ST. PAUL’S FROM HAMPSTEADST. 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 whoseNorthern Heights of London, or to books like Park’sHistory, Baines’sRecords, and Mrs. White’sSweet 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 ofThe 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.
[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 theeighteenth 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 questA fragrant wild, with Nature’s beauty drest.
To find with easy questA fragrant wild, with Nature’s beauty drest.
To find with easy questA 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.
CHURCH ROW, HAMPSTEADCHURCH 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 Hampsteadal 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
THE SPANIARDS ROAD, HAMPSTEADTHE SPANIARDS ROAD, HAMPSTEAD
ambassador, while another explanation of the sign makes its origin like that of a more widely famedKeller, whose landlord was anAuerbachman. 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 HighgateChurch, 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 quantityin 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 “recant 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, amarked 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 blockedup 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 againIn minds made better by their presence.
Of those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence.
Of those immortal dead who live againIn 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 veritableHollow-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 averbal 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’sYear 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 inSurreyas the traditional godfather of Newland’s Corner, but I see theDictionary of National Biographyallows him novilleggiaturafurther 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
HIGHGATEHIGHGATE
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 thePax 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 pointson 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.
TOnot 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 theroad 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
HIGHGATE FROM PARLIAMENT HILL FIELDSHIGHGATE 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. Furtherback, 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 mostnoticeable 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 towhich 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.,Cheapingor Market Barnet—answering to thealiasof High Barnet by its elevation of 400 feet, still shows character as an old independenttown, 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 rebuiltand 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’sLast 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, forat 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 fromclosed-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 hisSeasons, 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 openingof a trim path to Southgate. But I fear to confuse myguideesin 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 pointingto 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 theFortunes 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.”
ANolder 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 andsloughy 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—