The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  The Rustic Idyll

  There is, as Sir John Summerson first pointed out in his Georgian London, a fundamental distinction to be made between the suburbia which is just the untidy, sub-industrial fringe of the town – Stowe’s garden plottes, teynter yardes, Bowling alleys … and such like – and the suburbia of prosperity, the townsman’s carefully arranged stake in rusticity. In practice, however, contemporary observers do not always seem to have distinguished between the two kinds: Stowe himself complained of the ‘garden houses’, which were after all just smaller versions of the richer man’s ‘houses of recreation’ which Norden in the same year noted with approval. Clearly some of the difference must lie in the social class, and hence the eye, of the beholder.

  Those who came out to take the waters at ‘Pankridge Wells’ and to disport themselves in various ways in the fields no doubt regarded this as a nice day out in the country, while to the inhabitants of the 122 houses of the village proper, not to mention the one gentleman who kept a coach, this part of the parish near the church remained, as it had been for some time, the seedy end, dangerously close to the town and contaminated by it. Here, as we have seen, were bodies hung in chains. Here, early in the eighteenth century, was a highwayman shot, and another in 1739. By then, Woodehouse’s mansion (once Bruges’s, and the pride of Kentish Town) was quite ruined, the remains of many of its fifty chambers overgrown with grass or put to farmyard uses. The siting of the first workhouse in this area, the one from which the Osburns were dragged, in what seems to have been an already ancient building (it was found to be unsafe and ruinous in the 1770s) was probably no accident. Newspaper cuttings in the Heal Collection, and in the Guildhall Library tell a tale of highwaymen and footpads lurking in this hinterland, of horses stolen when put out to graze, of meetings of ‘dog-fighters, bullies, chimney sweeps’ and other ‘low, rough fellows’. There were suicides in these fields, duels – sometimes to the death – and occasional murders. Babies were abandoned there, alive or dead. The man who was vicar of St Pancras from 1750 till he died almost at the end of the century, Benjamin Mence, was, in the tradition of St Pancras incumbents, had up before Doctors Commons for not holding a sufficient number of services in the church proper, but was let off on account of the remoteness of the church from the village and its ‘unwholesomeness’. The burial ground was said to be a target for body-snatchers, on account of its isolation.

  The smell of the tile kilns tended to create a noxious atmosphere in the area: Louis Simond, a visitor from France, thought at first that it smelt of rubbish dumps, but remarked with his usual amiability that once you realised what was producing the smell you ceased to mind it. Goldsmith, in his ponderously satirical ‘Voyage to Kentish Town’ in A Citizen of the World (1760) describes the road from Battle Bridge to the village proper – that is, the old King’s Road – as being full of dust heaps and open drains: an early example of the rustic idyll being derided. In addition, the Fleet was still up to its old tricks of flooding, damaging market gardens and tile kilns alike and occasionally drowning cattle.

  The area round the Mother Red Cap (where the second workhouse was established towards the end of the century on the site of what is now Camden Town tube station) was hardly more salubrious: the inn attracted a dubious clientele. There was even a government proposal in 1776 that a public gallows should be set up at the fork, thus converting it into a north London Tyburn, but, although it is frequently stated that executions took place here, I do not believe the plan was ever put into practice. It was probably overtaken by the Jeffreys-Pratt family’s development of the area for housing a decade later. Instead, the pound, the stocks and the engine house belonging to the workhouse were erected on the site. The workhouse itself was a ‘handsome brick edifice’ that had seen better days and in the meantime had been an inn called the Halfway House. It was sold to the parish by Captain Fitzroy, a member of the Southampton family who had been Lords of the Manor of Tottenhall – whose land adjoined Cantelowes’ here on the west and who had recently managed to get an Act through Parliament converting their leasehold interest in the lands into a freehold for ever (see page 49).

  Meanwhile, half a mile north in the village proper, near the chapel of ease and Hewett’s house – now the property of Christ Church, Oxford – away from the poor, the dust, the floods, the fumes and the riff-raff who frequented the Wells and the Mother Red Cap, the inhabitants cultivated a rural tranquillity. A mid-eighteenth-century map of the Environs of London for twenty miles around has a ‘gentlemen’s houses’ sign at Kentish Town. One of the most archetypal of these gentlemen, and in his own way one of the most prominent, was the Rev. Dr Stukeley, the prototype of all early antiquarians and indeed the founder of the Society of Antiquaries. He was rector for many years of St George the Martyr, Queen Square, then a new and fashionable church, and late in life bought and gradually embellished for his retirement his ‘Hermitage’ at Kentish Town. He wrote in his diary:

  To compleat my felicity after 9 years assiduous enquiry, I found a most agreeable rural retreat at Kentish Town 2 miles and a ½ distant [i.e. from Queen Square] extremely convenient for keeping my horses and for my own amusement, the hither end of the village [i.e. near end] between the Castle Inn and the (old) chapel, an half-hour’s walk over sweet fields. ’Tis absolutely and clearly out of the influence of the London smoak, a dry gravelly soil, and air remarkably wholesome.

  The location given would suggest that the house was, like both the Castle Inn and the chapel, on the western side of Kentish Town high road, but other documentation makes it clear that it actually stood at that level on the eastern side of the roadway. It was on land owned since the middle ages by St Bartholomew’s the Great on approximately the site now occupied by Bartholomew Place. It was a ‘mostly new’ house previously owned by Samual Hoggin of the Castle Inn. The following year Stukeley acquired from Bart’s for £600 a lease on adjoining property – a stable, shed, cart lodge, yards and gardens, and 2 closes (i.e. hedged fields) one large and one small. He remained delighted with his purchase: ‘A vast advantage [Kentish Town] enjoys, before Hamsted and High-gate, is exceedingly soft and good water from the springs at the bottom of the sandy part of Hamsted Heath under Caen Wood. ‘Tis brought in pipes to our doors, and by my contrivance makes a little river through my garden.’ He also built on a new bedchamber to the south, and a ‘chapel’ or garden room, and enclosed two acres from the larger meadow to make a circular garden – ‘a retired place like a hermitage’. He constructed a ‘Druid Walk’ and made ‘an elegant Eve’s bower’. Later came a ‘Mausoleum’ with family pictures and also a bust of Cicero. Over the new room was a Latin inscription he translated in his diary as: ‘Oh, may this rural solitude receive, and contemplation all its pleasures give, the Druid priest.’

  Such were the diversions of elderly gentlemen in the mid-eighteenth century, when ‘the Gothic’ was a new and exciting discovery and the whole pageant of mediaevalism and the ancient world just coming into focus. It is easy today to laugh at Dr Stukeley’s eclectic enthusiasms: his ideas about Druids or indeed about Caesar’s camp at St Pancras (see Chapter 2) may have been more romantic than soundly-based, but he was showing a nicer discrimination when he put up in his private chapel in Kentish Town some broken stained glass obtained from a glazier in his native Stamford where it had been taken out of churches ‘because it darkened them’ (Stukeley was properly shocked by such a Philistine disrespect for the past). Some of the glass depicted William Bruges, also a native of Stamford and a benefactor of the church there, so Bruges came ‘home’ to Kentish Town after more than three hundred years. Stukeley was also a genuinely knowledgeable gardener; his diary records the 230 roots of crocus and gentian he planted and also the fruit trees he set himself – medlar, service, cornelian, barbery, quince, double blossom, cherry, crab, non-perel. He wrote of his house in 1761, ‘Hither I ride or walk almost every day. Sometimes I lye there, always enjoying that incomparable pleasure of the mind delighted with the rural simplicit
y and nature, having long since cast off ambition to wish for anything greater or more splendid.’ He was then in his mid-seventies, so these remarks are not those of a self-conscious philosopher trying to convince himself that he has chosen the better part, but of an old man savouring a life that cannot be destined to continue much longer (he died in 1765). By chance, the Heal Collection has preserved an advertisement from a newspaper for the year when he was laying out his garden. The seller was in the New Road (the Euston Road, then indeed brand new), which was on Stukeley’s route from Bloomsbury to Kentish Town. Was this a source for some of his rarer plants? ‘Just arrived, in exceedingly good order for planting, a great Variety of Trees, flowering Shrubs, Ferns, Gales, Mountainous and Bogg plants, collected in the different Provinces of North America …’

  By the early nineteenth century, before it was built over, the house and garden at Kentish Town was itself for many years in the hands of a nursery gardener. Dr Stukeley himself is now largely forgotten, but a street in his old parish still preserves his name. By a symmetric quirk of fate, a large portion of this street, its houses demolished, has now been turned into a garden. The creation of such a bizarre oasis in central London would surely have pleased the doctor.

  The theme of health is one to which eighteenth-century commentators on Kentish Town frequently return. The obsession with pure air, types of soil and pure water, so typical of the period, now seems something of a redundant fancy, but at the time it was rooted in a realistic anxiety. Mortality was high among the working class and even middle-class families were not spared. In his History of London (1775), Harrison was able to write: ‘At Kentish Town … the air being exceedingly wholesome, many of the citizens of London have built houses; and such whose circumstances will not admit of that expense, take ready furnished lodgings for the summer, particularly those who are afflicted with consumptions, and other disorders.’

  Indeed as early as 1725 the idea that one came to Kentish Town for one’s health seems to have been current. The Assembly House (formerly known as the Black Bull and then, in the early eighteenth century, as the Flask – not to be confused with the one at Highgate) has long possessed an oval, marble-topped table, given to the inn by a satisfied client, Mr Robert Wright. The story is that he had been very ill but was restored to health by a sojourn at Kentish Town which included a daily walk to the public house. Indeed the table still bears round its edge the inscription ‘In memoriam Sanitas Restauratae Robertus Wright, Gent. Hoc marmor posuit A. Dni 1725’. It no longer stands in the inn’s forecourt under the twin elms, for forecourt and elms have, since the mid-nineteenth century, been gone: the sole relic of the right of way that originally ran through the pub yard to become Assembly House Lane behind (present Falkland Place) was, till 1976, a strip of slanting, redundant roadway at an angle to the high road outside Kentish Town station in front of the news-stands – recently paved over. But the table is kept inside, a curious relic in a decor where the genuine remains of a florid late-Victorian temple to drink (a second re-building) are married uneasily to 1960s brewers’ early-Victorian: mock oil lamps and so forth. I expect Mr Wright chose marble because it was ‘handsome’ and would resist the ravages of beer mugs and weather; he could not possibly have foreseen that his table would endure when everything round it was utterly transformed (but see page 18).

  Another sign of Kentish Town’s growing fashionableness at the period was the Green Street races, which were announced for the first time on ‘a new track at Kentish Town’ in 1733 and were held for many years afterwards. They took place on two fields behind College Lane, the estate held in the seventeenth century by William Platt and subsequently by St John’s College, Cambridge (hence the ancient lane’s name). Lady Somerset Road, Burghley Road and a new council estate now cover the site, but College Lane itself, slotted through later developments, still winds behind the high road. A few of its cottages are very old, and the walls that line it at one point are remnants – still bearing the ghostly traces of doors and windows – of yet older buildings, put up on the ‘waste’ between the lane and the high road licitly or illicitly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. From the courtyard of the Vine (1930s mock timbering) an archway in a small brick gatehouse far older than the present inn leads through into College Lane, but where it originally led was across the lane to the Race Fields and thence to a footbridge over the Fleet – another of Kentish Town’s many lost or fragmented rights of way.

  Green Street – part of which became known now as The Grove, a typical eighteenth-century classicism – continued to be the more select end of the village as it had been since Elizabeth’s time. It was here in the later part of the eighteenth century that substantial ‘villas’ – another classicism, since debased – began to go up, fronting onto Kentish Town Green and probably encroaching on it. The Gordon House (origin of the name is lost, but it is commemorated in the road) belonged to a Mr Cooper, a wealthy man who ran a boys’ academy there and died suddenly of apoplexy one day in the last quarter of the century, while in the middle of a lesson. His was the forerunner of a whole crop of private schools which were to flourish in the area in the next hundred years. A little further up was a house lived in by J. Suckling, uncle to Lord Nelson (another Suckling uncle, William, lived down the other end of the village near the Castle, and it was in his garden that Nelson was said to have planted trees as a boy). Further up again was ‘a gentleman’s seat, delightfully situate’, and ‘a beautiful residence called the Gothic’, a name which Stukeley would have relished – indeed he may well have seen it built. On the opposite side of the road ‘a most desirable aristocratic residence’ occupied what had probably been the site of the Chomondley house in the seventeenth century.

  This information is derived from an annotated ‘Panorama’ of the main roads of the district drawn at a slightly later period by J. F. King, resident of Kentish Town and a descendant of a Huguenot family called Leroy who had settled in St Pancras about a hundred years earlier. Between Mr Cooper’s house and the Suckling home, King also shows a large house gutted by fire many years before and known in his day simply as the Ruins. Its identity, however, may be more closely established. In the 1770s there stood next to Mr Cooper’s academy a home for the blind called Emmanuel Hospital. As is the way of such institutions on the perimeter of cities, it occupied an old building – perhaps even one of those half-timbered houses built by a well-to-do merchant in Tudor or Stuart times. At all events it must have been combustible, for one night in March 1779 it was burnt to the ground. At first it was thought to have been an accident, for such fires were very common in an age of candles, oil lamps and wooden panelling, but the affair was closely scrutinised by (in the words of a newspaper report) ‘some gentlemen who live in town, but have houses in that neighbourhood and whose confidence is not to be caught by every specious appearance.’ Once again, middle-class outsiders were having their effect on the district. They formed the impression that the building had been deliberately fired by the superintendent and his wife, a couple called Lowe, with a view to collecting the insurance money from the Bird-in-Hand Fire Office. Lowe’s alibi was that he had ostentatiously left London a day or two before, but the gentlemen unearthed, through cancelled turnpike tickets and inn bills, evidence of a secret return to London by fast post-chaise. Another fast post-chaise (sent by Magistrate Fielding of Bow Street) pursued Lowe, and he was eventually caught in Liverpool, from whence he had hoped perhaps to make his escape to the newly independent States of America.

  This Lowe was perhaps a fairly typical example of one type of eighteenth-century social mobility. Starting life as a servant in a livery stables, he later took a public house where he made his fortune ‘by usurious means’. He then set up as a gentleman, and one with high ideals and charitable aims. Apparently he was assiduous and skilful in collecting funds for the Hospital, and endeared himself to local Kentish Town society on that account – does the phrase ‘gentlemen whose confidence was not caught by every specious appearance
’ conceal an implication about other local gentry, less fly, who were taken in by him? When cornered at a hotel by Fielding’s men he swallowed poison, killing himself. Despite the modern nature of his crime – defrauding an insurance company must have been a relatively new ploy at that date – his end seems to reach back to a pre-eighteenth-century epoch: he was buried without office at a cross-roads, and a stake was driven through his heart.

  The part played by fast travel in this story is significant also as regards the development of the suburbs generally. Fifty, even twenty-five years earlier, Lowe could not have hoped to succeed in his ingenious plan, but the general improvement in roads during the eighteenth century and the development of lighter, better-sprung vehicles speeded up travel – not dramatically, as the railways were to do in the 1840s, but to an extent comparable, perhaps, with the motorways replacing old, choked routes through towns in the 1960s. No longer did coaches bound for New-market risk overturning on the King’s Road, as they had in Pepys’s day. Completely new turnpike roads like the Camden Road and Fortess Road (both following roughly the line of old lanes) and the Caledonian Road in Islington were not built till the early nineteenth century, but the improvement of existing roads and the erection of toll gates had been going on then for some time.

  With better roads came better public transport services, and in this Kentish Town was peculiarly well-placed. Indeed its substantial development in the last quarter of the eighteenth century may have been, in part, a direct result of this. Most of the north-bound stage coaches out of London passed through the centre of the village (the by-pass road for Highgate, the road under Nash’s Archway that became the start of the Great North Road, was not built till 1813). In the 1780s there were still only two coaches a day each way, but towards the end of the century houses being sold in the Kentish Town neighbourhood were advertised as having ‘the great convenience of coaches to and from London every hour of the day’. First the Vine, but later the Bull and Gate (‘Boulogne Gate’) public house and the Assembly House on the opposite side of the road, were the pick-up-and-set-down point for local travellers who wished to make use of the first or final stage of one of the long-distance coaches. This circumstance must have helped turn the junction of Highgate Road with the then-twisting Fortys or Fortess Lane into the geographical centre of the village. Later, in the days of horse omnibuses, the Bull and Gate continued to be the stopping point – and terminus – for some of them, and so this was the natural place to build Kentish Town railway station in the 1860s and the tube station in the 1900s. Inertia is a considerable force in town development.