The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  Elliott, a somewhat pompous and sarcastic old person who wrote a brief local history in the mid-nineteenth century which has never been printed, described the newly mobile nature of late-eighteenth-century life thus – with hindsight, he could see the pattern more clearly than contemporary commentators:

  About the period at which we are now arrived, a new system, which has since grown into an established and almost universal practice, began to prevail among the citizens of London … Notwithstanding the highly improved measures which in their day were adopted for promoting the salubrity and comfort of the city, a constant residence at their houses of business was not only insupportable but threatened the destruction of their health. [Sic.] … In common with its neighbours, Kentish Town partook of the increase of inhabitants occasioned to the suburban villages by this passion for nightly emigration …

  Commuting was, however, still a gentleman’s occupation. The fare into town on the coach was 4d. and presently 6d. – sums well beyond the reach of all but the middle classes. Ordinary people walked, then and for the next sixty or seventy years. At any rate till the coaches became frequent, many of the gentlemen must have had their own carriages or chaises anyway. It was not till the middle of the following century that the commuting clerk, with his cheap mass-transport ticket and his mass-produced terraced villa to match, became the archetypal Kentish Town resident.

  Indeed some residents were very grand, or had aspirations that way. In 1777, the Kentish Town House estate – part of the Deaconsfield, with a substantial house of the Tudor period standing on it – was sold to a solicitor called Bateman with a smart town practice. He proceeded to pull the old house down and to build himself a palladian-style mansion ‘on the Model of Wanstead House’, complete with an ornamental water-garden, utilising a convenient pre-existing pond fed by the Fleet. Unfortunately this exercise in the picturesque ruined him and he was forced to mortgage the property, henceforth irreverently known to the locals as ‘Bateman’s Folly’, or, more obscurely, ‘Annuity Hall’. A more substantial estate, further up the hill on the same side, belonged to the Duke of St Alban’s.

  What such residents were clearly buying was not just fresh air, peace, Hampstead Water Company amenities and so forth, but the pastoral idyll – a daydream of a world of milk-maids, shepherdesses, swains and antique innocence, which developed apace in counterpoint to the urbanisation and industrialisation going on elsewhere. This was the period of Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon and Hameau, and the English aristocracy were not without similar conceits, though they escaped paying for them in the way the French royal family paid. In 1787 we find Mrs Barbauld’s daughter writing to her mother (an indefatigable lettriste) from Hampstead lodgings, of the views over Kenwood where Lord Mansfield lived –

  and the Earl of Southampton’s ferme ornée. Lady Mansfield and Lady S’hampton, I am told, are both admirable dairy women, and so jealous of each other’s fame that they have once or twice been very near to serious falling out in the dispute which of them could make the greater quantity of butter from such a number of cows. On observing the beautiful smoothness of the turf in some of the fields about this place, I was told the gentlemen to whom they belonged had them rolled like a garden plot.

  The Southampton hameau – Fitzroy Farm – was at the end of Millfield Lane, half way up Highgate Hill – a locality which retains even today bosky exclusiveness and some fragments of past farm buildings, though the house itself was a stuccoed ‘seat’, nothing like a farmhouse. In 1786 the Southampton family had succeeded in securing to themselves in perpetuity the freehold of the Totenhall manor of which they had been the leaseholders (see Chapter 2), and over the next two generations the cows and the green lawns were to become even sleeker on the proceeds of the erstwhile fields of west Kentish Town, which were made to yield profitable crops of bricks and mortar. The large Mansfield dairy farm covered much of what is now Parliament Hill, so perhaps the smoothness of its slopes, on which people now play football, fly kites and take their dogs and children for runs, owes something to the late eighteenth-century use of garden rollers.

  Just as, in our own day, the ‘gentleman farmer’ with an interest in the stock market as well is a feature of the Home Counties commuterlands, so was he a phenomenon in Kentish Town, Hampstead and Islington in the late eighteenth century. Indeed the term was then current: in 1801 a ‘gentleman’s farm’ was advertised for auction, complete with stock, including not only cows but also books. I believe this was the St John’s College farm, whose buildings seem originally to have been on both sides of the high road just south of the point where Gordon House Road now enters it: the farmhouse was on the western side where Mortimer Terrace now abuts onto the railway land. The buildings and land on the east were acquired for a while by one Meyer Cohen – a property dealer perhaps? – and then by William Minshall, ‘a county magistrate of high respectability’. It is recorded that here he cultivated nineteen acres ‘very tastefully’. But the house and possibly some land on the opposite side of the road were bought by a real if less gentlemanly farmer, Richard Mortimer, who already had substantial holdings in the Chalk Farm – Regent’s Park area, and had a ‘cow lair’ and field next to the Castle Inn. (Later this field was bought by J. F. King’s father, who turned it into a ‘truly picturesque’ garden; such transformations were typical of the era.)

  The other important local farming family were the Morgans, already mentioned several times in this account. They may have appeared in the area before the end of the seventeenth century, and by the early part of the eighteenth century one of them was bailiff to Cantelowes Manor. By the 1770s his son, William, was established in Hewett’s old house in the high street, which became known from then on as ‘Morgan’s Farm’. William died in 1787, having made a will only a few days before leaving to his eldest son James the farm with its house and contents, which included plate, linen, and a wine cellar. Clearly, even if not a gentleman by birth or education, Farmer Morgan had prospered and acquired many of the appurtenances of one, even to the aforementioned Chinese wallpaper. Two years later another Morgan, Richard, who may have been James’s son or may have been his brother, bought the chapel of ease and its plot of ground on the other side of the high street – by this time it was known as the Old Chapel, since a new one had been constructed that year further north, on the site of the present parish church. The vestry were critical of the trustees of the church lands for disposing of consecrated land in this way, and the parishioners in turn criticised the vestry for not looking after their interests better, thus allowing to be ‘sold, along with everything else that was found there, the bones and ashes of the dead to be converted into bricks, or to be trampled upon, kicked by man and beast, and shattered to pieces on the roads and fields.’ The indignation of the villagers and the terms in which it was expressed would seem to support the theory that the land round the chapel was indeed used for burials at one time, even though it had never been designated for it. (Redevelopment would not have disturbed the deeper graves, then or later. It is curious to reflect that the counters of the present Sainsbury’s stand above the bones of ancient consumers of bread, meat and eggs.) It is said that Richard Morgan used some of the old gravestones to pave the yard of his new house, and some of the chapel panelling for wainscotting – ‘Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires …’

  Writing some sixty years later, Elliott held the belief that the slow but steady growth of Kentish Town at this time was not just due to a favourable combination of circumstances, but had been helped on its way by one particular man. He wrote:

  – Nor should we omit to mention that a superintending cause of the great accession it, in the course of a few years, experienced, was to be found in the late Dr William Rowley, a physician of extensive practice, who about this time became a resident of the village. So favourable an opinion did he entertain of the amenity of its situation and the purity of its air – an opinion declared by him to be founded on philosophical experiments – that he den
ominated it ‘the Montpelier of England’, and it was his custom in almost every case where he considered a change of air necessary, to recommend most strenuously to his patients a sojournment at Kentish Town.

  Rowley (who had the lease of the Fortys Field and lived nearby in a big house in Willow Walk) sounds like a splendid public relations officer for the district, and must thereby have extended his own practice even further, so perhaps Elliott is right to be cynical. But he adds ‘Many are the instances in which they who laboured under hopeless and apparently incurable disease have been thus restored to health and vigour,’ and adds a note concerning Robert Wright’s marble-topped table.

  In fact, there had happened to Kentish Town what happened to so many villages just outside big cities at a period of urban expansion and rebuilding: like Islington, Hampstead and Paddington at the same period, and like Montmartre and Montparnasse during the mid-nineteenth-century reconstruction of Paris, Kentish Town was becoming in its small way a ‘resort’. No one managed to find mineral springs at Kentish Town, as they did at smarter and richer Hampstead – I am sure it was not for want of trying, but the soil of Kentish Town, which no matter what Dr Stukeley may have said is largely London clay, presumably defeated any such endeavour. But there was the much canvassed ‘sweet air’ and the river Fleet in its still-rustic beauty. Nor was it only those who could afford to buy or rent, or at least take lodgings there, who wished to profit from the place. A day-trippers’ trade established itself, just as it was to do at seaside resorts a hundred years later with the coming of cheap excursion tickets on the railways. Tea gardens and pleasure gardens developed. Kentish Town had always been a village of inns; many are recorded incidentally in the court rolls. Like all places strung out along the main road into a town, the village for centuries enjoyed – or at any rate tolerated – a trickle of strangers passing through. Indeed it probably took the straggling form it did because it owed much of its development to the inns: a hostelry at some distance from the next clump of houses – like the Bull and Last in the Highgate Road – could by its very presence extend the perceived boundary of the village. But now, with coaches both public and private bringing plenty of custom, and other people walking out on foot of a Sunday from the newly developed London districts just the other side of the New Road, the ancient taverns of Kentish Town enjoyed what was probably their heyday. It was to be an Indian summer.

  The most important of these was the Castle; contemporary prints show its garden laid out for customers and a rustic bridge over the stream. Its grounds covered the whole of the space now occupied by Castle and Castlehaven Roads, Kelly Street, Clarence Way and the disused South Kentish Town tube station: a horrid spot today, this last. An inventory of the place taken when Samual Hoggin died (whose house over the way Dr Stukeley bought) shows it to have been a well-appointed inn as early as the 1750s. It was presently to be rivalled in its attraction, however, by the Assembly House, further up the town. This pub was spacious enough for large gatherings of people, and it was there that house auctions were held. It possessed two acres of garden (part of which, though this is irrelevant, later became the site of the house in which this book was written). About 1780 its landlord, Thomas Wood, was advertising:

  A good trap-ball ground, skittle ground, pleasant summer house, extensive gardens, and every accomodation for the convenience of those who may think it proper to make an excursion to the above house during the summer months … A good ordinary on Sundays at two o’clock.

  Several years later Wood was still advertising his ‘larder’ in glowing terms, but appending this advertisement to a public protestation of his innocence in a recent court case. In 1785 a Sir Thomas Davenport, who had suffered a highway robbery near the Assembly House, accused Wood of having been the highwayman, on the identification evidence of his coachman. Wood was arrested, remanded in gaol tried but eventually acquitted, and two other men were hanged in his stead. However Davenport was apparently so convinced that the true villain had escaped him that he continued what amounted to a persecution campaign against Wood, who is said to have ‘died raving mad’ (in 1787) as a result of it. He is also said to have been a relative of the Sucklings and therefore of Nelson – but Nelson, like the Old Farm House (Morgans, Hewetts etc.) seems to have been something of an obsession with nineteenth-century commentators.

  Despite all the protestations about ‘healthful tranquility’ highway robbery was a feature of life in Kentish Town. At night, the high road was almost as unsafe as it had been in Clun’s day, a hundred years earlier: there was a particularly bad outbreak between the years 1775 and 1785. Newspapers of the period contain frequent reports of hold-ups – money and valuables were almost always handed over by the victims to escape a worse fate – and also advertisements of armed patrols leaving the main public houses at set hours, so that those who wished to seek the safety of numbers could do so.

  The Vine, higher up Highgate Road, also had a garden and skittle ground, and it is recorded that the landlord, Odhams, ‘being civil and obliging’, did very well and saved money. He appears in a short list of the principal landowners in the area of 1804. The Vine, the Bull and Gate, the Bull and Last – all these taverns which, like the Assembly House and the Castle, are still there today in name, had then the aspect (if no longer quite the character) of country inns. Most of them were houses that were old already, timbered constructions with wide yards in front of them. The only public house in this whole area that escaped rebuilding during the nineteenth century was the Flask, still to be seen up at Highgate. Every one of the numerous Kentish Town taverns was to be changed, over the next two generations, into an urban public house, the Victorian ‘gin palace’ that came in for so much abuse both deserved and undeserved. The gardens, paddocks and bowling greens disappeared under streets, and with them went the last vestiges of Kentish Town’s innocent pretensions to health and country virtues. They were much regretted. As so often, it was only once the area was irrevocably transformed into something else that its earlier qualities were fully appreciated. The changes which, individually, had each been regarded as an ‘improvement’ or a ‘refinement’ were, cumulatively, destructive. Moreover the destroyers were the very people who had come to the district in appreciation of it, and it was what they actually sought there that they destroyed, by their sheer presence and numbers. The paradox is a familiar one today. Elliott, writing when it was too late, could point the moral:

  The villages surrounding the metropolis … were filled with an extraneous population, to which their means of accommodation were altogether inadequate. Hence arose the necessity for the erection of new dwellings, and hence all the charms of nature were compelled to give place to the gratification of the caprice and avarice of man.

  Thus was Eden lost. But it was only subsequent generations, such as Elliott’s, who saw the matter in this light.

  By the time Elliott was writing, Kentish Town Road had become ‘a continual street of closely ranged dwellings’. This, as King’s ‘Panorama’ shows, did not happen all at once. But it is true that the building explosion that it underwent in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was largely ribbon development – not, like its name, an unpleasant twentieth-century invention, but simply the natural way expansion takes place unless deliberate efforts are made towards some other pattern. A commentator, Aiken, writing soon after the turn of the century, remarked that ‘the hamlet of Kentish Town consists of a long street ascending to the high ground near High-gate, and chiefly composed of boxes [originally ‘hunting boxes’, and hence by vulgarisation any holiday house] and lodging houses for the accommodation of the inhabitants of London, with boarding schools and public houses etc.’ Certainly the very detailed map of 1796, which enables one to walk about the place almost as in life noticing every cottage, stable, cow-lair and vegetable plot, shows the road from a little below the Castle northwards as far as Bateman’s Folly at the foot of Highgate Hill entirely fringed with properties of one kind or another, though many are spaced out
with gardens and paddocks in between. The first lateral development – Mansfield Place (now Holmes Road) and Spring Place – had also appeared.

  A very few of the houses built in these years are still there, hacked about and disfigured, disguised behind inappropriate modern shop fronts, their twelve-paned windows usually replaced by sheets of later glass. One stands just below the (rebuilt) Castle, sideways on to the road, hiding behind a fish-bar, some advertisement hoardings and a coat of dark red paint. Another stands, similarly sideways on to the main road (the later terraces always fronted the road) with a sweet shop in front of it, facing what is now a cobbled alley – Leverton Place – but was once one side of the spacious cobbled yard of the old Assembly House. It is clearly recognisable on King’s ‘Panorama’, and he comments that it ‘was formerly called Village House and occupied by Captain Finch … it was very pleasantly situate with a commanding view to and fro.’ No longer, poor house, no longer, as the clogged traffic at that well-known north London bottle-neck sits exuding fumes, and chip papers blow into the remaining segment of what was once its front plot. In its side wall the slot through which ‘night soil’ would once have been discreetly tipped to men who came at dusk with carts has been bricked up. Behind, where its walled garden once ran, is now – after an interval of several generations covered with small houses – a garden again, of a sort. There is grass, and trees, but they are often damaged, and small parties of harmless but bleary drinkers frequent the place.