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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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.