_THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD._
The oldest maps of London extant show two roads to Hampstead; Aggas’s
(time of Elizabeth) has four. The most easterly of these roads ran out
by Gray’s Inn Lane, past old St. Pancras and Battle Bridge, through
Kentish Town and part of Holloway to Highgate, touching Caen Wood, and
so by Bishop’s Wood and Wild Wood Corner to Hampstead. Later on a branch
of this same Gray’s Inn or Battle Bridge Road ran off by St. Pancras a
little to the west, into a country lane running up from Tottenham Court
Road, into what is now the Hampstead Road, and so to Hampstead.[37]
Another road ran out by Tyburn, crossing the road to Reading—the present
Edgware Road—and going on by Lisson Grove to Kilburn Abbey, passing
West End and Sutcup Hill, Hampstead, and thence on to Edgworth. But
the most interesting of these roads, and which is distinctly traced in
Aggas’s map, ran up from Charing Cross, through St. Martin’s Lane to
Broad St. Giles’s, crossing the ‘Waye to Uxbridge’ (Oxford Street),
and thence up Tottenham Court Road, which shows how nearly the modern
highway follows the lines of the ancient one. It looks very like the
present road to Hampstead, except that it appears to stop short at the
top of Tottenham Court Road. The difference is in the road itself and
its surroundings—running as it did over a track, which, once made, was
left to take care of itself; dangerous with heaps of refuse and hollow
places that in winter were full of water, and at other times absolute
sloughs. Even in Charles II.’s time, when turnpike roads were made by Act
of Parliament, the travelling by coach or waggon does not appear to have
been much improved. The highways were in places so narrow that a lady
traveller in 1764 tells us that, meeting another coach, her conveyance
was brought to a standstill till the road was made sufficiently wide at
that particular part to allow of the carriages passing each other. In
winter and in rainy seasons, owing to the want of a proper knowledge of
draining, it was not an unknown grievance for the waters in low-lying
places to inundate the carriages; while at the close of such periods
travellers frequently found their wheels so deeply embedded in the mud
left in these hollows that they had to remain there till additional
horses could be had from the nearest farmhouse or village to drag their
vehicle out. The private letters, diaries, and memoirs of those bygone
years are full of such adventures.
It was not, indeed, till after the first decade of George III.’s time
that this state of things began to be seriously remedied, and roads, in
our present meaning of the term, laid through the length and breadth of
the land. Pretty deep in the present century, except for a few cottages
in the fields, there were no habitations between the George Inn,
Hampstead Road, and the Load of Hay, on Haverstock Hill. In other ways,
the road continued to be pretty much the same as in Colonel Esmond’s
time, ‘hedgerows and fields and gardens’ all the way up to Hampstead.
About the time of the building of Camden Town, people who loved pure
country air began to move further out, and toy villas and rustic
residences dotted the Hampstead Road, some of them remaining there with
their paled-in gardens and trellised porches and verandas, oddly wedged
in between builders’ yards and other commercial premises, till long after
I knew the neighbourhood.
As recently as 1859 the road to Hampstead was a charming one, especially
if one drove there; for then you had the advantage of seeing beyond and
above the pedestrian. No sooner did you cross the Canal Bridge than your
pleasure in the prospects began. Leaving Chalk Farm on the left, where in
some one or other of the effaced fields Tom Moore and Jeffrey (afterwards
Lord Jeffrey) met to fight their intercepted duel, and Primrose or Barrow
Hill, in a ditch on the south side of which (1678) the body of the
murdered Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was found, ‘his sword thrust through him,
but no blood upon his clothes or about him, his shoes clean, his money in
his pocket, his rings upon his fingers, but with his breast all bruises,
and his neck broken’;[38] and upon the summit of which, with sublimated
vision, William Blake, _pictor ignotus_, saw the spiritual sun, ‘not like
a golden disc the size of a guinea, but like an innumerable company of
the heavenly host, crying “Holy, holy, holy!”’
Then Haverstock Hill, with the Load of Hay tavern, looking in 1845 as
rustic and simple as its name. It had been famous for its tea-gardens,
and an ancient footpath from the Lower Heath, Hampstead, formerly
crossed the fields from Pond Street, and came out beside it on the main
road. Above the bank, rising from the highway on the left, stood the
cottage, ‘famous,’ as Carey in his ‘Book of the Roads’ (1812) called
it, as the residence of Sir Richard Steele, the ‘solitude’ that for so
many years reminded readers of the literary Captain’s delightful essays,
and recalled in his company all the wits of Queen Anne’s time, who, on
their way to the summer meetings of the Kit-Cat Club at the Upper Flask,
Hampstead, were wont to beguile him from unfinished copy, an easy task,
since the gay instincts of the man on these occasions would generally
override the severity of the philosopher, and prevent the personal
application of the moralities he so charmingly discoursed about.
[Illustration: _Hampstead from Primrose Hill._]
‘I am in a solitude,’ he wrote to Pope, June 1, 1712, ‘an house between
Hampstead and London, in which Sir Charles Sedley died, breathing his
last,’ he adds, ‘in this very room,’ a circumstance that, in connection
with his enforced rusticity, and the circumstances that induced it,
combined to waken serious reflections; and writing on this occasion, as
Pope himself was said to write, ‘_with his reputation in his hand_,’ Sir
Richard somewhat ungenerously, when we consider the close kinship of many
of Sedley’s inclinations with his own, improved the occasion at the dead
man’s expense, wholly ignoring the assurance of gossiping Anthony à Wood
that poor Sedley, after suffering much for his offences, took up and grew
serious, and subsequently became a leading man in the House of Commons.
If this be true, it says a good deal for the recuperative moral force
concentrated in Sir Charles’s nature. Steele’s cottage stood so nearly
opposite to the little hostel, the Load of Hay, that its inhabitants, if
so minded, could have almost distinguished the features of the gentlemen
of the road who, towards sunset, occasionally drew bridle beside the
horse-block in front of the well-worn steps leading into it, to refresh
themselves with a tankard of ripe ale, or some more potent stirrup-cup,
before starting across country to Brown’s Well, or Finchley Common,
places which continued till quite modern times to be words of fear in the
vocabulary of travellers.
Pope’s contributions to the _Spectator_ led in 1712 to Steele’s making
his acquaintance, which was followed by his introducing the young poet to
his courtly friend Addison. One can fancy the fine presence and handsome
countenance of the distinguished essayist, his Sir Charles Grandison air,
and the stately suavity of his bow, which brings the side-locks of his
voluminous wig an arm’s length beyond the shapely hand laid impressively
on the breast of his deep-flapped waistcoat, and the ill-dressed, crooked
figure and sallow face of the youthful poet. But remembering that Pope
at seventeen years of age had been admitted to the company of the wits
at Wills’s, it is probable that the stately compliments of the great
moralist, whose mission it was to help reform the morals and manners of
the day, did not so much affect him as they might have done an older man
less conscious of his acknowledged power; and the nervous flushing of
the sallow cheek, the brightening of the large dark eyes, and the slight
quiver of the sensitive muscles of the melancholy mouth, may be as much
the result of infelt pride as of modesty.
[Illustration: _Sir Richard Steele._]
It was Addison who, on reading the first two cantos of the ‘Rape of the
Lock,’ pronounced it ‘a delicious little thing’; ‘it was _merum sal_,’
he said, but when Pope resolved to recast the whole poem, and asked
Addison’s advice, and the latter entreated him not to run the risk of
spoiling it, in doing so he affronted the morbidly jaundiced mind of
the poet, who, on the altered poem proving a success, called Addison’s
counsel insidious, and accused the amiable giver of it of baseness.[39]
It is a pleasant recollection not only to have seen Steele’s cottage, but
to have stood with my friend, Eliza Meteyard, in the room to the right
where some of those witty, playful, clever papers were composed, in which
the follies and vices of the times are mirrored with graphic power in the
pages of the now too rarely read _Spectator_ and _Guardian_.
[Illustration:
To
My Lov’d Tutour Dʳ. Ellis
With Secret impulse thus do Streams return
To that Capacious Ocean whence they’re born:
Oh Would but Fortune come wᵗʰ. bounty fraught
Proportion’d to yᵉ mind wᶜʰ. thou hast taught!.
Till then let these unpolish’d leaves impart
The Humble Offering of a Gratefull Heart.
Richᵈ: Steele
]
There might have been an ampler number of them, perhaps, but for the
proximity of the Upper Flask and Bull and Bush taverns, and the near
neighbourhood of the Wells. But it is still pleasant to fancy the lifting
of the gate-latch, and to see in imagination going up the garden-path,
or issuing from it, with Steele in the midst of them, Arbuthnot and Gay
and Pope, and it may be Swift, famous associates and friends, whose
almost centuries-old footsteps—for those who care to look beneath the
surface of the present—underlie the dust upon the hillside, and give the
road a charm beyond its own.
Their pungent repartees, their brilliant fancies and clever witticisms,
those mental coruscations of the moment, may yet be floating airily in
space, but the more solid portions of their intellectual riches have
become national endowments, and their harvest result is with us yet.
The commonplace row of mean shops called Steele’s Terrace marks the place
where Steele’s double-fronted cottage stood, elevated some 15 feet above
the roadway, with a large strip of garden ground before it, but solitary
even when I was accustomed to see it, no other house being close to it.
Nichols, quoted by Park, alluding to Steele’s disappearance from town
to this ‘solitude’ at Hampstead, writes, ‘It is to be feared that there
were too many pecuniary reasons for this temporary retirement,’ a
supposition generally adopted by Sir Richard’s biographers. I venture to
think that another cause existed more pressing than the importunities
of creditors or the exigencies of straitened means. Exactly one month
after Steele’s letter to Pope, describing his whereabouts, Swift, writing
to Mrs. Dingley from the old Court suburb, under the date of July 1,
1712, tells her ‘Steele was arrested the other day for making a lottery
directly against an Act of Parliament; he is now under prosecution, but
they think it will be dropped out of pity. I believe he will very soon
lose his employment, for he has been mighty impertinent of late in his
_Spectators_, and I will never offer a word on his behalf.’[40]
Feeling himself disgraced, and desirous of keeping out of the way of his
town acquaintances, seems a more cogent reason for his seclusion than the
fear of his creditors, especially when we learn that the _Spectator_,
instead of falling off in popularity, was selling better than ever and at
double its original price; and that at the close of this summer he had
taken a house for his wife in Bloomsbury Square, which does not look as
if he was in want of funds.
As for the irritable Dean, who had threatened to do nothing for him, a
little further on in his ‘Correspondence’ he is telling the same lady of
all he had done for the Whigs, and adds that he had ‘kept Steele in his
place.’[41]
Leaving Steele’s cottage, we pass England’s Lane on the left—a lane
famous for its blackberry hedges and the pleasant fields in the
neighbourhood of the late Mr. Bell the publisher’s house; but all has
changed, and the once rural lane is now a path between brick walls and
garden fences. Farther on is Park Road, leading to the newly-made Fleet
Road and Gospel Oak Station; and on the other side of the way, a little
further on, Upper Park Road, with fragrant nursery-grounds spreading over
the same distance on the right, reminiscent of the times when it was all
‘flowers and gardens’ on that side of the way to Hampstead. The road is
still attractive with its handsome houses, standing behind well-grown
trees in well-kept gardens; but formerly, on the ascent of Haverstock
Hill, the outside passenger by the old stage-coach on looking back found
himself repaid on a clear day by a brief prospect of the great city, with
‘the dome of St. Paul’s in the air,’ and all the surrounding spires,
towers, and cupolas that ascend above the city roofs.
We leave Haverstock Terrace (now Belsize Grove), leading to Belsize
Gardens, on the left, and a little above it, to the right, the sloping
grass-fields—as yet unbuilt on, but marked for speculation—and a pleasant
view, between the poplars shading the top of Haverstock Hill, of green
Highgate, and the smooth mound of Traitors’ Hill west, with Camden Town
crowding up to the new Cattle Market, and tiers of houses covering what
were once Copenhagen Fields, an engraving of which, dated 1782, lies
before me, and shows these fields with only one habitation in them,
Copenhagen House, a tea-drinking place, the popularity of which extended
for a considerable time into the present century.
The entrance to the garden is through the ribs of a whale set up
archwise, with an inscription across the top. Two individuals are
playing at bowls, whilst two others look on. In the foreground are three
gentlemen in cocked hats, long-skirted coats, and their hair _en queue_,
one of whom placidly smokes a churchwarden; while at a little distance,
watching them, are two sinister-looking men, with thick bludgeons in
their hands, and the ugly head of a horse-pistol ominously protruding
from the pocket of one of them, suggestive of a state of society to which
again I shall presently refer.
Meanwhile, Belsize Avenue dips down on the left, and a little further on
the opposite side of the road Rosslyn House, once the home of the clever
but unscrupulous Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn, who began life as
‘plain Mr. Wedderburne, a Scotch lawyer,’ and lived to be Lord Chancellor
of England.
But the Wedderburnes, though poor, were well descended, and it is said
that backstairs influence was not spared to second his own unblushing
efforts for position. Lord Campbell tells us he was the first to deny
the right of the poor, ‘which old usage and the piety of our forefathers
had given them, to glean in the cornfields after the harvest.’ He gave
judgment also that the law of burning women alive for the crime of
coining should not be mitigated to hanging, and on the occasion of the
Gordon Riots showed himself merciless as another Jeffreys in taking life,
condemning the rioters to be hanged by scores without reference to age or
degree of culpability.[42]
[Illustration: _Rosslyn House._]
He hanged mere children, for some of these unfortunates were not more
than fourteen years of age, of whom Selwyn, who never missed an execution
or a death at which he could be present, noted in his ‘Diary’ that he
‘never saw boys cry so much in his life.’
But to return to Rosslyn House and Lord Loughborough, we read that in
politics he was without honour, siding with either party that happened
to be in power, and whether Whig or Tory it mattered not—his lordship
was always on the winning side. ‘None are all evil,’ but ‘neither wit,
nor talent, nor a splendid hospitality’ can redeem the meaner and darker
traits of Lord Loughborough’s character.[43]
Rosslyn House, formerly known as Shelford Lodge, had anciently belonged
to the Careys, who held it of the Church of Westminster. It is stated in
the ‘Northern Heights of London’ that the celebrated Lord Chesterfield
lived here for some years, while he held the Manor of Belsize, of
which it is a part, and this author suggests that his ancestors
might have called the house after their estate, Shelford Manor, in
Nottinghamshire.[44]
In 1812 Rosslyn House was occupied by Mrs. Milligan, widow of the
projector of the West India Docks. It has since been the residence of
Admiral Disney, the Earl of Galloway, Sir Francis Freeling (Secretary
of the General Post Office), and others, till it fell into the hands
of a speculative builder, who happened to fail before all the fine
timber was felled and the house wholly destroyed. The grand avenue of
chestnut-trees, which is said to be as old as Elizabeth’s time, remained
almost entire[45] (1855-56), and some well-timbered fields appeared in
the vicinity of the mansion. But the park itself has been cut up into
portions, each of which belongs to a separate proprietor, and as many
houses are scattered over it.
For four years, while the fine old house, the historical home of the
unfortunate Sir Harry Vane, was being prepared for them, Rosslyn House
was used as the Home for Soldiers’ Daughters.
A little farther on a bit of sward crops out, reminiscent of Hampstead
Green, where Collins the painter once lived, and on one side of which
still stands the house formerly occupied by Sir Rowland Hill,[46] the
inaugurator of cheap postage, and that of Sir Francis Palgrave, a
well-known writer and Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, 1838.
The central space is now occupied by St. Stephen’s Church, a structure
nominally built by public subscription, but which, I have been told,
owed its completion to the munificence of one family, old inhabitants
of Hampstead, that of Prance. They gave the clock, and subsequently the
carillon.
Some ancient elm-trees of magnificent size are left standing near the
church. At the east end of the building two paths branch out of the
main road, one leading to Pond Street and South End Green, the other to
the Home of the Sisters of Providence and the congeries of sheds which,
used as a small-pox hospital, desecrated this charming neighbourhood
in 1870-72, and in 1886 were converted into a temporary asylum for
idiots. The ground they occupy appears to be devoted to unseemly uses, a
proposition having subsequently been made to convert it to the purpose
of a cemetery, and this with the knowledge of the deteriorated value of
property in the locality, which the closing of the small-pox hospital had
not then readjusted.[47]
On the left lies Belsize Lane, and immediately past the church to the
right the road leading to Pond Street, with Belsize Grove and Lyndhurst
Road opposite.
Amongst the many notable men associated with Hampstead, Sir Stevenson
Arthur Blackwood, K.C.B., must not be overlooked. ‘My earliest
recollections,’ he writes, ‘are of Rosslyn Lodge, an old-fashioned
two-storied house, in the _then_ quiet and charming suburban village of
Hampstead.’ Rosslyn Lodge stood in the grove opposite Pond Street, facing
some shady fields which led on towards the town, about a quarter of a
mile distant.
At the top of the grove, which consisted of fine old Spanish
chestnut-trees, stood the residence of Lord Galloway (Rosslyn House),
and a path led up to the Conduit Fields. These extracts from his ‘Life’
decide the whereabouts of Sir Arthur’s boyhood’s home, which one writer,
at least, has placed at Frognal.
[Illustration: _Fields near Pond Street, 1840._]
At this point Rosslyn Street opens straight ahead, dominated by the ugly
tower of Trinity Presbyterian Church, and a little beyond Pond Street, on
the same side of the way, a new bit of road marked ‘Hampstead Gardens’
affords another charming view of Highgate. To the right Downshire Hill
leads to the lower Heath and North London railway-station, with Thurlow
Road to the left, and a little further on the same side of the way the
lane leading to the Conduit Fields and Shepherd’s Well, which till quite
modern times supplied Hampstead with water, employing a body of local
water-carriers, who made a living by vending tall pails full to the
householders at a penny a pail. The last of these old water-carriers died
an inmate of the workhouse at New End about 1868.
[Illustration: _Shepherd’s Well._]
The road becomes steeper at the entrance of Rosslyn Street, where one
looks in vain for the old ‘Chicken House,’ which Brewer describes
‘near the entrance of the village, an ancient domestic dwelling of
low proportions built of brick,’ in all probability the home of the
wood-reeve or keeper, and not, as local tradition persisted in believing
it, a royal hunting-lodge.[48]
In 1815 it was in a state of dilapidation, the front disfigured by the
presence of some miserable tenements, and in 1866 was so built in,
blocked up, and divided, that, with the exception of the wide oaken
staircase projecting into a yard at the end of the narrow alley—about
the sixth house to the right in Rosslyn Street—no part of the original
structure remained. Up these stairs on the night of August 25, 1619,
passed James I. and his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, an event
commemorated by two small portraits of the monarch and his Master of the
Hounds, preserved till late in the eighteenth century in the window of
an upper room in the Chicken House, with another painting of the infant
Christ in the arms of Simeon. Under the former was inscribed: ‘Icy dans
cette chambre couche nostre Roy Jacques premier de nom, le 25th Aoust
1619’—a legend sufficient in itself to show that the incident was an
unusual one.
Here Mr. Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, whose attachment to Hampstead
is said to have ‘amounted to a passion,’ was in the habit of taking up
his summer quarters. Towards the latter years of the eighteenth century
it was a favourite lodging-house for young gentlemen from the Inns of
Law, the Toupees, and other sprightly youths of fashion, who affected
Hampstead for the facilities the horse-course afforded of exhibiting
their talents as curricle and hackney-coach drivers.
Gale, the antiquary, also lodged here, and on one occasion commissioned
Signore Grisoni to make a drawing of the picturesque old church, an entry
of which is preserved in the Trust Book.[49]
In 1754 Gale returned to the Chicken House, where he died. He was buried
in the old churchyard. To the left of Rosslyn Hill, a little removed from
the road, at the commencement of the bank, which shows the depth to which
the hill has been cut down, stands the large red-brick mansion, occupying
the site, and in part formed of, Vane House, a staircase of which is
preserved.[50] It is now the Home for Soldiers’ Daughters, which was
formally opened for their habitation by the Royal Consort, Prince Albert,
on a summer’s day of 1860. A little beyond, on the same side of the way,
is Green Hill, where, on the site of the late eminent publisher’s house
(William Longman, Esq.[51]), stands the new Wesleyan Chapel, and, divided
from it by Prince Arthur’s Road, Stanfield House, which preserves in
its name that of the well-known marine painter, Clarkson Stanfield, who
for some years resided here, never tired of tending his pretty garden,
which has almost entirely disappeared. It is now the Institute and Public
Library.
[Illustration: _Vane House, 1800._]
On the right are Rosslyn Hill Schools and Trinity Presbyterian
Church.[52] It was formerly called Red Lion Hill. The original site
of the small secluded chapel, in which Rochemont Barbauld officiated
from 1785 to 1799, now underlies in part the present Unitarian Chapel
schoolroom.
On this side of the way, immediately facing Green Hill, stood Elizabeth
House, an old mansion, so called, it is said, from the legend of her
princely Majesty on some occasion or other having slept here. For a
considerable part of the present century it was occupied as a first-class
ladies’ school. Serjeant Ballantine’s sister and Constable’s daughters
were pupils. It is still standing, but in disguise, having been converted
into shops.
On the same side of the way is Gayton Road, a new thoroughfare,
unfinished when I left the neighbourhood (1864-65). It covers the
greater part of the space formerly occupied by the playground, gardens,
and orchards of a once celebrated school (the house—Norway House—still
stands) in the now narrow _cul de sac_ called Burford Lane, after
the name of the present proprietor, an old-fashioned, many-windowed,
two-storied dwelling.
Burford Lane is close to the town entrance to the Lower Flask Walk, on
the right-hand side of the High Street, and close by the Bird in Hand,
the coach-office where the modern omnibus deposits its passengers, as the
old stage-coach did in the days of Richardson’s _Clarissa_.
High Street and Heath Street are the great arteries of Hampstead, out
of which issue the crowded, confused ramifications which make the study
of its groves, mounts, squares, streets, terraces, lanes, and courts a
topographical puzzle to the uninitiated.
The ways leading to these intricacies all start from the two principal
streets, so that a stranger beginning at the beginning soon learns to
unravel the difficulties of the locality for all purposes of business or
pleasure. How this complicated irregularity of position and outline came
about, which makes the old town unlike any other, and how, from a hill
village of five wattled huts, shut in by the great Forest of Middlesex,
it grew to be a place of fashionable resort, and gradually enlarged to
its present extent and settled respectability, with its tens of thousands
of inhabitants, claiming municipal rights, will be set forth in the
following chapters.