BEATING THE BOUNDS 149
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. CLOCK COURT, HAMPTON COURT PALACE _frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. THE GREAT AVENUE, HAMPTON COURT 4
3. ST. PAUL’S FROM HAMPSTEAD 20
4. CHURCH ROW, HAMPSTEAD 24
5. THE SPANIARDS ROAD, HAMPSTEAD 28
6. HIGHGATE 36
7. HIGHGATE FROM PARLIAMENT HILL FIELDS 40
8. EDMONTON CHURCH 60
9. ENFIELD 64
10. HENDON 80
11. RUINED CHURCH AT STANMORE 88
12. HARROW 96
13. PINNER 104
14. OLD MANOR HOUSE, NEAR ICKENHAM 112
15. UXBRIDGE 116
16. SYON HOUSE, BRENTFORD: GARDEN FRONT 120
17. HIGH STREET, TWICKENHAM 128
18. THE DIANA FOUNTAIN, BUSHEY PARK 132
19. HAMPTON COURT PALACE: SOUTH FRONT 136
20. KEW BRIDGE FROM BRENTFORD 148
_Sketch-map of the county at end of volume._
MIDDLESEX
I
LONDON’S COUNTY
Fresh from having sounded Surrey’s praise, I find myself called on to
put a new barrel into my organ for the tune of Middlesex. At once comes
to mind a scene in a petty sessions court, where it was a certain
lawyer’s business to tear to rags the character of a witness on the
opposite side, as he did with professional gusto. But when the next case
came on, it was the turn of this damaged witness to stand in the dock;
then the lawyer himself led the laugh raised by his announcement: “I
appear for the prisoner, your worships!” Clients must reckon with such
awkward chances where a small knot of country solicitors divide the
alternation of blowing hot and cold on the course of justice.
At the time I thought this particular client unfairly used; but it
occurs to me that I am now in much the same plight as was his turncoat
champion. In that volume on Surrey I had not foreseen how I was to hold
a brief for Middlesex, with which I then made some odious comparisons,
and called Cobbett to witness, in his downright way, against the latter
county as “all ugly.” Now, we hack-writers, a poor but more or less
honest tribe, do not pump up sweet or bitter so easily as those
fountains of legal eloquence that at the Old Bailey or elsewhere stand
ready to spout high moral indignation, touching emotion, and
jury-bamboozling argumentation for whichever party may be first to put a
fee in their slot. The literary conscience being less elastic, I have
nothing for it but to acknowledge that, in the heat of advocacy for
Surrey, I was led into speaking with too little respect of its neighbour
across the Thames. As for my witness, counsel on the other side might
easily show that he had an itch for venting random abuse, that on
occasion he vilipended the fairest parts of his beloved Surrey, and that
he lived in the flattest and tamest corner of the slandered county. As
for myself, casting off the metaphor of wig and gown, I humbly and
heartily cry _peccavi_, I recant my error, and in the following sheets
will stand to do ample penance for having said any word that might bring
a blush of resentment to the cheek of Middlesex. What I may have hinted
to its disparagement was spoken in haste, without malice, and I trust
fully to explain it away after the example of that courtly German tutor
who, on his princeling pupil translating _albus_ as “black,” remarked,
“Quite so, your Transparency--black, but not indeed absolutely black;
rather verging on grey--one might say light grey, or even white, if his
Serene Highness will graciously allow.”
In sober earnestness, as English counties go, there is little need of
apology for Middlesex, which, if not ranking as a show county, and
certainly not so charming, on the whole, as Surrey, has some bits hard
to match. It may be truly said of this green-robed damsel that “when she
is good she is very, very good,” and that when not so good, she is
seldom “horrid.” The worst of it is flats fit for market-gardens and
football fields, of which the largest stretch extends on the west side
of London. Yet here, too, one is seldom out of sight of some pleasant
rise, some oasis of park wood, some straggling line of hedgerow timber;
and even that most dreary edge of the county, the marshlands of the Lea,
is overlooked by the heights of Clapton and Enfield. The general
character is a gently undulating surface, swelling more boldly in the
heights north of London, and in the ridge above Stanmore, where, at its
junction with Hertfordshire, Middlesex reaches a highest point of about
500 feet. The most marked features are those two lines of high ground,
the latter walling in the north side and curving round on the
north-west, then between them the basin of the Brent, in which stand up
isolated hills like that of Harrow.
So far as size goes, Middlesex has little to boast of, being the
smallest but one of English counties, not half so big as Surrey. A
winter day’s stroll would bring us through its greatest length, and at
one point it might be stepped across in a couple of hours. On the other
hand, its smaller area has a considerably larger population than
Surrey’s, even excluding its bigger half of the Metropolitan area. But
more thickly packed as it is with suburbs and villages, farms and
factories, Middlesex is not so well off as Surrey for good old
independent towns, and for capital has to content itself with the shabby
squalor of Brentford. London seems to have cast its shadow on this side
so as to stunt the growth of puny boroughs. Another contrast between the
two counties is in shape, Surrey being, on the whole, more compactly
contained than its sprawling neighbour. But the most striking difference
is that of soil, Surrey marked off in zones of clay, chalk, and sand,
that give its special ornament of dimpled variety, while Middlesex shows
mainly a smug face of London clay, only here and there spotted by sandy
pimples, gravelly scabs, rare warts of rock, or more frequent freckles
of brick earth, in most parts interlarded with the patches and cosmetics
applied by elaborate culture.
This much-enamelled nymph wears, perhaps, a too monotonous dress of
green, hay and market vegetables being now the chief crops of Middlesex,
though time was when its “Pure Vale” had a name for the best wheat in
England to make flour for the royal larder. Yet the supply of London
Haymarkets and Covent Gardens has not blighted its most common beauty of
“hedgerow elms on hillocks green.” It can be pronounced, indeed, a very
well-wooded county, studded with parks and gardens, and richly laced
with avenues,
[Illustration: THE GREAT AVENUE, HAMPTON COURT]
looking like fragments of that great Middlesex forest which once covered
all its heights, when the valleys were marshy wildernesses, and the most
eligible residential quarters such island camps and clearings as have
left their traces on Ludgate Hill and Brockley Hill at either end. For a
good time back the advantages of ornamental planting have been liberally
bestowed on a shire where Defoe could reckon not less than three
thousand houses “which in other Places would pass for Palaces, and most
if not all the Possessors whereof keep Coaches,” not to speak of myriads
of gigmanity.
One glory may be claimed without question by London’s chief
county--which, of course, is to be distinguished from the County of
London--that English literature must be full of scenes and images drawn
from fields that lay within a walk of Grub Street. Till the last
generation or two we find our poets more at home on the north side of
the Thames, not a few of them, indeed, born within the sound of Bow
Bells. Milton, Pope, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, Keats, Byron,
Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lamb--such are the shades that at once come to
mind as haunting this countryside. Even within the present bounds of
London they found their whispering groves, verdant lawns, and blossoming
brakes, long buried beneath bricks and mortar, where such names as
Maiden Lane, Islington Green, Highbury Barn, or Willow Walk are like the
tombstones of beauty that lives to be a joy for ever in immortal verse.
Population and industry have wrinkled and scarred the natural features
of a county _nimium vicina Cremonæ_. London itself has spread leagues to
the north since the day when one of Miss Burney’s cits used “to take a
walk in Tottenham Court Road as far as the Tabernacle or thereabouts,
and snuff in a little fresh country air.” Nearly a century earlier
“Evelyn’s Diary” sighed over two new streets behind Piccadilly--“to such
a mad intemperance was the age come of building about a city by far too
disproportionate already to the nation.” Half a century later Mary Lamb
could speak of Dalston as “quite countrified,” where her brother, in his
half-serious way, boasted of walks to such “romantic” scenes as Hackney
and Tottenham. When, beyond the northern heights, a wayfarer of our
generation thinks to have left the smoky Babylon behind him, he finds it
breaking out again in whole towns of suburban homes, through which its
trams run to the very edge of the county; for in these days of steam and
electricity London grows and multiplies not only by accretion, but
fissiparously, throwing out swarms to settle upon blooming trees and
flowery meads, whence, indeed, it is the drones that daily flit back to
make honey in the original hive, so that we had better drop this
metaphor as a stinging one.
Has any Lubbock or Maeterlinck ever had an opportunity of watching a new
crop of London homes as it rises on the ground? Here is a goodly field
that once fattened corn or turnips, but for long has been laid out in
grass, making part of a dairy farm, a horse paddock, a golf course, or
area for one of those open conical towers often standing up in the
environs of our Babylon, which might be taken for Chaldean observatories
or wickerwork idols, to be filled with hecatombs of captive victims, but
the initiated recognise them as shooting-stands for the practice of
Cockney sportsmen. Perhaps the ground is let to a cricket or football
club, and that is more like to be a sign of the doom close at hand.
These youthful athletes hold their playgrounds on more precarious tenure
than the richer amateurs of golf; then a season comes when the gates are
left open, the fences fall in gaps, the weather-stained notices to
trespassers stand in idle decay, and the local urchinry press in to
sport at will, no longer snatching a fearful joy. For weeks, months, the
field lies waste, uncared for, sodden and sorry, trampled to flaws of
bareness, with patches of rank weeds and unsavoury rubbish-heaps--a
no-man’s-land, as might seem, that in truth is signed, sealed, and
delivered to the speculative builder. Yet here still peep out daisies
and buttercups, “the little children’s dower”; and here hawthorn and
hemlock bloom bravely on the ragged hedge or choked ditch, along which
wander youth and maid, for whom nature’s poorest charms are made
glorious by the sunshine of life’s May-days, and their feet tread here
as lightly as on the heath of Hampstead or the rich lawns of Hampton,
while still they can whisper that old story, “Old and yet ever new, and
simple and beautiful always.”
But too soon wooers and playfellows are exorcised by short pipes and
horny hands digging trenches, laying foundations, piling bricks and
mixing mortar. Already the open field may be marked out in invisible
streets, labelled with titles for which the builders have much ado to
draw on their invention, one erecting a chain of castles in the air,
another completing a series of abbeys, a third affecting historic
surnames, while a fourth may invoke famous writers or heroes of the
hour, and it saves trouble when some local landmark can be pressed into
service as godfather. Soon, over broken waves of grass, emerge the brick
reefs wrought by trades-union zoophytes. The rows of houses rise like an
exhalation, story on story. Lath and plaster, jousts and beams, stucco,
slates take their place as if by _hey presto!_ and where you walked on a
spring evening along some puddled footpath, or some trickling rill, in
the height of summer you must pick your steps on incomplete pavements of
Brook Terrace or Oak Avenue, again coming upon that young couple who,
earlier in the season, were all eyes for one another, but now are fain
to bend their united looks upon the high-pitched proclamations of
house-agents and the fluttering hopes of “orders to view.”
Almost as soon as run up the houses may be taken. Builders’ carts are
succeeded by furniture-vans; bare window after window blossoms out with
blinds, flower-pots, faces watching new neighbours coming in turn to
their ordeal of broken crockery, broken promises of tradesmen, struggles
with furniture that must be forced to fit, clashing of tempers and
tastes that ought to harmonize, ends that should be made to meet. And
as these young households settle down, so does the colony clear up its
litter. Now the dovetailed dwellings may be numbered, that at first,
perhaps, stood precariously independent as “Honeymoon Cottage” or what
not, six-roomed “Chatsworths,” two-storied “Abbotsfords,” veritable “De
Vere Mansions,” housing a dozen Smiths and Browns. Gaps are filled,
rough edges are rounded off, roadways are beaten smooth; one by one are
barred the footpath short cuts, on which smart or smug husbands and
brothers, with some salt of youthful sport in them, made hasty morning
spurts to the nearest station. Their evening return is guided by lines
of gaslights to the welcoming door, at which will be handed in so many
circulars, and among them, too soon, demand-notes for rates and taxes.
In the intervening hours, the rawly-paved streets are somewhat silent,
but for cheery whistling of butchers’ and bakers’ boys, here and there
echoed by the tinkling of pianos on the hire system, now and then
drowned by the postman’s knock or the rattling of commercial Jehus, who
by-and-by have to look out for perambulators. And ah! at times there
comes a gloomier van to doors that must open for grief as well as for
joy; then poor comfort it is to aching hearts if their dear ones have
not so far to travel to that freshly laid-out cemetery that makes such a
weary journey from the inner parts of London, where not even the dead
may rest. But if one go-cart be turned into a household tombstone,
neighbour mothers are happier in setting on their legs a brood of
future citizens, who will grow up to know nothing of this suburb but as
a great toy-box of bricks and mortar.
For New Kensington, East Hampstead, or whatever title it assumes, has
pushed out apace till its spreading lava-flow half hides the scattered
hamlets or groups of tumble-down cottages which may thus be preserved
for a time like flies in amber. For example, look into the back roads of
Tottenham, or beside the church of Walham Green, where to-day a
Juggernaut procession of motor-cars would soon crush the
eighteenth-century poet who still berhymed this “green” as truly rural.
Your new district may well have an old church to make its moral centre,
perhaps in some out-of-the-way corner of the parish; then spick and span
fanes, in each shade of Anglicanism, bring their services within easy
reach of any householder; and chapels of various denominations follow
suit, from tin little Bethels to imitation Gothic towers and Vandal
spires. Even before the perambulators peeped out on fine days, doctors’
lamps and door-plates began to shine at corners not taken up by the
flare of a public-house. Babels of school buildings rise above private
roofs. Galaxies of shops break out along the main thoroughfares,
promoted from “Lanes” to “High Roads” or “Broadways”; and ere their
fronts have grown dingy, their windows glow on red and green omnibuses
plying to some Crown or Spotted Dog, whereat, before it took the style
of a hotel, the rustic borderer leisurely drank his beer and opened his
ears to strange tales of what went on in London, whose lights, if they
have not lured him into its tempting glare, now stretch out to cheer his
secluded home. The slow buses are shoved aside by tram-lines and motors,
cause as well as effect of fresh growth. Humbly neighboured mansions and
well-fenced parks are turned into public playgrounds for the young urban
district, that soon develops an obscure but noisy school of local
politics, and heaps up a debt as recklessly as any of your rich
boroughs.
Thus, in the short lifetime of a generation, some square mile or two of
fields and hedgerows has been turned into a permanent camp for one of
London’s legions. By this time our loving couple that were among its
oldest inhabitants may no longer appear in the local directory. Have
they prospered in the world, we must look for them in its Bayswaters or
Bromptons. Have they failed, let us pity their hunt through some newer
and cheaper suburb for a jerry-built roof over rheumatic bones.
Many at seventeen their fortunes seek,
But at three score it is too late a week!
This portentous growth is indeed past praying for. “Every wind that
blows from north or south, east or west, from India, China, America, or
Australia, feeds it; every wheel that turns at home, every colonist who
digs or watches his flocks at the antipodes, intensifies it. The marrow
of London is in the backbone of the world; its blood is the blood of
myriad kindred populations; its million hands seize upon the fruits,
the corn, the gold, the oil, and wine of every zone.” Its choice
suburbs, indeed, may be considered as stretching out to the Riviera, the
Swiss Lakes, or the Bohemian Forest. But, as yet, the county in which
the greatest of modern cities chiefly lies has a remnant of rustic
charms it cannot be too coy of displaying to the cosmopolitan multitude
pent up within its spreading bounds. Nor are these busy throngs blind to
the charms of Nature. As willingly as the yokel seeks its streets paved
with gold and gleaming with lights, so the smoked Londoner loves to wash
his eyes in greenery, or to bask in the “good gigantic smile of the old
brown earth,” if only on a holiday stroll to Hackney Downs or Wormwood
Scrubs.
Then thy spruce citizen, wash’d artisan,
And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air:
Thy coach of hackney, whisky, one-horse chair,
And humblest gig through sundry suburbs whirl,
To Hampstead, Brentford, Harrow make repair;
Till the tired jade the wheel forgets to hurl,
Provoking envious gibe from each pedestrian churl.
Some o’er thy Thamis row the ribbon’d fair,
Others along the safer turnpike fly;
Some Richmond Hill ascend, some scud to Ware,
And many to the steep of Highgate hie.
To leave his beehive behind him, the townsman of this age has to go
further afield; further and faster he does go by his trains, trams, and
other machines such as those foreseen by Wordsworth in a spirit of
prophesy, on which Byron’s “spruce citizen” and “snug apprentice” can
now
Glance along
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
And they were butterflies to wheel about
Long as the summer lasted.
Or those foretold by an earlier poet:
The filthy beasts that never chew the cud
Still grunt and squeak and sing their troublous song,
And oft they plunge themselves the mire among;
But ay the ruthless driver goads them on,
And ay of barking dogs the bitter throng
Makes them renew their unmelodious moan.
Yet it is doubtful if dusty cyclist or goggled motorist see as much of
the country as their slow-going grandfathers, and that not only because
there is less of open country to see. In their haste to get away from
the streets they might as well travel on the Underground Railway. These
speedy wayfarers--“machines themselves, and governed by a clock”--go in
the traces of a road, blinkered by its rows of suburban houses, and
ready to drop for fatigue when taken out of the shafts of pace-making
and record-breaking. Nay, I could name one philosopher of note who on
Sundays became peripatetic, but never thought of leaving his hard-paved
rounds till I opened his eyes by turning him on to grass for a dozen
miles, by ways undreamt of in his philosophy.
Among authors, only popular novelists or journalists can afford to keep
gigs, not to speak of motor-cars and the like, so one need not make a
virtue of necessity. But no one should presume to write a book about
Middlesex without having tramped all over its hills and dales on the
green lanes and winding field-paths, too many of which have been
obliterated, but many are guarded more carefully than ever now that the
sons of Mammon or of Nimrod would fain enclose them against the like of
me. In taking these quiet byways between bustling highroads, I cannot
help observing how few persons one meets, and these few--if not
whispering lovers, for whom their primrose path cannot be too
lonely--are apt to be men of my own time of life rather than our
juniors, who, when the hoardings and the gate-money are not too high,
may be seen packed into fields for their beloved sports, some score of
them playing, perhaps, while some hundreds or thousands take the
exercise of noisily looking on.
They may call me an old fogey, these spry youngsters who follow so
keenly their elaborate pastimes, but I laugh in my beard and chuckle to
think how in its day our generation was more active, though it made less
fuss about its amusements. Schoolboys of that day did not need to be
harnessed and driven to their games, undertaken with spontaneous mirth
rather than with solemn zeal. We never wasted a holiday in applauding
the feats of professional champions, and our wholesome spring, surely,
had a better chance of a lusty winter. I sometimes go out a country
ramble with a contemporary who has sons brought up at schools that make
a religion of athletics; then we have to leave his young hopefuls
behind, lest they should be a clog to our gouty feet. I never--more’s
the pity--can get any son of mine to encounter the stiles and the
clay-bottoms of Middlesex. Such simple recreation is voted “too much
fag” by an age that has little relish for sport unless spiced with
excitement, costume, renown--that is, indeed, changing the very meaning
of sport from doing something oneself to seeing something done by the
idols of the gate and the gallery.
A popular writer has braved his public to flout this craze for athletic
performances as distracting “muddied oafs” and “flannelled fools” from
the great game of war. I would more humbly put in a word of lament over
the decay of walking, when even the men of my time have too much gone
astray after golf, which is simply an intermittent walk, attended with
considerable expense, made in the unprofitable and unprofited society of
caddies, and spoiled at every turn by the anxiety of driving little
balls into ugly holes with instruments which a scientific observer has
pronounced “singularly ill adapted for that purpose.” As for the girls
who stretch their limbs at this game, as at hockey or tennis, they may
be not so ill employed, since walking over Middlesex fields seems
contra-indicated by their boots and other impediments.
The right way to see and love Middlesex is at the jog-trot pace of
Shanks’ mare, breaking no wind and no records. In my guide, _Around
London_, I have traced many paths which are also pointed out to willing
eyes in other booklets of the kind. The present volume’s aim is to take
a more general and sweeping view of this county; yet I hope, as we
trudge along together, to give the reader many hints as to where and
how he may explore its often hidden charms. As for matters of history,
statistics, geology, and so forth, I refer him to the tomes in which I
should have to look for such information, only advising him that a
certain encyclopædia must not be trusted in its flattering of Middlesex
soil as “mainly gravelly.” Let him not go by that authority when
choosing his boots for a tramp here. Nor should they be seven-leagued
boots, as thus, in every direction, their first stride would take him
over the border of a neighbour shire. On one side, indeed, less than
four miles beyond the limits of a London borough, he can shake off the
dust of this county in Herts; on another, he has only to cross the Lea
to be in Essex before he seems to have got clear of London streets; on a
third, any bridge of the Thames will take him into Surrey, from which,
when all is said and seen, he may be in no haste to get back into
Middlesex.
II
HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE
The Switzerland of Middlesex is a name that has been fondly given to
those heights closing the vista up northward openings from Oxford
Street. Hampstead ranks as a London borough, and so should stand out of
the scope of our survey. But we cannot pass by the cream of the county’s
scenery, even though it has been half spoiled to make the choicest of
suburbs, a crowd of homes for the classes, and a holiday resort for the
masses, with suburblets and dependencies of its own in once outlying
hamlets like South Hill, North End, Child’s Hill, Belsize, and so on,
not to speak of adjoining districts that cling to its skirts by such
usurped titles as South Hampstead and West Hampstead.
Middlesex has other hills as high and bold as Hampstead, which owes its
eminent amenity to a topping of Bagshot sand, here rarer than in Surrey,
giving a dry and broken surface, natural nursery for heath and
copsewood. Heedless digging out of sand and gravel has but increased the
picturesque irregularity; and even the enclosures filched from the
common in former days add a charm of contrast, where the richer
greenery of private groves or avenues masses itself above the scarred
mounds and hollows, so wildly overgrown, so deviously threaded by
embowered tracks among thorny tangles, bosky knolls, thickets of bracken
and broom. It takes a poet to describe the manifold aspects of this
half-tamed wilderness:
Thine ever-shifting looks surprise:
Streets, hills, and dells, trees overhead now seen,
Now down below, with smoking roofs between--
A village revelling in varieties.
Then northward, what a range, with heath and pond,
Nature’s own ground; woods that let mansions through,
And cottaged vales, with billowy fields beyond,
And clump of darkening pines and prospects blue.
The “village” itself, grown to a borough of more than eighty thousand
people, may well be said to “revel in varieties,” all the more now that
its smart, newer streets make a frame for the intricate ascents on which
stately mansions, snug villas, and tumbledown cottages stand huddled
together; and trim suburban roads are still here and there lined with
the remains of park-like avenues. Hampstead is much changed in our time,
but, more conscientiously than most suburbs, it clings to fragments of
the past, unwilling to destroy scenes and buildings whose embalmed
memories go to keep up its rents.
This favourite purlieu of London has larger books than mine devoted to
its history. Through the mists of the past is dimly seen a _homestead_
clearing in the great Middlesex forest, that became a manor of
Westminster Abbey and a hunting-ground of our kings; then, by-and-by, a
resort of Londoners when they could stroll out safely across the open
fields of St. Pancras and Marylebone. At the time of the Plague it made
a camp of refuge, as it had done from a great flood of the Thames in the
previous century, and would do again when, on its wooded heights,
homeless families looked back to the glare of the Great Fire, which they
took for a prelude of the Judgment Day. The Middlesex elections were at
one time held on the Heath, serving also for a racecourse and
fair-ground. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Epsom and
Tunbridge Spas set the fashion, the chalybeate well at Hampstead became
a resort, like other wells about London that had long enjoyed a name as
miraculous remedies. The Hampstead Spa, still commemorated in Well Walk,
soon came to be a scene of idle diversion and heady revels, more like to
kill than cure, about which the village of lodgings grew fast, as Defoe
notes, “even on the very steep of the Hill, where there’s no walking
Twenty yards together without Tugging up a Hill or straddling down a
Hill.” Several other pleasure-grounds sprang up in the vicinity, such as
the once-famed Belsize Gardens, the most noble that Pepys ever saw,
before the mansion was turned into a “folly-house,” precursor of
Ranelagh and Vauxhall. This suburban Vanity Fair advertised among its
attractions “twelve stout fellows completely armed to patrol between
Belsize and London”--a guard which had to be increased as robbers
swarmed like flies round the concourse of gamblers. The sign of the
“Flask” preserves the name of another resort in vogue for a time. Our
Bank Holiday Saturnalia seem a flicker of those more expensive
high-jinks that went out in a snuff of scandal. The Long Room of the
Wells is said to have been turned into a chapel, of better repute than
their Sion Chapel, which, like the Fleet, was once notorious for illicit
marriages. After ranking for a time as “one of the politest public
places in England,” in the latter part of the century Hampstead seems to
have had a quieter reputation, when the philanthropist Thomas Day
brought his wife here to be out of the world; and it figures as a
secluded spot in the _Fool of Quality_, that Sandford-and-Mertonish
romance so much admired by Charles Wesley and Charles Kingsley. Here
also are laid some of the scenes of _Clarissa Harlowe_, and of
_Evelina_.
By this time Hampstead was attracting famous residents as a retreat from
the smoke and din of London. It had borne a humble name for laundresses
from a time when they might have ducked Falstaff in its ponds. In the
age of wigs and waistcoats we have glimpses of Steele, Addison,
Goldsmith, Johnson, the Kit Cat Club, and, indeed, almost all the
literary notabilities, as occasional lodgers or visitors; then about a
century ago Hampstead drew together a galaxy of artists and poets, who
found inspiration in its lovely surroundings. A later inhabitant,
Coventry Patmore, tells us how Millfield Lane, leading round Caen
Wood
[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S FROM HAMPSTEAD]
to Highgate, used to be known as Poets’ Lane, so often was it trod by
sons of the Muses, whose publishers sometimes drove or rode to town from
more spacious dwellings than sheltered Keats and Leigh Hunt. Caen or Ken
Wood, which at one time belonged to the unpopular Lord Bute, reminds us
of a constellation of lawyers, when the great Lord Mansfield settled
here, and had for neighbour on the heath the eloquent Erskine; while
Rosslyn House, lower down, was the seat of Wedderburn, another judge
whose name is held in less honour--all three poor Scottish cadets who
grew fat on the English bench. In our generation, its rents and rates
are like to keep poets out of this paradise; but it is still well
stocked with successful Scotsmen, and is said to make a promised land
for the chosen people of the Old Dispensation, as Defoe says it did in
his own day.
Among the many authors once at home here was William Howitt, to whose
_Northern Heights of London_, or to books like Park’s _History_,
Baines’s _Records_, and Mrs. White’s _Sweet Hampstead_, I must refer my
reader for a long list of celebrities. It is half a century ago since
Howitt looked from his beloved heights, too truly prophesying how soon
the open view would be engulfed in “this monster development of burnt
clay, and buried for ever beneath its dingy piles! Look along the feet
of these yet green and smiling hills--east and west, far and wide comes
up, as it were, a giant army to desolate and trample them down. See that
front rank of the great house-army, far as the eye can reach before
you, and on either hand, coming on with a step ‘steady as time and
inexorable as death.’” The same writer records attempts of successive
Sovereigns to limit the growth of the capital, but no Canute could stay
the advance of its swelling population, sucked together from all ends of
the earth. Yet, since his day, something has been done here to stem the
tide that threatened to drown so much beauty. The Heath itself stands up
like an Ararat above the deluge of brick and mortar, rescued from
further encroachment and spoliation, protected by Act of Parliament,
even extended of late by reclamations or acquisitions of private
property thrown into the public demesne.
Our way to the top is now to be made easy by a tube railway. Hitherto
the ascent has been a true pilgrimage, the nature of the ground, as well
as the gentility of the place, not much encouraging public conveyances.
The titular Hampstead road, as we know, mounts from Camden Town, past
Chalk Farm, once a quiet spot notorious for duels, now a noisy railway
depot; up Haverstock Hill, where a street name recalls the abode of Sir
Richard Steele; then by Rosslyn Hill to the steep and irregular winding
of the High Street. Hampstead Heath Station lies off to the right, at
South End, the foot of the Lower Heath. Further to the other side,
through the Belsize district, is the Swiss Cottage Station of the
Metropolitan line. When this was a newly-made terminus, I lived on the
top of Hampstead Hill, and my way home was by a field-path, with a bad
name for garrotters, that is now Fitzjohn’s Avenue, the smartest and
most expensive street in North London, though architectural purists may
gnash their teeth over its eclectic amenities. Its young trees, now
beginning to give some shade to the seats along this broad avenue, lead
up to the Church quarter, where old buildings have mainly gone down
before new ones, but still Church Row shows a blotched face of mellow
comeliness from the days when Mrs. Barbauld kept a school here; and the
Soldiers’ Orphan Asylum to the right represents at least the site of
what was Bishop Butler’s home, and before him Sir Harry Vane’s.
Exploration on this side would reveal a bit of old Hampstead that may
take rank as a picturesque slum. On the other side, the slope below the
church is seamed by the devious roads of the Frognal quarter, in which
lived that lover of London and its suburbs, Sir Walter Besant. It is
well known how death cut short his preparation of a Metropolitan survey
on a huge scale. The materials he left behind him have been partly used
for a series of small volumes under the general title of _The
Fascination of London_; and in one of these, half devoted to
Hampstead,[A] we are told how the Frognal Priory that once flourished
here was a mere mock-antique folly of a middle-class Horace Walpole.
[A] _Hampstead and Marylebone_, by G. E. Mitton. Edited by Sir Walter
Besant. A. and C. Black.
Hampstead Church is more admirable for its situation than for its
structure, which dates from the eighteenth century, and shows the
peculiar feature of the chancel being at the west end. The pretty
churchyard has fine peeps of prospect and several notable graves. Here
is buried Sir James Mackintosh, the reformer so warmly praised by
Macaulay. Close to each other lie two old neighbours at Hampstead, Lucy
Aikin and Joanna Baillie, who share the fate of a literary fame brighter
for their own generation than for ours. In the church it was left to
American admirers to place a bust of John Keats, whose name has shone
far and wide since his obscure sojourn where he loved
To find with easy quest
A fragrant wild, with Nature’s beauty drest.
Incledon, the singer, is buried inside. Of quaint epitaphs there appears
only one, to Mr. John Hindley. Most of the monuments are of an elegant
type, answering to Hampstead’s later character. The tomb to be first
sought out, under the south-eastern wall of the church, is Constable’s,
painter of so many scenes from his “sweet Hampstead,” which has had as
strong attraction for artists as for poets. Collins, Romney, Linnell,
Blake, Clarkson Stanfield, were some of those familiar here. In the
extension of the burial-ground across the road, by the railing at the
lower end, lie the cremated ashes of Gerald du Maurier, the popular
Punch artist, who lived at New Grove House a little way above. Sir
Gilbert Scott was not the only distinguished architect who has made his
home near Hampstead Church.
[Illustration: CHURCH ROW, HAMPSTEAD]
But we shall never get to the top if we linger beside all such memorials
of renown, which may be sought out by the help of Miss Mitton’s book
above mentioned. Heath Street, mounting from Church Row, comes into the
backbone line of High Street. Hence the explorer may lose himself in the
labyrinth of steep roads and lanes winding upwards, to come out where
the Heath opens at about its highest point, recorded by a tablet, on a
house off the right of the main road, as being level with the top of St.
Paul’s. If one stray too far to the right, the spire of Christ Church
makes a beacon towards the Lower Heath, by the edge of which is the way
up from Hampstead Heath Station, passing, below this church, the tall
elms of the Well Walk, that was the centre of Spa gaieties. If one bear
rather to the left, that course should lead out on the Judges’ Walk, a
grandly-shaded terrace looking over the West Heath and the country
beyond. This gets its name from a tradition that, in the Plague year,
the law-courts were held at Hampstead _al fresco_, suitors from infected
and non-infected quarters keeping to opposite sides of the ridge running
on from the pond at the head of our main line of ascent.
The open plateau here, marked by a round pond and a flag-staff, may be
taken as a central spot from which to orient ourselves. The view,
weather permitting, is a noble one, the most prominent feature to the
right being the dome of St. Paul’s, and to the left the spire of
Harrow-on-the-Hill, rising over the Welsh Harp Water, with, perhaps, a
glimpse of Windsor Castle. Bounded more closely to the north by the
Barnet ridge, it is said by writers of a less smoky age to take in the
Laindon Hills of Essex eastwards, and in the other direction the spire
of Hanslop, a few miles from Northampton.
The ridge road onwards separates the Upper and the Lower Heath, the
former on the left the more wildly broken expanse, the latter sloping
more barely, with squashy patches, to the line of ponds, along which it
makes an open playground. Close at hand, in the hollow to the east, peep
up the chimneys of the Vale of Health, a curious gathering of
tightly-packed houses fringed by tea-gardens and dominated by a big
public-house, the whole looking as if it did not quite know what it
meant to make of itself. This colony must have lost the sanitary
reputation it had when Leigh Hunt lived here, visited by Keats, Shelley,
and other disciples of the “Cockney Poet” school. Beside it is the
highest of the chain of ponds separating Hampstead Heath from Highgate
Fields, going to fill that “river of wells” which once ran above ground
as the Fleet, so much of a river that an eighteenth-century picture in
the Guildhall shows barges riding upon it at Holborn; and so late as
Victorian days its upper bed could be traced beside the Fleet Road that
records it below Hampstead Heath Station. From this bank of clay, with
its sand cope breaking into springs, rise other streams that flow under
London, and come to light in the park waters of the West End, their
hidden course marked by such names as Kilburn, Westbourne, Tyburn, St.
Mary-le-Bourne, Brook Street, as by the crooked shape of Marylebone
Lane. The ponds, when first formed or improved, were actually used as a
water-supply, but are now kept as a reserve in case of fire, one of
them, like one at Highgate, serving for a bathing-place.
Advancing on the ridge road, we pass “Jack Straw’s Castle,” a famous old
tavern that holds its head high after catering for patrons like Dickens
and Macready. I bear in mind nearly forty years with what dignified pity
the head waiter handed back his tip of twopence to a country parson not
duly aware of this being no common public-house. Here, to the left, goes
off at an acute angle the Hendon Road, dividing the Upper Heath into its
west and north sections. Above the latter the ridge road runs straight
on to that other old hostelry, the “Spaniards,” in the garden of which
Mrs. Bardell was arrested while carousing with her friends on the
elusive profits of her action against Mr. Pickwick. A landmark at this
further end is the conspicuous group of Italian pines that have figured
on many a canvas, so as to be perhaps the best-known feature of
Hampstead scenery. On the right of the ridge road here the Lower Heath
has a park-like aspect, borne out by a large red mansion intruding
itself towards the edge of Caen Wood. But the most richly ragged part of
the common, sweetest in blossom-time and glorious in autumn, lies to the
other side.
To see the Upper Heath at its best one should descend upon it from
outside the buildings about “Jack Straw’s Castle,” making towards the
Leg of Mutton Pond at the western edge. Keeping round this edge to the
north, one presently comes to the grounds of Golder’s Hill, seat of Sir
Spencer Wells, and after his death saved from the builder to make a
public paradise, where, indeed, as often happens in such cases, the
mansion has proved to be rather a white elephant. Beyond this, among a
cluster of refreshment-houses, across the Hendon Road, their doyen is
the “Bull and Bush,” with its old-fashioned garden, traditional resort
of Addison, Garrick, Hogarth, Sterne, and other celebrities. Next is
reached the double hamlet of North End and Wildwood, a charmingly
secluded group of cottages and mansions, one of them North End House,
famed as the gloomy retreat of the great Lord Chatham. We might hence
gain the Hendon Road up a grand avenue of chestnuts faced by lime-trees,
which is not always discovered by wanderers on the Heath. But the
leisurely explorer is advised to hold on to the common beyond the
houses, and there turn left to a knoll commanding an expanse of green,
bordered by the Hendon heights beyond the Finchley Road. At this edge of
the Heath a scheme is on foot for planting a “Garden Suburb,” as
homœopathic remedy against any eruption of vulgar building.
Still keeping to the edge of the Heath, one comes up to its northern end
by that fragmentary avenue of storm-beaten pines near which Erskine
House stands beside the “Spaniards,” according to one story so named as
having been once the residence of a Spanish
[Illustration: THE SPANIARDS ROAD, HAMPSTEAD]
ambassador, while another explanation of the sign makes its origin like
that of a more widely famed _Keller_, whose landlord was an _Auerbach_
man. At the time of the Gordon Riots this inn was kept by a man who
seems to have passed for a Spaniard among his neighbours, of one of whom
he well earned grateful favour. When Lord Mansfield’s town-house had
been burned by the mob, a body of rioters swarmed out to attack Caen
Wood, but were cunningly delayed by this landlord with free supplies of
drink till soldiers could be brought up to protect the judge’s mansion.
Beside the road onwards now swells, to the right, a noble mass of timber
in the park of the Earls of Mansfield, who still possess Caen Wood,
while they have another most enviable home at Scone Palace on the Tay.
If ever this family were driven to mend their fortune, like others of
our aristocracy, by marrying a Chicago millionaire’s daughter, they
might choose rather to sell such a valuable property, which as yet has
been kept safe from the suburban builder. But the episcopal estate on
the other side of the road has ceased to give sanctuary to Nature, as we
may see by Bishopswood Avenue, running off towards East Finchley, and
further threats of streets in this direction, though opposite the gate
of Caen Wood, below the “Spaniards,” a field-way still leads to the
“Five Bells” of Finchley.
Under the modest title of Hampstead Lane, the main road now mounts and
winds up to Highgate Church, which may be gained in other ways from
Hampstead. Round Caen Wood passes that Poet’s Lane, now too prosaically
fenced in, and leads to the Highgate Ponds, beneath a height studded
with mansions and grounds. The east side of Hampstead Heath, beyond its
line of ponds, merges into the Highgate Fields, bought for the public at
a king’s ransom, less wild than the adjacent playground, but fitter for
the games that spangle this expanse of open slopes. Towards the north
side will be seen a tree-planted tumulus, about which hangs some misty
popular legend of the flight from Boadicea’s defeat at Battle Bridge by
the Fleet River, close to King’s Cross Station. It has been opened and
explored, though not thoroughly, without any remains being discovered.
On the southern edge swells up Parliament Hill, formerly known as
Traitors’ Hill, since here the gunpowder plotters proposed to watch
their explosion, where smoke too often hides a fine view over London,
beyond the further expanse of playing-fields named from the Gospel Oak,
an old preaching station. By this height there is a way across from
Hampstead Heath Station, above which cluster the houses of South Hill,
one of several outlying suckers of this favourite suburb.
Highgate makes a worthy neighbour to Hampstead, not standing quite as
high in the world, but with a dignity and distinction of its own, and no
small wealth of treasured memories. Its steep ascents have not been so
much invaded by mere smartness; the face towards Hampstead, at least,
shows quality rather than quantity in its colonization. So, on the
height rising from a welter of lower suburbs, it better preserves the
roomy amenities of the time when “Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate
... a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma, his Dodona oak-grove
whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon”; and
among other pilgrims to the lofty shrine came one not over-devout Scot,
who could note how “wide sweeps of flowery, leafy gardens, their few
homes mostly hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy
umbrage, flowed gloriously downhill, gloriously issuing in wide-tufted,
undulating country, rich in all charms of field and town.”
The approaches from Lower Hampstead fall into the line of West Hill, to
the foot of which road run tramways and buses through Kentish Town, that
has undergone a certain social subsidence since from his windows here
Leigh Hunt could look out on Caen Wood. But as we hence begin the ascent
to Highgate, on the right is passed a model village, in quite baronial
style, guarding the approach to Holly Lodge, seat of the late beneficent
millionaire Lady Burdett-Coutts, whose mother was Coutts the banker’s
daughter, and her father Sir Francis Burdett, that firebrand of radical
reform, cooling down in later years so as to be taunted with his
“_re_cant of patriotism”--epigram which seems a reading backwards of
Horace Walpole’s gibe against Whitfield, who “had not recanted, only
canted.” This lady’s great wealth fell to her by inheritance through the
will of her maternal grandfather’s second wife, a marked figure in the
society of a century ago, who had been Miss Mellon the actress, and came
to be Duchess of St. Albans in the end. The lucky heiress, who perhaps
suggested Miss Dunstable in Trollope’s novels, found her hand sought by
many suitors, among them Prince Louis Napoleon; but, like Miss
Dunstable, she was long in making her choice. Her friend Queen Victoria
honoured her with a peerage in her own right; and, with national
benedictions, a place was made for her in Westminster Abbey.
Higher up, this road is bordered by many fine mansions, among which the
“Fox and Crown,” while it stood, had special license to display the
Royal Arms, in token of the gallantry of its landlord, who at the risk
of his life stopped the young Queen Victoria’s carriage when the horses
had almost run away down a hill that at any pace should be descended
with caution. On the right stands the Church, a modern one, notable for
its far-seen spire, and for the monument inside to S. T. Coleridge, who
spent his last days peacefully at No. 3, The Grove, that quiet row of
houses to the left behind the shady green, blocked up by a reservoir. He
is buried in the vaults beneath Highgate School above, which was the
site of the old church.
Below the present church the grounds of the old Mansion House on the
slope have become a cemetery, bisected by the lane coming up past Holly
Lodge. The situation of this makes it the finest of London’s
burial-grounds, having from the terrace at the top an open view over the
northern suburbs, too much blocked up by private enclosures on other
sides of the hill. Many celebrated persons lie here, from Faraday to Tom
Sayers, among them George Eliot, whose grave in the lower part is
inscribed with her own lines:
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence.
The cemetery adjoins the beautiful park presented to his neighbours by
the late Sir Sydney Waterlow, beyond which we get on to the steeper
ascent of Highgate Hill, a line more thickly strung with historic
interest. This road comes up from the great artery of London that was
once a veritable _Hollow-way_. At the foot of the hill the Whittington
College Almshouses commemorate the name of that fortunate-unfortunate
youth who here heard Bow Bells calling him back to be Lord Mayor of
London. The very stone on which he may have sat down is seen
incorporated in a lamp-post a little way up the hill. In our day, with
his last copper, he might have rested his stiff legs in a cable tramcar,
soon carrying him above a roar of traffic that would drown Bow Bells,
even if they had not to be rung gingerly for fear of bringing down their
tower. Higher up, where Hornsey Lane goes off to Crouch End, he would
pass a Roman Catholic church and monastery, whose dome makes a landmark
from more than one point of view. Above this comes Waterlow Park, the
mansion in which, Lauderdale House, is believed to have been once
occupied by Nell Gwynne; and a brass in the wall outside marks the abode
of Andrew Marvell. On the other side of the road, Cromwell House, with
its neighbour, Ireton House, now a convalescent home, is said to have
been built by the Protector for his son-in-law Ireton. A little higher
on that side stood Arundel House, where Lord Bacon died of a chill
caught in the unlucky experiment of getting out of his coach on Highgate
Hill to stuff a fowl with snow.
At the top, beside Pond Square, which is Highgate’s quiet Charing Cross,
this road converges with those coming up by West Hill and from Hampstead
Heath. Here the “Gatehouse Inn” preserves the memory of that high gate
at which the Bishops of London, as lords of the manor, levied toll upon
vehicles passing over the hill, a privilege that appears to have been
originally granted by Edward III. to a hermit who undertook to keep the
roads in repair. His turnpike hermitage is supposed to have been on the
site of the old church, now occupied by Sir Roger Cholmeley’s school.
Till a century ago the Great North Road bravely mounted to this gate,
when from the windows of the Gatehouse could be seen a dozen other
hostelries, their common sign those famous horns that proclaimed them a
resort of junketing Cockneys, who, as well as passing travellers,
received the freedom of Highgate by “swearing on the horns.” This was a
burlesque pleasantry of more or less coarse features, which long
survived through the rites of libation kept up to the profit of that
conservative trade, the licensed victuallers. An essential part of the
ceremony was a fee drunk for the good of the house. The origin of it is
obscure, but it may have arisen as a verbal play on drinking from a
horn, as seems to have been the custom in “Drunken Barnaby’s” time. The
classic form of the oath is preserved in Hone’s _Year Book_, with an
illustration by George Cruickshank. The initiated one was called on to
swear that he would not eat brown bread if he could get white, nor drink
small beer if he could get strong, nor kiss the maid if he could kiss
the mistress, always with certain reserved cases, the conclusion being,
“Kiss the horns, or a pretty girl if you see one here, and so be free of
Highgate.” Recent research has not shown the horns exhibited over any
Highgate inn, yet no lack of girls deserving to be kissed, in strict
accordance with police regulations.
From the school the line of that old North Road drops to converge with
the modern one coming round the east side of the hill. The latter may be
gained at once down Southwood Lane, which has pretty peeps between its
houses, and at the lower end some fine old trees, relics of a noble
seat. This brings us into the present highroad at Highgate Station,
where turns off the way to Muswell Hill beside Highgate Woods, a trim
pleasure-ground of lawns and low thickets traversed by arched alleys and
glades, in which one might well forget being not yet clear of London
suburbs. On the opposite side of the Muswell Hill Road, Queenswood makes
another shady park, its groves well displayed in the hollow formerly
known as Churchyard Bottom. Through it one comes out in view of Hornsey,
where a fresh forest of houses appears beyond a gap of green
playing-fields.
This young Middlesex borough of over 70,000 people must not be passed
over without notice, though it does not hold up its head like its
“classy” neighbours. Yet Hornsey is as old a place as any of them, once
boasting lordly seats and parks, now turned into streets and
playgrounds; and while its character is rather for respectable snugness
and smugness, it has still some picturesque nooks. Indeed, proud
Highgate itself, into which runs also the London parish of St. Pancras,
is in large part a municipal dependency, as it was once a chapelry of
the parish whose name seems better represented by the old form
Harringay, “field of hares,” as it may well have been, like its namesake
at the opposite end of the county. Hornsey’s new Church overshadows an
ivied tower of the old one, beside which the most distinguished tomb is
that of Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, whose first pleasures of memory
belonged to Stoke Newington Green. Tom Moore lived for a time at Muswell
Hill, in a cottage named “Lalla Rookh,” said to have been formerly a
rural retreat of Abraham Newland, the most popular prose author of his
day as signing the Bank of England notes. I mentioned him in _Surrey_ as
the traditional godfather of Newland’s Corner, but I see the _Dictionary
of National Biography_ allows him no _villeggiatura_ further than
Highbury, and states that he never slept out of the bank till his
retirement. Let the local antiquaries look into this matter, one of
whom, Mr. R. O. Sherington, has published an interesting little book
about the parish. All traces of antiquity
[Illustration: HIGHGATE]
are like to be swept away by a growth so rapid that Mother Shipton’s
portent, Highgate Hill standing in the middle of London, would appear
now no such impossibility, if the city did not spread as fast in other
directions.
But the lion of Hornsey is the Alexandra Palace, that stands more
conspicuous than beautiful on Muswell Hill, most of it, indeed, in the
adjoining parish of Wood Green. This northern rival of the Crystal
Palace, opened a generation ago, at the same distance of six miles from
Charing Cross, had a career of intermittent unprosperity as a
speculation, but now that it is public property its fortunes seem to be
on the mend. The building contains much the same quasi-educational
attractions as the Crystal Palace, combined with all the fun of a fair.
Inside is boasted the “greatest cycle track in the world,” and the lower
part of the park on the Tottenham side was laid out as a race-course. On
the higher side, about the Muswell Hill entrance, is a grove preserving
some fine trees. In the Coronation year this made the scene of a lively
encampment of colonial troops, who did not keep the _Pax Britannica_,
since our white fellow-subjects proved too ready to resent the manner in
which black or brown auxiliaries were treated as men and brethren by the
local nursery-maids.
From Muswell Hill one has a wide view of green ridges vanishing under
brick. To the east, indeed, appears a new prospect, the flat valley of
the Lea, bounded by Epping Forest. From other open points on these
northern heights of London, one sees Middlesex in its more
characteristic aspect of waves of land swelling out of green troughs and
breaking into a foam of structures of all shapes and sizes, from
tombstones to palaces. This scenery we can best explore by following the
lines of the main roads that run north and west out of London. On that
more crowded area let us now turn our backs, having reached its official
edge at the further end of Hampstead Heath, and again on Highgate Hill.
III
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
To not every Londoner of this generation is the Great North Road as well
known even by name as the Great Northern Railway running near it. The
highway that led so many a hopeful youth across the northern heights, to
see the lights of London at last shining before him, has more than once
shifted its course, and now falls into the Metropolis by a delta of
branches, among which one might be at a loss to pick out the main
stream. Its original course seems to have been by Hornsey, Muswell Hill,
Colney Hatch, and Friern Barnet, where it may still be followed as a
pleasant byway of winding ups and downs joining the present road at
Whetstone. That chain of muddy, rutty lanes, as it was in old days,
becoming worn out by traffic, the Bishops of London, through whose land
it passed, made a new road straight over Highgate Hill. Those spiritual
stepfathers were more concerned about collecting their tolls than
sparing horseflesh; but, as Bishops ceased to be great lords, both
clergymen and laymen began to have a conscience of what is due to
animals. Proposals to divert the road round this trying steep were for
a time baffled by the opposition of landowners holding jealously to
their parked seclusion. Not till about a century ago was constructed the
road which skirts Highgate Hill on the east, at first meant to be
carried out through a tunnel on a smaller scale, like the grotto leading
from Naples to Pozzuoli. The tunnel, however, fell in before it was
opened, and gave place to a deep cutting spanned by the archway on which
Hornsey Lane crosses it, a structure recently rebuilt. This Archway
Road, as it is called, may claim to be the main northern highway. But
motorists and cyclists from the West End are much more familiar with the
Finchley Road that, passing on the other side of Hampstead Heath,
converges with the eastern line at North Finchley.
Finchley is a very wide word, as I can tell, who, while yet a stranger
to Middlesex, paying a visit here, found myself let in for a dark walk
of over half a dozen miles to the Finchley Road Station. Even further
this parish spreads along the lower heights beyond Hampstead and
Highgate, including dependencies with by-names of their own. Till
enclosed early in last century, it contained much open land, like that
Finchley Common famed in Hogarth’s picture and in the Newgate Calendar;
Sydney Smith calls it the most notorious haunt of highwaymen in England
when he was young, as Tom Jones and Partridge had reason to understand.
A rough patch of it still holds out on the right hand of the eastern
road, but hardly large enough to parade a regiment of the Guards, or
to
[Illustration: HIGHGATE FROM PARLIAMENT HILL FIELDS]
afford a stage for any thrilling chase of Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard.
The airy high ground once used for military encampments is now set with
strings and knots of houses, grouping themselves most thickly at three
points--Church End, East Finchley, and North Finchley--the last-named
being the apex of the triangle they form, and the first the nucleus of
the parish.
Between these straggling suburbs are still green fields, groves of elm
and beech, and footway hints of vanishing rusticity; while much of the
ground has been taken up by huge cemeteries on the heights once clearly
outside of London. Electric trams and motor-buses seem at present in
need of a good word, which they might have from anyone who had seen the
Great North Road before its tram-line was made. Two or three years ago a
pitiable sight here on hot Sunday afternoons was groups of
flower-burdened women in black, waiting to struggle for room on the
insufficient public vehicles that tugged heavy loads towards the
resting-places of their dead. Where so many sad and weary mourners were
often disappointed of a lift, tramcars from Holloway now spin by the
gates of the adjacent Islington and St. Pancras burying-grounds. The
Finchley Road is not yet laid with rails; but up it steer a fleet of
motor-buses that have their haven at the “Swan and Pyramids” in North
Finchley, some of them voyaging southwards as far as the distant
“Elephant and Castle.”
The Finchley Road emerges into open country at Child’s Hill, just beyond
the London boundary. Further back, indeed, near the cemetery at Fortune
Green to the left of the road, there is a most rustic-looking farm and a
fine old avenue, making the first stage of a field-way to Hendon, soon
spoiled by a sewage farm and an isolation hospital, but recovering from
this infection when it has crossed the Brent. The road to Hendon turns
left from the highway through the village and string of villas called
Golder’s Green, a name that takes in the red-brick tower on the right,
marking the new Golder’s Green Crematorium, beside a Jewish cemetery,
five miles from the Marble Arch. The tube railway passing under
Hampstead Hill now threatens to break up this pleasant stretch of the
road, where at present lanes and paths run off to Hendon and the Brent
Valley. So London stretches its tentacles towards Hendon, as yet
swimming freely on its sea of green bounded by the Finchley and the
Edgware Road, from which latter we shall visit it further on.
From the hamlet of Temple Fortune, with its “Royal Oak” bus station,
where a rash suburb seems to have budded too early, the road, again as
yet between hedges, mounts for a long mile to Finchley’s Church End and
G.N. Railway-station. Here, nearly six miles from Lord’s Cricket Ground,
the Finchley Road behoves to be known as the Regent’s Park Road. The
little Church, containing some old brasses, stands to the left on a road
coming in from Hendon, where it has been rather dwarfed by Christ’s
College opposite, once a semi-private school, now acquired by the local
authorities. In the pleasant churchyard the most noticeable tomb is an
obelisk over Major Cartwright, that firebrand of Radical reform in his
day, who in ours, perhaps, might pass for a cautious Conservative.
Church End has still some traces of its village life; but most of
Finchley is a suburb of too monotonous respectability, now overshadowing
our road for a couple of miles or more. On the west side it drops to the
course of the Dollis Brook, the Brent’s longest stream, beyond which the
swelling ground lies still open in meadows or parks, with green lanes
and footpaths leading over to the ridges of Mill Hill and Totteridge.
From Nether Street, for instance--the valley road parallel with the
highway--by a lodge gate is marked an avenued footway for Mill Hill,
that leads finely across the Dollis Brook to mount on a golf-course
beside the grounds of Nether Court. It seems as if all the parks of
Middlesex are like to be usurped upon by that greedy game of golf, so
much more at ease in its native barrens, or on the heaths of Surrey.
There may soon be as many clubs of Londoners as in all Scotland; and yet
a bitter cry goes up from long waiting-lists of would-be members, eager
to find room on links of any pretensions. Of such a candidate it is told
that, in his impatience, he addressed the secretary, asking whether his
admission were barred by social ineligibility or by want of “form,” and
received on a postcard the curt reply, _Both_. But if we drop into golf
stories, our progress along the North Road will be bunkered; so from
this hint of an attractive deviation let us return to its macadam. The
word is “Fore!”
At Tally-Ho Corner, about a mile beyond Church End, the Finchley Road
converges with the main highway coming by the “Bald Faced Stag” of East
Finchley, with cemeteries and other prospects on its right. Past the
seven-mile-stone there is an ascent to the turning for Colney Hatch at
Fallow Corner, where the top of tramcars gives a wide view towards the
Alexandra Palace. To the right here lies some pleasant scenery about the
great asylum of Colney Hatch, name worthy of a better fame, which its
conscious dwellers would fain dissemble under the undimmed title of New
Southgate. But, on the whole, this makes a less pleasing way than the
other.
From North Finchley the united roads run on another long mile between
houses, a remarkable number of them public-houses and other places of
refreshment. Thus we pass imperceptibly into Whetstone, where comes in
Friern Lane from Muswell Hill, by Colney Hatch and Friern Barnet, which
is the oldest and prettiest, but not now the busiest, way out of North
London. By-roads and paths go off on this side, over the Great Northern
main line, towards Southgate and East Barnet. On the other side, where
runs the branch line to High Barnet, one can soon strike across to the
quiet amenities of Totteridge; and from Totteridge station, close to the
highroad, a path leads on up the Dollis Brook to High Barnet. But when
the road itself brings us again into something like open country, it
passes for a time out of Middlesex, its boundary here so labyrinthine
that one has known a very policeman doubtful as to which county he was
patrolling. Between Totteridge and Barnet a long forked tongue of
Hertfordshire is thrust into Middlesex, licking up some of the fairest
scenes hereabouts for a county that has no need to be greedy of
loveliness. It is thus that our shire’s waist becomes pinched up to a
breadth of about eight miles, between Colney Hatch and the Thames. The
North Road crosses the border more than a mile short of High Barnet,
where for a time the tramway stopped at the top of a hill, as if taking
breath to mount the steeper rise into the town, in the upper part of
which we come back into Middlesex. On this ascent into Barnet, by its
railway station, almost for the first time we get on either hand wide
and open views of the fine landscapes that have been too much butchered
to make London homes and holidays.
Barnet is another widespread name. Friern Barnet--Friar’s Barnet--was
site of a monastery, now two or three miles behind us to the east of our
road. A mile or two north of this lies East Barnet, with its suburban
outgrowth, Oakleigh Park. Modest as East Barnet looks, its secluded old
Church seems to have been the core of all the Barnets. A little way
further north, on the main line of the Great Northern Railway, New
Barnet has become a distant Metropolitan suburb overlaying the hamlet of
Lyonsdown. Then, a mile to the west, eleven miles from Clerkenwell,
Chipping Barnet--_i.e._, _Cheaping_ or Market Barnet--answering to the
_alias_ of High Barnet by its elevation of 400 feet, still shows
character as an old independent town, especially about the far-seen
tower and spirelet of its restored church, on the brow of the ridge.
Here goes off westward an airy road to Elstree, leading in a couple of
miles by Arkley to Barnet Gate, a mere hamlet about an old windmill and
an inn, from which a very rural footpath edges a by-road to Highwood and
Mill Hill.
Towards the parallel ridge of Totteridge, building is transforming
Arkley Common, where were the once-sought Barnet Wells, visited by Pepys
in 1667, who “there found many people a-drinking”; but half a century
later Defoe records how the credit of this spa had dried up, the more
accessible waters of Hampstead and Islington having come into vogue.
Till the present day Barnet has kept the notoriety of its fair in
September, the trade of which is drowned in a carnival of blended
Cockney rascality and bucolic dissipation, so that it seems time to put
down this blatant survival from when the town was practically as far off
London as York is now. It will be remembered that at Barnet Oliver Twist
fell in with that compromising companion, the “Artful Dodger,” who, at
the fair time, was likely enough to have business here. Dickens is said
to have had Barnet again in view as “Thistledown,” at which he denounced
the mismanagement of a “Free” Grammar School, such as in his day so
often gave cause for scandal. But unless that the way to it led up a
hill, where on either side the fields were “puffed up into notice by a
series of undulations,” his description as little answers to the Barnet
of our day as to its rebuilt and reformed school beside the Church. The
town enjoys several charitable foundations, from the seventeenth-century
Jesus Hospital, designed for such old women as are not sorcerers,
witches, tale-bearers, back-biters, drunkards, lunatics or otherwise
objectionable, to the modern Leathersellers’ Almshouses on the Elstree
road. Its “Red Lion,” “Green Man,” and other ancient hostelries are
further hints of a prosperity fed by the traffic of the Great North
Road, which here throws off a hardly less-renowned branch to Holyhead.
Barnet is famed in history for the battle, 1471, where, as an old
schoolmaster of mine puts it in a well-known school history, “every
petal of the Red Rose was shattered from its stem”--a botanical metaphor
to puzzle unimaginative schoolboys, who perhaps know more of this battle
from Bulwer Lytton’s _Last of the Barons_. Running on through the
cheerful High Street, and by the common called Hadley Green, our road
forks for St. Albans and for Hatfield at a triangular patch of grass on
which an obelisk marks the traditional scene of Warwick’s death. The
battle-field seems to have been mainly to the right of the road, on
Hadley Common, to which one turns off from the upper corner of Hadley
Green, where the town almost runs into the village of Monken Hadley,
with its ancient Church. As a rarer relic than its monuments, this
restored, or rather rebuilt, church keeps on its tower a cresset that
may often have served for beacon to wanderers in the wilds of Enfield
Chase, and no doubt did its part in spreading the alarm of the Armada,
for at Hadley we are on one of the highest levels of Middlesex, in view
of “bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor,” where Macaulay starts the chain of
fire-signals that would run to the north till “the red glare on Skiddaw
roused the burghers of Carlisle.” Close to the church will be seen the
railed-in stump of an oak, haunted by misty memories of one Friar
Bungay, whom Bulwer Lytton makes to figure in his story; but this
personage seems to have lived more than a century earlier, and to have
shared the fate of Roger Bacon as being dubbed a sorcerer, through
scientific curiosity in advance of their age. For an elm not far off is
cherished a tradition of Latimer’s preaching under it; and if so, it
must be a very patriarch of elms.
Hadley Common, Barnet’s most beautiful purlieu, is the largest
unenclosed fragment of Enfield Chase, a strip of woodland, interspersed
with greensward, stretching for two miles along the ridge north-east of
the town, all whose sweetheart couples might be lost in its bosky mazes.
One can thread them by taking the road turning off at that venerable
stump, to become a bridle-track along the edge of the woods, joined
about half-way by a path coming up from New Barnet Station. This way is
sacred to the pedestrian, though the cyclist is tolerated, if he care to
plough through the roughness of its further end. It debouches at Cock
Fosters, now a pretty hamlet of gentility about the inn which was once,
no doubt, a resort of foresters, standing just off the road from
Southgate to Potter’s Bar.
As hitherto he has seen so little of the country from closed-in
highroads, the reader who has got to High Barnet on wheels might be glad
to take his way homewards by a roundabout track that, safe from the
proud dust of motor-cars, makes one of the greenest walks so near
London, with fine prospects on all the Barnets. His first stage is along
Hadley Common to Cock Fosters; then, by the spire of the church behind
the inn, he will find a footpath which, crossing a road enters Oak Hill
Park and drops over the Pymmes Brook to a road past the isolated church
of East Barnet. At the Manor House here James Thomson is said to have
been tutor, and he might still find scenes for the rural pictures of his
_Seasons_, preserved by private grounds on the slopes opposite this
church, half hidden in its shady enclosure. Behind it the Church Farm
has been turned into the Philanthropic Society’s Industrial School, by
which goes a path that, beyond the Great Northern Railway main line,
soon loses itself in the new roads of Oakleigh Park, leading into the
highway at Whetstone. Perhaps a pleasanter way, as things are now, is to
keep the road past the church till on its right runs up an embowered
lane straggling across the railway into a road from Colney Hatch, on
which one turns right for the tram-line. This round of some five miles
from Barnet takes one roughly along the edge of that inlet of
Hertfordshire, that, indeed, extends to Colney Hatch, a mile or two
further south. Almost opposite the “embowered lane” mentioned above,
goes off a turn in the other direction, which, crossing the Pymmes
Brook, mounts past the opening of a trim path to Southgate. But I fear
to confuse my _guidees_ in pointing out all the green ways still open on
this side of the Great North Road here.
To return from our digression backwards: in the upper part of Barnet the
Great North Road re-enters Middlesex to traverse its bluff north-eastern
promontory. Here the road is a truly great one, well laid, well
bordered, and well provided with guide posts giving not only directions,
but distances on the by-ways. From the obelisk at the fork it skirts on
the left Wrotham Park, the seat of the unlucky Admiral Byng, its woods
hiding a white mansion that looks out conspicuously from the other side.
To the right appears in a hollow the suburban smartness of Hadley Wood,
a new quarter grown up about its station on the main Great Northern
Railway line, which presently tunnels under our road. By Ganwick Corner
and the “Duke of York,” we come to Potter’s Bar, the last Middlesex
village, much transmogrified through villas and trim suburban roads, by
which London breaks out again on the edge of its shire. This is three
miles from Barnet, and five or six miles more through “pleasant
Hertfordshire” would bring us to Hatfield, whence this road holds on by
fat midlands, skirting fens and wolds, over fells and moors, through
dales and glens, till at last it must be brought to a stand by the
rushing tide of the Pentland Firth, after giving so many stages of
scenery and adventure for imagination. I think it is Mr. John Buchan who
insists how, among the world’s roads, the breath of romance blows
stronger on those pointing to the Pole than on those belting the same
latitude and hugging the same isobar.
The station of Potter’s Bar lies a mile or so to the left, reached by an
avenue-like way opening nearly opposite the “Old Robin Hood.” This
station also serves South Mimms, a goodly village with an old church,
but not set in such rich surroundings as its neighbour, North Mimms,
across the Hertford border. The direct way to South Mimms is the
Holyhead Road, turning off from Barnet High Street at the “Green Man,”
which is all that a highway should be; but not much more can be said of
it unless for its peep into Dyrham Park at the Dancers Hill cross-roads.
Above the thirteenth mile-stone and the crossing of the Mimms Brook the
pedestrian may look out for a group of farm buildings on the left, by
which a path, crossing the road here, curves over fields to Clare Hall
and a hospital near the south end of North Mimms. There a lane to the
left, or a path a little further, leads out of Middlesex to the hamlet
of Ridge, through whose churchyard begins another field-path running
after a mile almost into the picturesque Hertfordshire village of
Shenley; then a park-enclosed road of two miles more leads to the
Midland station of Radlett on Watling Street.
But one must not be tempted to stray into another county, else much
might be said of the road that turns right at the Potter’s Bar Police
Station for Northaw, Cheshunt, and Enfield. From Potter’s Bar, on this
side, another finely-bordered highway turns back to London, through
what was once Enfield Chase, by Cock Fosters and Southgate. At the leafy
hollow, where a large board beacons to Hadley Wood Station, one can turn
by it for a walk of two miles to Barnet, pleasantly reached over the
upper part of Hadley Common.
The cross-road in the other direction leads in three miles to Enfield
and the scenes of our next chapter, passing the north side of Trent
Park, which got its exotic name from George III., when he gave a lease
of it to Sir Richard Jebb, in reward for his services to one of the
royal princes on a sick-bed at the Tyrolese Trent. Where the road
touches the park, over the fence may be seen the remains of Camelot
Moat, an overgrown enclosure of immemorial antiquity that makes one of
the scenes in the _Fortunes of Nigel_. A later novelist may have picked
up a hint here in the legend of such a “Lost Sir Massingberd” as is said
to have hid himself in a hollow tree and perished miserably by falling
into a well underneath. By the country-folk Camelot Moat seems best
remembered as one of Dick Turpin’s lairs; but all over the county linger
memories of this worthy, whose spirit on rough nights haunts its lonely
roads from Enfield Chase to Stanmore Heath, or did so till quite
recently, when it is understood to have taken offence at the passage of
motor-cars as not easily brought to “stand and deliver.”
IV
EDMONTON AND ENFIELD
An older road north is the line of the ancient Ermyn Street, running out
roughly parallel with the Great Eastern Railway to Cambridge, by the
Middlesex side of the Lea. Defoe styles this the North Road, and states
that more carriages came that way in his time than on any other road
into London. But there are Londoners of our day to whom it is unknown
beyond Shoreditch; and few foreigners find it out, though Americans
might see here perhaps our best effort at one of their long city
avenues. It is not, indeed, as long as Yonge Street, Toronto, which has
laid itself out for thirty miles as a shadow cast before future
greatness, and it may be surpassed by the “magnificent distances” of
Washington or Philadelphia; still, this modest London thoroughfare holds
an almost straight course for half a dozen miles from Shoreditch, past
Dalston and Stoke Newington, over Stamford Hill, and through Tottenham
to Edmonton. Here it makes a slight bend from the line of the ancient
road; that a little to the left may still be traced in grassy and
sloughy stretches beside fragments of woodland, where one might believe
oneself many miles from a busy highway. But for a few green gaps, which
seem in the way of being filled up, the actual road as far as the edge
of Hertfordshire and beyond has been shut in with houses, often
spreading out so far on either side that the Edmonton census district is
the most populous part of Middlesex outside London. Edmonton’s name
included one of the county’s half-dozen Hundreds, which, in the more
practical grouping for parliamentary representation, is divided under
the titles of Enfield and Tottenham; while Enfield, for its part, holds
the distinction of being the largest Middlesex parish.
This is the road on which fared Hobson, the Cambridge carrier of
Milton’s day, whose rule that each horse must be hired in turn as it
stood in the stable is said to have originated the phrase “Hobson’s
choice.” It has also memories of Dick Turpin, who, according to the
legend recorded by Harrison Ainsworth, leapt Black Bess clean over a
donkey-cart at Edmonton as he spurred on to Ware, with the myrmidons of
the law in hot pursuit. Another criminal hero of the neighbourhood was
the pickpocket George Barrington, transported to Botany Bay in 1790,
where he reformed himself to become a police superintendent, an author,
even a poet, known by one trite couplet--
True patriots all! for, be it understood,
We left our country for our country’s good.
“Stop, thief! Stop, thief! A highwayman!” was the cry naturally raised
by those who saw John Gilpin racing along the road, its most famed hero
to the general reader. There appears, indeed, some obscurity as to the
first stage taken by the worthy linen-draper on his untamed steed. The
text distinctly states that he passed through ‘merry Islington‘; but
commentators differ as to whether by Aldersgate Street he gained the
Essex Road, and thence struck across the line of the Green Lanes, or
more directly attained the Kingsland Road, which seems his shortest line
from Cheapside, but would soon bring him into the parish of Stoke
Newington, a name perhaps omitted by poetic license as more intractable
to the metre.
We can confidently follow his race beyond where the Seven Sisters Road
comes in from Finsbury Park. Were the seven sisters of Tottenham those
seven daughters who, with such comically lugubrious looks, kneel in a
diminishing row along the Barkham monument in its Parish Church? The
received legend makes them seven elms, whose successors stand railed in
on the green at Seven Sisters Corner. From this landmark we hold up the
road to another corner, where has been restored Tottenham High Cross,
the name of which calls to mind shades as abiding as John Gilpin’s. It
was from Tottenham that Piscator and his friend set out to take their
“morning draught” at the “Thatched House” of Hoddesdon, after a walk of
over a dozen miles. It may have been in the garden of the “Swan” here
that Izaak Walton in the flesh could stroll under a “honeysuckle hedge”
and rest “in a sweet shady arbour,” rural amenities now much to seek
about the Tottenham highroad, though in entering this parish it crossed
the invisible boundary of London. By Tottenham Hale one might now turn
down to the Lea, that ripples so sweetly through Walton’s
seventeenth-century Arcadia; but one had better not.
We have a vision of our own,
Ah! why should we undo it?
On the other side of Tottenham’s spacious Broadway, towards Hornsey, we
might still find a remnant of green fields shrinking like the _peau de
chagrin_ in Balzac’s romance. A height between this road and the Green
Lanes has of late been laid out as a pretty park, overlooking the
meadows of the Muswell Brook--mocked with the _alias_ of Moselle--where
the London County Council proposes to plant a new town of working men’s
dwellings. Socially, Tottenham has not much to boast of, Stamford Hill
perhaps being its only purlieu on visiting terms with the West End. A
century ago it had come down to snug and sober respectability, when it
was much affected by Quakers and other Dissenters, and such names as
Bernard Barton and John Williams, the missionary, marked its eminent
natives. Still, its main thoroughfare wears a certain aspect of
broad-brimmed sobriety and unpretentious comfort. But time was when this
village rang with the stir of feudal chivalry, even before that
burlesque “Tournament of Tottenham,” sung by an English Cervantes of so
early date that a quotation would need a glossary. To lists set up
beside Tottenham highway came “all the men of Islington, of Highgate,
and of Hackney,” their weapons flails, their shields baskets, their
armour sheep-skins; then Perkin the potter, “with doughtiness of dent,”
carried away the prize, the hand of the Reeve’s daughter Tib, along with
which went such trophies as a grey mare, a spotted sow, and a brood-hen.
The fair lady was forthwith led to church, the beaten champions in her
train, and rancour was drowned in a wedding-feast that lasted “all the
long day” for those eupeptic heroes.
About the church can be traced Tottenham’s nucleus of antiquity. When,
on the right hand of the main road, we have passed the Sanchez
Almshouses, founded by a Spanish confectioner who came to England with
King Philip, a far from bonny opening named Scotland Green hints how
this was once a royal manor, passing into the lordship of the Scottish
Kings, and held in turn by the rivals Bruce and Baliol. The Bruces had a
keep here, still extant in a modernized form. Bruce Castle became a
school carried on by the Hill family, one of whom, after an experiment
at educational reform noted in its day, rose to wider fame as the
victorious champion of penny postage. The ivied mansion, no more like a
school than a castle, housed young gentlemen till not long ago; but,
with its pleasant grounds, it has now been turned into a public resort.
At the north-west corner of this park stands Tottenham Church, half hid
among trees that soften its incongruity, ranging from the old flint
tower to the new brick chancel. One might well look in here for a sight
of the Barkham and the Candeler monuments, each in its way an imposing
specimen of such memorials in Stuart days, set in dim religious light by
a rich show of coloured glass. A daughter of the Ettrick shepherd is
buried, so far from her birthplace, in what Besant described as “a very
good churchyard, full of interesting monuments of unknown people; and in
the day-time you might wander there for a long time and learn quantities
of history just hinted at in the bald, disjointed way common to
tombstones. You might, I say, under happier conditions, but you cannot,
because they have stuck up rows of spiky iron railings beside the path,
so that no moralist, unless he have very long legs, shall ever be
permitted to get any good out of the churchyard at all.”
Into the neighbour parish Tottenham merges without a break in what was
“all one continued street” so far back as Defoe’s time. About half a
mile beyond the latitude of the church, where the road swerves slightly
to the right, a house on the left side is marked “No. 1, Edmonton.” The
next landmark here is the “Bell,” with its fresco of that galloping
citizen, cloak, hat, and wig flying in the air, by which this house
claims connection with his wild career; but it has more than once been
rebuilt, and may not occupy the site of the original resort for Cockney
trippers, that would probably be farther on, towards the original
village. The “Wash of Edmonton” seems another doubtful point. No such
obstruction is now found on the road, which in Tottenham was crossed by
the Muswell or Moselle Brook, and beyond the “Bell” passes over the
large Pymmes Brook, flowing from East Barnet, then farther on the Salmon
Brook, from Enfield. This last is said to have been known as the Wash, a
title repeated in the Wash of Enfield and of Cheshunt; but now that the
streams have long been bridged over, the oldest inhabitants are not in
one tale as to which was the ford splashed about by our Cockney Mazeppa
Just like unto a trundling mop
Or a wild goose at play.
The hedges and stiles that bordered the road in Cowper’s day have
vanished like its turnpike gates. Upper Edmonton in turn imperceptibly
becomes Lower Edmonton, the old village now strung to London by leagues
of houses. A long mile beyond the “Bell” is reached a fragment of
Edmonton Green, where the poor “Witch of Edmonton” was burned in 1621.
We may here desert the road, and its trams running on to a gap of
still-open fields which the builder threatens to close; then again the
industrial outliers of Enfield will shadow it almost continuously to the
edge of the county. Let us turn up, by the Green and the station, to
Edmonton Church, notable for its traditions of Archbishop Tillotson, and
of another incumbent, Tate, the rusty psalmist, also of that “Merry
Devil of Edmonton” that played such tricks here in Henry VII’s time, as
for its joint memorial to Lamb and Cowper. Keats, as apprenticed to an
Edmonton surgeon, is likewise commemorated along with Lamb by medallions
in the public library.
The greenest memory of this parish and the next is Charles Lamb’s, who
ended his days at Edmonton in a little house on the way up to the
church. It was occupied, when I last passed it, by a registrar of
births, deaths and marriages, a tenancy to “arride” that very human
spirit. No lover of literature will visit Edmonton without seeking out
his and his sister’s grave, which may be found by going on from the west
end of the church to the tiny almshouses on the graveyard’s further
side, and there turning left on a railed path. About half-way along
this, on the right side, overshadowed by a more pretentious tomb, a
modest slab shows the epitaph by Gary, the translator of
Dante--Wordsworth’s tribute being rejected as long enough to fill a
whole row of tombstones.
A path from the churchyard, bending on to the right by an old windmill,
towards the New River and the Green Lanes, shows how much Edmonton has
lost the rural charms it may have had when Lamb came to die here. For
several years his home had been in the adjacent parish of Enfield, to
whose hilly and shady beauties let us now set our face. Not that rural
beauties appear to have had enduring attraction for Elia, who took any
beer-shop as the goal of his restless walks, which also by choice were
turned towards his familiar London. “To him the tide of human life
[Illustration: EDMONTON CHURCH]
that flowed through Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill was worth all the Wyes
and Yarrows in the universe; there were, to his thinking, no Green Lanes
to compare with Fetter Lane or St. Bride’s, no Garden like Covent
Garden.” So says his friend P. G. Patmore, who could only guess at
unselfish regard for his sister’s health as the cause of that seclusion.
When Lamb’s friends visited him at Enfield, they were sometimes in the
way of taking the hourly Edmonton stage, and walking the two miles on.
Another coach ran direct to Enfield, by which Henry Crabb Robinson was
two and a half hours on the way, who again tramped it in little more
than three hours. The London theatres were the loadstone that drew young
Charles Cowden Clarke, walking both ways by what could then be called
the quiet Green Lanes, now laid with an electric tram-line. Green lanes
are a frequent feature of Middlesex scenery; but these Green Lanes _par
excellence_ can no longer be held typical, as they run through the
crowded homes of Stoke Newington and Hornsey, tantalizing a romantic
soul with such names as Mount Pleasant and Wood Green. Yet this lively
highroad has still some patches of its greens to show; some stretches of
private grounds turned into public demesnes, like Clissold Park and
Finsbury Park; some pleasant glimpses of the fenced New River, in Lamb’s
youth still open to the holiday explorations of his school-fellows.
Beyond Palmer’s Green it grows more truly rural, the Green Lanes winding
up to Enfield in a manner not unworthy of their name, with many
tempting by-ways towards the Great Eastern Railway line on the right and
the Great Northern Railway on the left, that would keep wanderers from
going too far astray.
But the pleasantest way of reaching Enfield on foot is from the
south-west side, where Pan still haunts fragments of the Chase. For this
route one can turn off the Great North Road near its junction with the
Finchley Road, making by Colney Hatch to Southgate, the birthplace of
Leigh Hunt, who might still call this “a prime specimen of Middlesex” in
its charms of “trees and meadows, of greenery and nestling cottages.”
Southgate Green also boasts the Walkers, a family of cricketers recorded
in a bigger book than has been written about Leigh Hunt. Another way to
it is from Bounds Green, leaving the present border-line of suburbia to
cross the Pymmes Brook for the fine elm avenue of Broomfield Park, now a
public playground, through which is reached the avenue-like road from
Palmer’s Green to Southgate Green.
The builder has made havoc here with Lamb’s “unfrequentedest Blackberry
paths that ever concealed their coy bunches from a truant citizen.” But,
beside the “Cherry Tree” on Southgate Green, one can take a footway
leading into a road from the Green Lanes, along which road to the left,
then turning, right, round the next corner, one finds a woodland path
which makes one of the most sylvan walks so near London. Nearly a mile
of it lead out upon the small Green of Winchmore Hill, where a snug old
village forms the core of a settlement spread loosely along its
radiating roads. We are here a little to the west of the Green Lanes,
and about two miles from the further line of road through Edmonton.
Beyond the Green, after neglecting the turn to Winchmore Hill Station,
the pedestrian crooks to the right over a railway-bridge, then presently
on the left side of the road his path goes off almost straight to
Enfield, across a road, through a market orchard, over a brook, up the
slope of the Old Park, along the thickly-shaded bank of the New River,
and by the Town Park, to the tongue of open sward opening between the
older part of the town, and the west-end quarter known as Bycullah Park,
built upon what was once a racecourse.
High-set Enfield turns its best face to the west, where travellers from
Barnet are beaconed by a tall white spire rising over red roofs half
hidden in swelling greenery. This spire does not mark the Parish Church,
whose tower stands by the Market Place, where the Green Lanes road
crosses that from Barnet to Ponder’s End, close to the Great Eastern
Railway station, distinguished as “Enfield Town.” The Great Northern
Railway branch station, towards the west end, which will now cease to be
a terminus, is known as “Enfield.” This name, indeed, is widely
scattered, the Hertford road, to the east, being lined for two or three
miles with the huge hamlets of Enfield Highway, Enfield Wash, and
Enfield Lock. But the town of Enfield, linked to these offshoots only by
a name, still preserves much of its spacious amenity, from the days
when it was a clearing in the forest turned into a royal chase. The Old
Park, on the south side, has not lost its tradition of dignity as
precinct of a Tudor palace, while the wider bounds of the
hunting-ground, disforested and enclosed under George III., have shrunk
into smaller parks about mansions whose modest title of Lodge recalls
their origin, when only three such houses stood in a circuit of two
dozen miles, the Chase bounds stretching from Southgate to the northern
edge of Middlesex. The name of the Old Palace is fondly cherished for a
remnant of building used till the other day as the Post-Office, at the
present moment proclaimed “to let.” In front this looks across the
Market Place to the tower of the Church, the interior of which gains
roomy effect from its prolonged aisles and sunken floor; and it has
monuments to show, the most remarkable being Lady Tiptoft’s ancient
altar-tomb, and the family group of effigies commemorating a Lord Mayor
of Charles I’s. time.
Beside this church are the new buildings of the Grammar School, which
under Charles II. occupied the Old Palace, when its master was Dr.
Uvedale, the botanist, by whom is said to have been planted the first
cedar in England, still flourishing royally at the back of this
building. A fruitful private seminary is now ill-represented by the
Great Eastern station, the fine façade of the old building having in
part been removed to South Kensington Museum as a noble specimen of
moulded brickwork. Wren may have been the architect of a mansion which
appears to have
[Illustration: ENFIELD]
been occupied by Isaac Disraeli, till he removed to London, just in time
to make the future Prime Minister no native of Enfield. The house then
became a school kept by Charles Cowden Clarke’s father, with John Keats
as its most illustrious pupil, who, after his apprenticeship at
Edmonton, used to walk over to borrow books from his old teacher.
Another school in the vicinity could boast two scholars of very
different renown, Captain Marryat, and Babbage, the calculating boy, of
whom it is remembered that he would get up in the small hours to study
on the sly, whereas the future naval novelist was keen rather for play,
and distinguished himself by running away from frequent scrapes and
floggings, being once captured “in the horse-pond at Edmonton.” Sir
Ralph Abercromby also was an Enfield schoolboy, in days when the place
made such a choice retreat from London as now is Tunbridge Wells or
Leith Hill, and it can look back to older days when for wealth and
dignity it held up its head above Kensington.
The younger Clarke’s _Recollections of Writers_ are thick set with names
not yet forgotten, familiar to him when his father on their walks taught
the boy to plant acorns that may now be stately trees. He knew a
grandfather of Bulwer Lytton and a nephew of Gilbert White. He
remembered a visit from George Dyer, his father’s fellow-usher and rival
in love at Northampton, whose name has been “pickled and preserved in
humour” by his friend Lamb. From the school garden he sent a weekly
basket of flowers, fruit, and vegetables to comfort Leigh Hunt’s
imprisonment. He met Major Cartwright, the doughty Radical, then living
at Enfield. There were other notabilities of the neighbourhood with whom
the family of a liberal-minded schoolmaster might not come much in
contact, ex-Lord Mayors, knights, and professional veterans. Abernethy,
the rough-tongued surgeon, came here to die, and has a tablet in the
church. At an earlier date Lord George Gordon, the Protestant firebrand,
had lived hereabouts. Gough, the antiquary, is another name in a long
list of notable residents that might be continued down to Walter Pater,
whose childhood was spent on Chase side; and to its chequered shades,
perhaps, he owed “many tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him,
certain inward lights under which they most naturally presented
themselves to him.”
Tom Hood for a time had his home at Winchmore Hill, and in Hone’s _Table
Book_ (1827) there is a caricature by him of Mary Lamb stuck fast on one
of the high stiles common about Enfield and Edmonton. This is
accompanied by a letter signed “Sojourner at Enfield,” which, I must
confess, made me an accomplice in deceiving readers of my guide, _Around
London_. Till my eyes were opened by Mr. E. V. Lucas’s edition of Lamb,
I had not recognised this communication as one of Elia’s farcical fibs,
with its grave attribution of the sketch “probably” to Romney, and its
fragment “in the handwriting of Cowper,” going to show that the poet had
designed a companion piece to John Gilpin, which should deal with his
wife’s adventures while hanging about the “Bell.”
Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly said
Unto her children three,
“I’ll clamber o’er this style so high,
And you climb after me.”
But having climb’d unto the top,
She could no further go,
But sat, to every passer-by
A spectacle and show;
Who said, “Your spouse and you this day
Both show your horsemanship;
And if you stay till he comes back,
Your horse will need no whip.”
The Clarkes had left their school before Charles Lamb settled definitely
in “this vale of deliberate senectitude,” so we do not understand that
he here found the model for his _New Schoolmaster_. Charles Cowden
Clarke made his acquaintance at Ramsgate, and afterwards visited him at
Enfield, where from 1827 to 1833 the brother and sister lived in two
adjacent houses on Chase side, first as tenants, then as lodgers of an
uncongenial family next door. Both these houses, standing in a somewhat
altered state, are piously marked by tablets; but in my experience not
every Enfielder knows where to find them, so the pilgrim stranger may be
directed to the straggling green beside “my old New River,” on the way
between the two stations; here he turns up the road marked “Clay Hill,”
and may look for his double shrine on the right-hand side just before
reaching the spire of Christ Church. This part of Enfield, somewhat
bevillaed in our time, must then have been close to the fringe of green
by-ways of which Clarke speaks more lovingly than Lamb. One seldom knows
how far to take seriously the whimsical humorist’s groans over the
dullness of country life when fairly tried, nor his sighs for the
“fresher air of London”; but there seems to be a vein of real feeling in
such complaints as fill his letters from this exile--for instance, to
Wordsworth:
O never let the lying poets be believed, who ‘tice men from the
cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean it not of a country
village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to
solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers, but to
have a little teazing image of a town about one, country folks that
do not look like country folks, shops two yards square--half a
dozen apples and two penn’orth of overlooked gingerbread for the
lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street, and, for the immortal book and
print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the
show-picture is a last year’s Valentine, and whither the fame of
the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travel’d (marry, they just
begin to be conscious of the Red Gauntlet!); to have a new
plastered flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a
Cathedral. The very blackguards here are degenerate. The topping
gentry stockbrokers. The passengers too many to insure your quiet,
or let you go about whistling, or gaping--too few to be the fine
indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping,
thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months.
Among one’s books at one’s fire by candle, one is soothed into an
oblivion that one is not in the country; but with the light the
green fields return, till I gaze and in a calenture can plunge
myself into Saint Giles’s. O let no native Londoner imagine that
health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse
sweet and recreative study, can make the country anything better
than altogether odious and detestable! A garden was the primitive
prison till man with promethean felicity and boldness luckily
sinn’d himself out of it.
The writer of this was a man of moods, who, as his friend Coleridge has
it:
Pined
And hungered after Nature many a year
In the great City pent.
Before leaving the India House, Lamb “had thought in a green old age (O
green thought) to have retired to Ponder’s End--emblematic name, how
beautiful!” No one now would choose a retirement at Ponder’s End, that
industrial eastern neighbour of Enfield overshadowing the Lea Valley
with its tall smoke-stacks and long rows of workmen’s homes. Yet just
beyond the grimy hideousness of Ponder’s End Station, the bridge leading
over to Chingford Marshes gives a peep of the Lea that by moonshine
might still make a trysting-place for shepherds and milkmaids. Daylight
dulls all memories of romance with smoke and mist; then the name of
Green Street seems a mockery among those of the outlying Enfields that
for miles blotch the Hertford road with their confluent eruption.
These quarters depend upon various industries planted along the Lea, the
principal of them a national factory of death and destruction which, two
generations ago, brought Enfield’s name into history with the rifles
made here. A century earlier the name of Enfield Wash flowed far and
wide in public excitement over a puzzling story of crime, to stir, under
George II., even more sensation in England than did the Tichborne case
for our newspaper age. It was here that a servant-girl, Elizabeth
Canning, professed to have been robbed and imprisoned by certain
persons, one of them a gipsy woman, who, sentenced to be hanged, was
saved by fresh evidence that convicted the accuser of perjury. In those
days of rough-and-ready justice feeling ran strangely strong between
partisans of the gipsy and of the servant, the latter’s cause being
championed by mob violence, while dozens of books and pamphlets hotly
discussed the trials spread out over more than a year. Banished to the
American plantations, the dubious heroine took away a considerable sum
collected by her sympathizers, and, thus famed and dowried, she made a
good marriage in the colony, where her descendants may now be
flourishing as New York bosses or Chicago pork-poisoners.
As hints of what this highway was then, among its bordering of
monotonously mean streets stand here and there weather-worn cottages and
broad-faced Georgian mansions, whose long windows overlooked John
Gilpin’s race. When--the name of Enfield at last left behind--about
eight miles from the boundary of London, the road has passed out of
Middlesex, just before coming to Waltham Cross, on the right it has the
gates of Waltham House. This was for years the home of Anthony Trollope,
that energetic post-office inspector, traveller, and fox-hunter, who in
his spare time made himself the most voluminous author of a family which
must have filled more shelves in the British Museum than any other, his
own works better known to our fathers, as they may be to our sons, than
they are to a generation greedy of spicier flavours in its literary
fare.
A preserve of such good old houses is Baker Street, continuing the Green
Lanes, which no more resembles that “long unlovely street” of London
than its paradise of South African millionaires is like the Park Lane
leading on to Tottenham Marshes. This Baker Street makes the pleasantest
way north from Enfield, bordered by fine old trees and by the grounds of
suburban mansions, more than one of them showing notable ironwork in its
gates. A mile of such rustic gentility leads to Forty Hill, where we
pass the grounds of Forty Hall, built by Inigo Jones, then those of
Middleton Hall, named in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, cadet of a large
Welsh family, who, like so many other gentle youths in his day, became a
London apprentice and merchant, and won honour, if not wealth, by his
great enterprise of bringing a water-supply to the capital in the New
River.
This artificial water-course, a Pactolus to later share-holders though
it ruined its constructor, makes more Arcadian appearances in the
landscape than does the Lea, and bears itself with an air of
long-established standing to belie its “assumption of eternal novity.” I
know of no other canal that has got a poem all about it--_The New
River_, by William Garbott, whose muse, indeed, flows at no high
pressure:
From _Basons_ large, the water is conveyed
By Pipes, which thence into the _Town_ are laid.
Had I but Skill, how sweetly could I play
Upon thy _Pipes_, Sir Hugh, a _Roundelay_!
For miles out of London the New River is guarded from pollution like the
sky at Naples, which has been said to be the only clean thing there, and
that because no one can get at it. But higher up, near the Middlesex
boundary, one may take a path along its banks as it winds from mansion
to mansion, through woods and meadows where Izaak Walton might still
love to linger.
And here we come among royal memories. Between Forty Hall and Middleton
House stood Elsynge Hall, or Enfield House, in the New Park, where
Elizabeth held her court, after spending some of her younger days at the
Old Palace. The Maiden Bridge on the stream crossed by the road
continuing Baker Street is taken for the scene of Walter Raleigh’s
courtier-like offer of his cloak; no Enfield man, at least, will allow
the legend to be located elsewhere. A mile further on, across the county
border, we should skirt Theobald’s Park--pronounced _Tibbald’s_--once
the princely seat of Elizabeth’s Lord Burleigh, to which James I. took
such a fancy that he gave the Salisbury family Hatfield in exchange for
it. The park was then ten miles in circuit, the gardens passed for the
finest in England, and the house was a stately palace that stood till
George III.‘s reign. It had many changes of owner, one, by the irony of
fate, being last male descendant of Oliver Cromwell, who carried out a
more sweeping exchange with his sovereign. The hunting of Enfield Chase
made it a favourite abode with James, and here he died (1625) after
nearly being drowned, three years earlier, by a fall from his horse that
sent him head foremost into the frozen water of the New River, his boots
only sticking up above the ice. Here also the timid King was put in
danger from fire as well as water, for White Webbs House, a vanished
neighbour of Forty Hall, appears to have been one of the hatching-places
of the Gunpowder Plot.
Just within the Middlesex boundary, a road turning left from the
well-timbered hamlet of Bull’s Cross leads by the modern mansion of
White Webbs Wood in its charming park. In a short mile is reached the
“King and Tinker,” an old inn offering a variety among the zoological
signs of the neighbourhood--“Spotted Cow,” “Goat,” “Fallow Buck,” and
such-like. This sign gives a local habitation and King James’ name to
that oft-told tale of a sovereign too familiarly treated by an
unsuspecting subject, miller, tanner, tinker, or what not, the first
case on record being Alfred’s awkward dealings with a baking house-wife.
Opposite the inn stands a little chapel of the Countess of Huntington’s
Connection, which seems a natural growth here, since at Cheshunt, not
far off, was the college set up by that denomination, removed to
Cambridge only the other day. Between the chapel and the inn opens a
most charming footway across White Webbs Park, coming out in the Clay
Hill suburb of Enfield, a little to the east of the “Rose and Crown,”
that boasts itself the scene of one of Dick Turpin’s adventures--his
home, indeed, as it was kept by his grandfather.
For straying into Hertfordshire beside Theobald’s Park, one can find
excuse in a famous Middlesex monument. Let Viator keep straight on from
Bull’s Cross, till a leafy turn round the north side of the park leads
him towards the rose-gardens of Waltham Cross. Here, if he have as many
grey hairs as his present guide, he may suddenly start and rub his
spectacles, when he comes upon the once-familiar arch of Temple Bar, set
in the park enclosure, standing outpost sentry over Greater London, grey
and massive as ever, and looking as if in the country air it would
outlive that flighty griffin that has taken its place at the City
boundary. On the other side of Theobald’s might be found a hint of its
old neighbour, Charing Cross, for beside the highroad, at the turning
off to Waltham Abbey, just outside Middlesex, has been restored a
sumptuous Eleanor’s Cross, one of that series erected by Edward I. at
each spot where his wife’s body rested on its way from Grantham to
Charing.
Enfield does not turn its best face to the Lea Valley, but the stretch
of parks and shady roads to the north of it makes one of the pleasantest
corners of Middlesex. And if the pedestrian seek a green ramble back to
town, I can put him upon one which will show part of the country not so
much changed from the days of Lamb’s wanderings. Let him take the Barnet
Road, past the Great Northern Railway station and the spired church, a
little beyond which, where the road drops from a turning marked “Chase
Ridings,” he looks out for a field-path going off to the left. Crossing
a brook, it leads him into a bushy lane, past a group of hospital
buildings and chimneys that make a landmark. When the suburban skirtings
of Eversley Park are reached, turns of the road may be taken to the
right, and guide-posts will keep one straight for a mile or so
south-west till the north end of Southgate is reached at a joining of
five ways. Here, from the road southward for Southgate Green, almost at
once a path leads off to the right, by the backs of houses, along a
wooded bank, over a meadow, and through a park till it reaches a road
dropping down to cross the Pymmes Brook, beyond which is struck the way
leading past East Barnet Church to Colney Hatch. A good mile or two to
the west of this runs the tram-line of the Great North Road, on the
further side of which we now pass to London’s north-western artery.
V
ABOUT WATLING STREET
It has been fondly held that Watling Street went out over Hampstead and
Hendon, and the bit of the City bearing this name would fit in with such
an opinion. But the sounder doctrine seems to be that the ancient way,
made or improved as the Romans’ great North-Western Road, originally
came up from the marshes at Westminster, where the name Horseferry Road
tells a tale, and thence took the line of what is now Park Lane, till
the building of London Bridge caused it to be diverted into the City.
From the Marble Arch this route runs almost straight on to Edgware, and
beyond, without much wavering, to the foot of the height on which stands
St. Albans.
The Edgware Road is familiar to more Londoners than are aware of its
antiquity. It is now too crowded with traffic to stir thoughts of bygone
renown; but on one of the motor-buses that urge their wild career
through Maida Vale and Kilburn, beyond Brondesbury making the arduous
ascent of Shoot-Up Hill, a spur of the Hampstead heights, we can soon
get out to the boundary of London County at Cricklewood. On the left
hand of the road here a square mile or so of new suburb has sprung up in
the last few years, the best part of it being on an estate of All Souls’
College, whose Fellows must fatten in the body, while less lucky
gownsmen are like to starve on agricultural depression. It is well to
own property at some “Creek in the Wood” so near London; but when my own
three acres of pasturage come to be allotted I have my eye on the fields
about St. Martin’s or St. Paul’s.
The east side of the road here belongs to the Metropolitan borough of
Hampstead. On the west we are in the Middlesex urban district of
Willesden, that huge hobbledehoy suburb that as yet in part bears much
the same relation to London proper as lignite does to coal; or it may be
said to be in process of solidification--“half-baked” is a vulgar
epithet on censorious tongues. In the lifetime of a generation this
district has increased its population more than sevenfold, while, not to
be behind its neighbours, it has set up a debt of nearly a million
pounds. The large parish originally consisted of several scattered
hamlets--Kilburn, Brondesbury, Cricklewood, Willesden Green, Harlesden,
and Church End--which have now run together, though with gaps still
shrinking every month. The Kilburn end, indeed, has long been firmly
welded on to Paddington. Beside Willesden Green Station may be seen a
bit of the original green; but if thereon Willesden should affect
“county” airs, let her look back to the fate of Lisson Green and Lisson
Grove. Between Kensal Rise and the Public Library in Willesden High
Road there is at present a deep, shaded hill lane, barred by a stile,
where artists or poets might carry on their business undisturbed. In
another year or two this will probably be overflowed from the adjacent
brickworks, so as to become “Klondyke Avenue” or “Edward VII. Road.”
Would that the builder had first swooped upon that dingy south-western
edge, blighted by the smoke of engines and the language of bargees,
where Browning may well have seen--
Something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train!
From the misnamed junction at Harlesden, the quarter of Willesden best
known to railway travellers, there are still bits of footpath towards
Church End, by Roundwood Park, swelling to an eminence that gives a good
view of the neighbourhood. Willesden Church, standing in the remotest
corner of the parish, had once a noted image of the Virgin, which
brought many pilgrims to “Our Lady of Willesden”; and though it has
suffered enlargement and restoration, it enshrines interesting
monuments, brasses, and other relics of an antiquity that goes back to
Norman times, beset by a show of later tombstones, among them that of
Charles Reade the novelist.
The “Crown” at Cricklewood is the terminus of bus traffic on the
high-road. Thence an electric tram, coming round from Willesden, spins
out the straight road as far as Edgware, through a chequer of open
spaces that are every day being filled up like a backgammon board. On
this road we may well hurry at tramway speed, looking for interest
rather to either hand of it. As soon as we get out of what a year or so
ago was the edge of building, where on the right stands a forbidding
fortress of the Midland Railway, on the other side Dollis Hill Lane is
about to be overshadowed by Dollis Hill Avenue. This leafy lane leads
along the brow of Dollis Hill to Neasden, passing a house of Lord
Aberdeen’s, more than once visited by the statesman in honour of whom
its sloping grounds, now a public play-place for Willesden, have been
named the Gladstone Park. Mark Twain for a time occupied the house,
which has a fine view over the north-western suburbs. The word Dollis,
recurring in Middlesex place-names, has been held as connected with
“dole,” an old word for a mark of sharing or partition, replaced in our
Prayer Book by “neighbour’s landmark”; but this is not a point on which
pundits are agreed, and in many cases such names, the popular etymology
of which is generally wrong, might turn out to come from an owner long
forgotten.
From the back of Dollis Hill a footpath leads down to the “Welsh Harp,”
the next point of note on the road. This tavern flourishes on the edge
of what is the largest lake in Middlesex, or indeed in South-Eastern
England, the Kingsbury Reservoir, popularly known as the Welsh Harp
Water, a sheet more than a mile long, formed by damming the waters of
the Brent and the Silk Brook, as a store for supplying the Regent’s
Canal. Fishing, boating, and skating make attractions for customers of
the landlord, who in hard winters must coin ice into gold; and in summer
there are the tea-garden dissipations of a popular Vauxhall. At the top,
the artificial lake’s feeders are bridged by the road; at the bottom,
the Brent is released from a dam not so large as that of the Nile at
Assouan; then below, the once flowery banks of this stream seem as if
blighted by the Metropolitan Railway works at Neasden.