The Fields Beneath (13 page)

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:

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:

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.

Another eighteenth-century house survives, with a mansard roof, and a second-hand car dealer on its ground floor, on the corner of Fortess Walk, once Willow Walk. Its memory goes back not only to willow trees but to the days when Willow Walk, now cut off short by Fortess Road, curved round in a crescent to meet the main road again, enclosing a paddock where Dr Rowley kept his horses, and passing
en route
another so-called Old Manor House – in reality, another eighteenth-century gentleman’s abode.

Further north up the Highgate Road there is the Bridge House, hiding behind a later pebbledash facade, and several cottages in College Lane, including a doll-sized pair with a triangular scrap of garden (appropriated from the public way by stealth, undoubtedly) and a sign saying ‘Ancient Lights’ nicely painted yellow to match the rest of the woodwork. Then, just before the point where the lane runs under its own specially-constructed arch beneath the Hampstead Junction Railway, it crosses a remarkable and now carefully preserved survival of Kentish Town’s late eighteenth-century prosperity in the shape of a row of bow-windowed shops, fronting a cobbled lane running between College Lane and the high road. It is called Little Green Street – the only reminder left that the main road at this point used to be known as Green Street – and the shops no longer sell coffee, ribbons and mousetraps but have become carefully modernised homes. Next to them, on the high road, are two more houses which are probably also eighteenth-century, but they have been altered almost out of recognition. One has a pleasant rose garden in front: the other, blinded by ill-shaped modern windows, is fronted by a wilderness of overgrown plants, bits of broken plastic, wall paintings, slogans and other signs of radical decay. A decent tallow-chandler once made his candles here.

But the finest survival of this era is Grove Terrace, at which point College Lane emerges from its tunnel and runs openly along the facade of the terrace between it and the lawns stretching down to the main road – a bit of waste which managed
not
to get squatted on in the eighteenth century – before losing its identity irrevocably in Woodsome Road. The terrace has twenty-seven houses, all much of a kind but not uniform, varying in detail within a gentlemanly consensus of opinion about what a town house should look like – for these were some of the first houses built in Kentish Town which conformed to the prevailing recipe for a town residence rather than aspiring to be a Gothic cottage, picturesque retreat or villa fit for a retired Roman general. They were a portent of things to come but, with the exception of a run of pleasant houses built soon after near Jeffreys Street at the other end of the town, few of the later Georgian, neo-Georgian or Victorian terraces that were to swallow the fields of Kentish Town were constructed with Grove Terrace’s fine detail as to iron-work and cornices. Within are elegant staircases, fireplaces and ceiling mouldings. Yet this terrace, now pointed out as a noteworthy example of what the eighteenth century could do when it tried, was, like much architecture of that period, put up by a builder without benefit of architect. Indeed perhaps its delightful irregularity is due, in part, to the rule-of-thumb techniques of uneducated men, who didn’t have much use for grand plans like Thomas Nash’s but knew what the genteel public liked: a nice Grecian style doorway, a nice balcony to show themselves on on summer evenings, a convenient iron holder for a lamp over the front gate, a walled garden behind and a mews for their chaises and traps – nothing opulent, no palace-facade over-all such as the great squares of London; just three- or four-storey family homes for people who liked decent brick combined with fresh air.

J. F. King’s depiction of the terrace is a particularly good example of the method he employed throughout. He shows several houses built, with scaffolding up, and the rest of the view is of the field that was there before. For the ‘Panorama’ does not embody what Kentish Town was actually like in (say) one given day in 1810, but is a retrospective record, made rather later in the century, presumably with the aid of previous sketches, and showing concurrently buildings which did not, in fact, coexist. It is clear from the notes accompanying it that King’s intention was commemorative and valedictory. As a lifelong resident of the village he wanted to record it at a phase which he could remember clearly but which was passing by the time he was adult. But it is not to be supposed that he necessarily deplored the changes he saw in his life time – or, to be more precise, he probably deplored them emotionally, but felt that this was an unworthy attitude, that one must move with the times, that after all these new terraces were very fine and a sign of progress. For example, ‘That portion where the trees and Barn stand, Six excellent houses are built. House No 25 is where farmer Holmes lived; the whole space is known as Holmes Terrace.’

The population of the whole of St Pancras parish in 1776 was stated to have been only 600 people, and though this is now thought to have been an underestimation the overall dimensions of the total would not allow for a very large error. By 1801 the number of people had increased to 32,000. Admittedly a large part of this huge increase would be accounted for by the 1790s development of Camden Town – which from now on we allow to fall away from our account of Kentish Town, as a place with a separate life of its own – and by the new and crowded development of Somers Town to the south of it. But it is plain that Kentish Town proper had grown too, if less spectacularly. The decision in the 1790s that the old chapel would no longer accommodate the populace was a sign of what was happening, and in 1817 the one that had been built to replace it further up the road had, in turn, to be enlarged.