the visits of the head-borough and a posse of constables at unexpected hours had so disarranged the system of play in Well Walk that before 1725 the gaming-tables, and with them the raffling-shops, had disappeared. Defoe, in an early edition of his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us, in describing the Hampstead Wells, that besides the Long Room , where the gentry meet to amuse themselves and play at ca
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CHAPTER XVII. THE MODERN WELL WALK.
CHAPTER XVII. THE MODERN WELL WALK.
At the present day all that remains of the original Well Walk are the great elms on the bank above the bench at the Heath end of it, with two houses so facially improved that I do not recognise them, and the celebrated Long Room (Weatherall Place), converted to a private house about a hundred years ago. Gainsborough Mansions on one side of the way, and Gainsborough Gardens on the other, which memorise the name of the donor of the Wells, and the 6 acres of waste land lying about it, afford a stri
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CHAPTER XVIII. HAMPSTEAD LATER ON.
CHAPTER XVIII. HAMPSTEAD LATER ON.
In later years, as soon as May fretted the Kilburn meadows with cowslips, and the birds began to warble the livelong day and half the night in the woods and the thickets and groves upon the Heath, sensitive persons ‘in populous city pent’ found themselves irresistibly drawn to one or other of the many paths crossing the Marylebone fields, or that ran up from the west, by Lisson Grove, then a tree-shaded, pleasant neighbourhood of good houses, and so by Kilburn meadows to the Heath and Hampstead,
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CHAPTER XIX. A RETROSPECT.
CHAPTER XIX. A RETROSPECT.
As I approach the end of my pleasant task, the contrast between the ‘Sweet Hampstead’ of Constable’s (and even of my own) time with the present, makes itself felt with a sense of loss and change that is almost pathetic, so many of its lovely accessories are now missing. It is like contrasting the simplicity and grace of childhood with the conventional man or woman it has subsequently developed. Instead of rejoicing in its enlargement, and the importance of the townlike outgrowths on its skirts,
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CHAPTER XX. THE SUB-MANOR OF BELSIZE.
CHAPTER XX. THE SUB-MANOR OF BELSIZE.
The sub-manor of Belsize, lying on the south side of the parish of Hampstead, was given to the Abbot and Convent of Westminster by Sir Roger le Brabazon in 1317, upon condition that they should provide a priest to say a daily Mass in their church for the souls of Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, Blanch, his wife, the said Sir Roger, and all the faithful departed this life. Whether, at the dissolution of the abbey, it passed through the hands of the Bishop of Westminster is not known. At present it is
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CHAPTER XXI. THE HAMLET OF KILBURN.
CHAPTER XXI. THE HAMLET OF KILBURN.
As only one side of this hamlet is in Hampstead parish, there is not much to be said of it here. It was rapidly increasing when Park wrote his description of it; but that was nothing to the proportion of its increase during the last ten years, when it has grown to the dimensions of a town. Its name comes from two Saxon words, kele , cold, and bourn , a rivulet. By this cool stream, [298] which rose on the southern slope of Hampstead, hard by the forest-side, one Godwyn, in the time of Henry I.,
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HEATH HOUSE.
HEATH HOUSE.
It would be doing injustice to a family long known and honoured in this neighbourhood to bid farewell to Hampstead and the Heath, without some special notice of Heath House, the present residence of Lord Glenesk, but in 1790 the home of Samuel Hoare, Esq. It is a large, square, heavy-looking Georgian house of brown brick, surrounded by trees and shrubs, close to the Broad Walk on one side, and divided by a narrow roadway from Jack Straw’s Castle on the other. It stands upon the highest ridge of
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WENTWORTH PLACE, JOHN STREET.
WENTWORTH PLACE, JOHN STREET.
The now frequented thoroughfare of John Street has been long in coming into its inheritance—namely, the interest it derives from the fact that, after the death of his brother, John Keats resided here for nearly twelve months, and the last month of his life in England was spent here. Wentworth Place lies on the right side of the road going from St. John’s Chapel (on Downshire Hill) to the station. It consisted of two adjoining houses, one of them occupied by Charles Armitage Brown, the personal f
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VANE HOUSE.
VANE HOUSE.
It is generally believed that the fine old red-brick mansion to the left of the road as you ascend Rosslyn Hill, now the ‘Home of the Soldiers’ Daughters,’ is the veritable house which the unfortunate Sir Harry Vane built for himself on Hampstead Hill, a place in which he had hoped to pass the declining years of his life in peace. Of the original house only an old staircase leading to the garden exists, but the interior of the mansion has suffered so many changes, both before and after it became
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POND STREET.
POND STREET.
Pond Street —evidently the fashionable street in the eighteenth century for the reception of visitors of the class dignified as the ‘quality’—appears to have been in the early years of this, the Harley Street of Hampstead. Here resided Baron Dimsdale, in a house on the left side of the road going down, the physician who inoculated the Empress Catherine of Russia for small-pox. It will be remembered, to the Empress’s credit, that she requested him to leave the country as soon as possible after th
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A FRAGMENT OF THE FLORA OF HAMPSTEAD.
A FRAGMENT OF THE FLORA OF HAMPSTEAD.
In the reigns of Elizabeth and James the herbalists appear to have had Hampstead Heath very much to themselves. The laundresses must have had light feet, and children have been comparatively few. Otherwise they did not wander so far as Bishop’s Wood, or the old Target Bank, where the lilies of the valley grew so plentifully in Johnson’s time. Johnson was the pupil of Gerard, and the editor of a new edition of his master’s work, the ‘Great Herbal.’ To this lover of Nature, an apothecary by profes
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BENEFACTORS OF HAMPSTEAD AND THE CHARITIES.
BENEFACTORS OF HAMPSTEAD AND THE CHARITIES.
One of the earliest benefactors of Hampstead was Elizabeth, Dowager Viscountess Campden, widow of Sir Baptist Hicks, the donor of Hicks’s Hall to the county of Middlesex, and Lord of the Manor of Hampstead (whose town house, by the way, was Campden House, Kensington), ‘with whom, in all peace and contentment, she lived, his dear consort and wife, for the space of forty-five years.’ She bequeathed by will, dated February 14, 1643, the sum of £200 to trustees for the purchase of land of the clear
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THE FATE OF A REFORMER.
THE FATE OF A REFORMER.
I have had occasion to speak of Mr. Abrahams’ pamphlet [304] several times in the course of these pages, a publication that fell like a bomb in an unexpectant place, and aroused among the well-to-do inhabitants of Hampstead anything but gratitude. This gentleman, who had ‘a way,’ he tells us, ‘of looking into things for himself,’ having become a parishioner of St. John’s, proceeded to act as he had done when resident in St. Luke’s, London, where his scrutiny into parochial transactions had resul
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THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HEATH.
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HEATH.
As early as 1829 we find the freeholders and copyholders of the Manor of Hampstead meeting at the Assembly Rooms on Holly-bush Hill, to discuss the best means to prevent further damage being done to the Heath, by destruction of the herbage, and digging sand and gravel thereon, as well as to inaugurate a subscription to try by law the right of the Lord of the Manor to so disturb and destroy it, or to build on or enclose any part of it. Even prior to this date there seems to have subsisted an ill-
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