The old Assembly House tavern, where Leighton Road today joins Kentish Town High Street. A segment from King’s panorama of the district. Note Mr Wright’s oval table beneath the trees. Village House stands on the left.
The Assembly House just before being pulled down in 1853, after the collapse of the coach trade with the coming of railways. Note the oval table still in evidence.
Village House, as was, c. 1900, with a shop built out in front of it but surviving, in a townscape where everything else, including the Assembly House, had been rebuilt and changed.
Village House in the 1970s (the shop still selling the same sort of things). The narrow street in front of it and alley to the side are a vestige of the right-of-way that originally ran through the forecourt of the old, country-style pub.
The ‘terrace, blackish brown’ of Betjeman’s poem, complete with ‘Zwanzigers, the bakers’, taken shortly before Betjeman’s childhood in the years immediately preceding the First World War. The terrace still stands.
An old (i.e. pre-nineteenth century) house surviving just south of the Castle, embedded in later shops.
One of the few surviving examples (this one is in Leighton Road) of the kind of gentleman’s houses still being built in Kentish Town in the 1820s and ’30s. The side-porch is a later addition, dating from when the house was divided into two dwellings. Originally it stood detatched, in its own garden.
Daniels’, the big shop of Kentish Town, part of the urbanisation and modernisation of the 1860s. The building, though not the store, survives. It occupies more or less the same site as the chapel-of-ease occupied between the mid-fifteenth and the late eighteenth century. Today part of it is occupied by Kentish Town’s independent bookshop.
The sort of building that was appearing in Kentish Town in the early 1800s. It stood more or less opposite the block in the previous picture and the heart of it, including a hammerbeam roof, is still there, concealed behind a modern facade.
‘Improvements’ 1960s-style – Kentish Town in turmoil. Note the pre-Victorian village-style shops (two of the three remain today), the re-building taking place round them, and the presence of a tower block (Monmouth House) behind. Note the name too on the estate-agent’s board.
Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books which had fallen out of print. Although the list soon diversified into biography and fiction, all the titles are chosen for their interest in spirit of place.
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Copyright
First published by Maurice Temple Smith in 1977
First published by Eland Publishing Limited
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 2010
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
Copyright © Gillian Tindall 1977
The right of Gillian Tindall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78060–023–9
Cover Image: Laying Monster Tubes from the New River, 1855 by James Baker Pyne (1800–70) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London/The Bridgeman Art Library
The Fields Beneath Page 30
