A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 9, Hampstead, Paddington
By T F T Baker, Diane K Bolton and Patricia E C Croot/ Edited by C R Elrington. These two parishes lay in the Holborn division of Ossulstone hundred, and before their inclusion in Greater London the parishes embraced the metropolitan borough of Hampstead and most of that of Paddington, with a total population of over 200,000.
Victoria County History – Middlesex. Originally published by Victoria County History, London, 1989.
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HAMPSTEAD: NORTH END, LITTLEWORTH AND SPANIARD’S END
NORTH END
Sandgate, one of the Anglo-Saxon boundary points, has been plausibly located at North End and probably represented a gap in the surrounding woodland. The wood, Wildwood, part of Eton College’s Wyldes estate in Hendon, probably originally extended across to the northern slopes of Hampstead Heath and by 1632 it marked the parish boundary. Until c. 1730 the ancient route across the heath to Hendon took a sharp westward turn, before turning north again. Its twists were presumably imposed by obstacles, probably dense woodland, at the location marked as Wildwood Corner c. 1672. About 1730 a cutting was made through the heath west of the old route, creating the modern North End Way (formerly Road), a more direct route to Hendon.
In the late 16th century there was a wayside cottage at the northern end of the heath. Cottages were mentioned on the northern part of the heath in 1666 and at Wildwood Corner in 1679 and 1685. By the end of the century houses around a pond where the road turned west and on both sides of the road where it turned north again formed a village called North End. The house belonging to Thomas Tidd, wheelwright, who had lived in the area since 1666, was termed a ‘mansion house’ in 1692. By 1710 there were 10 people paying 19 quit rents for 18 houses and cottages, and 2¾ a., almost all taken from the heath, at ‘over the heath or North End’. The copyholders included William Trott, a London draper, and Joseph Keble (1632-1710), the barrister and essayist, who for the sake of the air had bought a small estate, where he lived for part of the week.
Two of the 18 houses were recently built cottages at ‘le Parkgate’, later called Spaniard’s End, at the north-east end of the heath and parish. The only other building in the area was Mother Huff’s, an inn later called the Shakespeare’s Head, on the edge of the demesne land fronting Spaniard’s Road. The house, where Mother Huff claimed in 1728 to have been for 50 years, was recorded in 1680 and may have been the New inn marked on the road through Cane Wood (Kenwood) to Highgate c. 1672.
At the other side of the heath, where Heath Road branched into North End Way and Spaniard’s Road, was Jack Straw’s Castle. The inn may not have been as early as the possibly mid 16th-century brick foundations. In 1670 Henry Skerrett was licensed to enclose 2 a. of heath, between the road to Hendon on the east and an old gravel pit, as a bowling green to entertain guests. There were new buildings there in 1673, a house and a cottage next to the bowling green by 1686, and three cottages by 1711. They were then held by John Fletcher, an innholder who lost them through financial difficulties to the brewer John Vincent. The three cottages were called Jack Straw’s Castle in 1713, when Vincent acquired waste nearby. Cottages were built nearby in the late 17th and the early 18th century, some by squatters. In 1690 Silvester Killett owned a cottage next to the bowling green; in 1714 his family gave the cottage for the use of the poor.
There was modest growth during the early 18th century, with a few country houses appearing among the cottages. In North End the Bull and Bush, licensed from 1721, may have originated in the estate belonging to the Tidds in the 17th century; although the story of Hogarth’s residence there was probably apocryphal, the inn attracted artists and writers in his day. A second inn, the Hare and Hounds, was licensed from 1751. Robert Dingley (d. 1742), a City goldsmith, acquired a small house in North End in 1727 and a grant of waste in 1738. He left the estate to his younger son Charles, who made a fortune out of trade with Russia and by 1769 had bought buildings and pieces of waste in Hampstead in 17 separate lots. In 1762, when North End contained 17 houses, 3 cottages, and 2 inns, Dingley’s house, called in turn Wildwoods, North End, and Pitt House, was set in 2½ a., mostly on the southern side of the village, and included a coach house, stabling, garden, grotto, wilderness, and four other houses. Politically ambitious, Dingley invited William Pitt the elder to North End in 1763. Asserting that no ague was ever known there, he made considerable alterations, building a new wing and a gymnasium for Pitt’s children by 1766, when Pitt first moved in. Pitt returned during his illness in 1767 but Dingley, put up as a candidate to oppose Wilkes, died in 1769 after being beaten up by the mob.
Much of North End was destroyed or damaged by a parachute mine during the Second World War. The Hare and Hounds was rebuilt in 1968. Pitt House, used by the army and then left empty, was sold in 1948 to an investment company, which demolished it in 1952 and replaced it with a house of the same name; the L.C.C. acquired 3 acres of the garden in 1954. Building after 1945 was discreet and North End kept its quiet village atmosphere. The Old Bull and Bush, although largely rebuilt in the 1920s, retained two 18th-century bay windows and one venetian window. Behind it, an early 18th century pair, nos. 1 and 3 North End, remained, as did Wildwood, dating from the 18th century and tile-hung in the late 19th century. Byron Cottage and the Gothic Wildwood Lodge also survived. Michael Ventris (1922-56), the architect and decipherer of Linear B, built no. 19 North End Avenue in the 1950s. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (d. 1983), the architectural historian, lived at no. 2 Wildwood Terrace from 1936, next to Geoffrey Grigson the poet at no. 3 in 1938. Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-68), the actor manager, lived at no. 5 Wildwood Grove in the 1950s.
HOLLYBUSH HILL
In 1770 one of two new brick houses on the eastern side of North End, later called Hollybush Hill, was occupied by a wine merchant. In 1781, with another house to the south called Myrtle, later Byron, Cottage or Lodge, it was bought by John Bland (d. 1788), a City banker. In 1787 the eastern portion of Dingley’s estate, where a cottage had been demolished in 1786, passed to Bland by bequest. Most of Dingley’s estate, including Pitt House, was bought in 1787 by Abraham Robarts, another banker, who sold it in 1807 to John Vivian, solicitor to the Excise. Robarts and Vivian apparently occupied Pitt House. Byron Cottage was occupied by the judge Sir Robert Dallas (1756-1824) c. 1810, by the Quaker philanthropist Sir Thomas Buxton (1786- 1845) and his wife Hannah, sister-in-law of Samuel Hoare the younger, before 1820, and by the marchioness of Lansdowne in 1823.
HOPE COTTAGE
Hope Cottage, a weatherboarded cottage near the Bull and Bush, housed the painter John Linnell in 1822 and, after he had moved to Wyldes, his friend the painter, William Collins. Both were visited by fellow artists, including Blake, Varley, Morland, and Palmer, attracted, according to William Collins’s son Wilkie, the novelist, ‘by some of the prettiest and most varied inland scenery’.
HEATH END HOUSE
In 1734 John Turner, a rich draper or tobacconist from Fleet Street, built at Parkgate a house called the Firs, after the clump of trees which he planted on the heath and which were to be painted by Constable and others. By 1762 it was one of five houses at what was called Spaniard’s quarter. Another was Parkgate, on the boundary, then occupied by John Sanderson, architect of the parish church. Spaniards inn, which gave its name to the district, lay just over the border. About 1788 Heath End House was built on the site of three of the houses of 1762, next to Saunderson’s house, which was purchased about the same time by Thomas Erskine (1750-1823), later Lord Chancellor.
ERSKINE HOUSE
Erskine created a stuccoed house, which he called Evergreen Hill (later Erskine House), with a covered porch and very large upper windows for a room designed as a banqueting hall to entertain George III. Humphry Repton worked on the grounds, which were stocked with Scottish fir trees from Kew. Erskine bought a piece of demesne land fronting Kenwood Lane in 1804, which became an extension of his garden, linked by a tunnel under the road. He took leases in 1806 of the former Shakespeare’s Head, where the Elms was built by 1851, and in 1811 of more demesne. He left c. 1819 and by 1834 his house was occupied by Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal (1776- 1846), chief justice of the Common Pleas, who may have been responsible for building by 1848 another house on the east side of Spaniard’s Road, north of the Elms. Charles Bosanquet (1769-1850), a governor of the South Sea Co., then lived at the Firs, where his brother Sir John (1773-1847), the judge, died.
LITTLEWORTH
Small plots were taken from the heath near Jack Straw’s Castle during the 18 years from c. 1720 when the stewardship of the manor was in dispute, and in 1737 several people had to regularize their titles to land in the area by then called Littleworth. Most were local tradesmen or craftsmen like the harnessmaker Samuel Hatch or the tallow chandler John Ayres, of whose cottages one illustrated at the end of the century may have been typical. By 1720, however, the gentry had begun to move in. Three cottages, part of John Fletcher’s estate, had been converted to two houses, one of which was occupied by William Brooks, gentleman, and in 1734 was a good brick house, about half way over the heath, with a view over nine or ten counties. The house was part of lands acquired from 1720 by Joseph Rous (d. 1731), a London gentleman, and in 1744 it was sold, with adjacent parcels enclosed from the waste, to Christopher Arnold, a goldsmith and partner in Hoare’s bank, who was granted more waste in the same year. By 1762 Arnold had a house and stabling in 1½ a. bounded by North End Way and Spaniard’s Road, the whole later called the Heath or Heath House. Another cottage built before 1738, the most northerly of the Littleworth group, was enlarged, probably by Lewis Allen after 1749. By 1762 Littleworth consisted of Heath House on the east side of the Hendon road, Jack Straw’s Castle and nine cottages, on the west side, and a house and two cottages a little to the north, also on the west side.
OLD COURT HOUSE
An advertisement for Old Court House in 1839, a detached residence with extensive views, suitable for a ’family of respectability’, could have applied to any of the houses along North End Way. Old Court House was used as an estate office during the 1850s and 1860s although there is no evidence that courts were held there but the other houses continued as substantial family homes.
Lord Inverforth left his estate in 1955 to Manor House hospital. Old Court House survived, a square building with a central portico and wings, dating from the early 18th century and refaced later in the century; it was converted to old people’s flats in the 1960s.
FERN LODGE
Between 1805 and 1820 Samuel Sotheby, ‘bookseller of the Strand’, a founder of the auctioneering firm, acquired several of the old cottages and adjacent plots of waste and built the house later called Fern Lodge. He became bankrupt in 1829 and again in 1841, when he lost his Hampstead estate.
In 1841 the inhabitants of the former Littleworth in other houses included merchants at Fern and Heath lodges, a banker at Hill House, a clergyman at Camelford Cottage, a solicitor at Crewe Cottage, and several described as ’independent’. A major-general lived in Fern Lodge in 1851 and his widow and daughter were still there in 1890.
In 1948 the Hampstead Heath Protection society bought the site of Fern Lodge and presented it to the LCC, which itself compulsorily purchased the site of Heathlands in 1951, the combined ground being opened to the public as part of the heath in 1955. The LCC bought the site of Heath Brow in 1953 as a car park for visitors to the heath, and in 1955 part of the former garden of Heath Lodge, which it opened to the public in 1963.
HEATHLANDS
From 1872 until 1890 or later Heathlands was the home of Hugh M. Matheson, the Far Eastern merchant.
In 1948 the Hampstead Heath Protection society bought the site of Fern Lodge and presented it to the LCC, which itself compulsorily purchased the site of Heathlands in 1951, the combined ground being opened to the public as part of the heath in 1955.
HEATH BROW
By 1890 Sir Richard Temple, Bt., had built Heath Brow on the site of Crewe Cottage.
In 1941 a land-mine destroyed Heathlands and Heath Brow and damaged Jack Straw’s Castle and Heath House.
The LCC bought the site of Heath Brow in 1953 as a car park for visitors to the heath, and in 1955 part of the former garden of Heath Lodge, which it opened to the public in 1963.
HEATH HOUSE
The elder Samuel Hoare’s widow Hannah lived in Heath House which remained with the family until c. 1911 but was leased by 1876. It was occupied from 1888 by Sir Algernon Borthwick, later Baron Glenesk (1830-1908), the newspaper proprietor, and by 1911 by Edward C. Guinness, Viscount and later earl of Iveagh (1847- 1927), the philanthropist. When he left for Kenwood in 1919, Guinness was succeeded by his third son the statesman Walter Edward Guinness, later Baron Moyne (1880-1944).
HOARSES HILL HOUSE
The second residence of the Hoares, Hill House, was occupied after the younger Samuel’s death successively by his sons John Gurney (d. 1876) and Francis until 1895. In 1896 Sir Samuel Hoare, Bt., John Gurney’s son, sold it to George Fisher, who rebuilt the house. He sold it in 1904 to William H. Lever, later Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925), the soap manufacturer, who made further additions, including a ballroom and art gallery, and acquired the neighbouring Heath Lodge in 1911 and Cedar Lawn in 1914. Heath Lodge was demolished and Thomas Mawson designed grounds for the combined estate.
CEDAR LAWN
Cedar Lawn, which served as a hospital during the First World War and subsequently as a maternity home, was demolished in 1922. In 1925 the whole estate was bought by Lord Inverforth (1865-1955), the shipowner, and the new house named Inverforth House.
INVERFORTH HOUSE
Cedar Lawn, which served as a hospital during the First World War and subsequently as a maternity home, was demolished in 1922. In 1925 the whole estate was bought by Lord Inverforth (1865-1955), the shipowner, and the new house named Inverforth House.
HEATH HOUSE
Heath House was repaired, occupied from 1971 by Peter King, the publisher, and, despite its sale in 1977 to a property developer, survived as a ’large, square, somewhat grim-looking Georgian house of brown brick’.
JACK STRAW’S CASTLE
Jack Straw’s Castle, popular both with visitors to the wells and with travellers, was important in publicizing the attractions of the locality, with ease of access from London, proximity to the heath, and wide views. As a consequence Littleworth, the hamlet of humble cottages, was transformed into an area of villas set in extensive grounds and lost its former name, often being called simply the Heath. In 1764 the painter William Oram bought an existing plot, where by 1770 he had built a brick house and stabling. In 1777 his widow conveyed the house to Francis Willes, in 1784 knighted for secret service work as a decipherer. Willes (d. 1828) bought the adjoining plots, including the poor cottages, and acquired grants of waste to make a total of over 2 a., centred on the house later called Heathlands.
HEATH LODGE
In 1775 Jane Hemet alias Mrs. Lessingham, actress and mistress of Sir William Addington, a magistrate, was granted 2 a. of waste at Gibbet Hill, west of the road to North End, where she employed the builder Bradley to erect a house. Henry White, another builder, led protestors who, claiming that she was not a copyholder and was not entitled to the grant, filled in the excavations. In 1776 she overcame the technicality by buying a cottage at Littleworth and succeeded in building Heath Lodge in the centre of the heath, a three-storyed cube with a central semicircular bay and flanking two-storeyed wings designed by James Wyatt on the model of a villa in Italy. Mrs. Lessingham (d. 1783) left the house to Thomas Harris (d. 1820), manager of Covent Garden theatre, but it was occupied by William, Lord Byron (d. 1798), the poet’s great-uncle, in 1784.
Near Heath Lodge, the northernmost of the Littleworth houses of 1762 was three-storeyed with a semicircular bay extending to the roof; it was advertised in 1779 as lately built. In 1807 the house (the Hill, Hill House, or the Whinns) was given to Samuel Hoare the younger (d. 1847) by his father Samuel the elder (d. 1825), who in 1790 had left Stoke Newington for the healthy elevation of Heath House. The elder Samuel’s father had become a partner in Bland, Barnett & Co., the banking firm of John Bland of North End, c. 1722. The Hoares were Quaker, later Anglican, bankers, prominent in the anti-slavery movement and familiar with many leading politicians and literary figures. George Crabbe often visited Heath House and Tennyson and Wordsworth met for the first time at the Hill in 1845. For a century the family played an important part in Hampstead’s history, supporting churches and schools and other causes, and leading the battle over the heath against Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson.
Thomas Pool, who acquired Jack Straw’s Castle in 1774, built two brick houses in 1788, which c. 1820 were converted into one house south of the inn, called successively Heath View, Earlsmead, and Old Court House.
CREWE COTTAGE
Two adjacent cottages behind Jack Straw’s Castle came to be occupied by John, after 1806 Baron, Crewe (d. 1829) and his wife Frances and by Lady Camelford. At what became Crewe Cottage, Frances Crewe (d. 1818), the celebrated beauty and Whig hostess, from c. 1792 to c. 1807 entertained Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Reynolds, Canning, the princess of Wales, and Fanny Burney and her father. Her interests included helping refugees from the French revolution and she may have been influential in attracting many to Hampstead, including the marquis de Cincello, who c. 1800 lived in a house near Hill House, later called Cedar Lawn.
CAMELFORD COTTAGE
Camelford Cottage was occupied c. 1799 by Anne (d. 1803), widow of the politician Thomas Pitt (1737-93), first Baron Camelford and nephew of William Pitt, who had stayed in North End. The house passed to her son Thomas (1775-1804), the duellist, who was killed in 1804, and was afterwards occupied by her son-inlaw William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville (1759-1834), who also acquired Crewe Cottagec. 1807. Grenville was resident in Hampstead during the period when he headed the Ministry of All the Talents, which saw the abolition of the slave trade. He left c. 1813, when both Crewe and Camelford cottages were empty.
NORTH END
The combined population for North End and Littleworth increased from 108 in 1801 to 307 in 1851 and 416 in 1871. North End remained predominantly a village of agricultural labourers, gardeners, and laundresses, and in 1839 had the second highest concentration of laundries in the parish. There were a few tradesmen, like William Ambridge the grocer in 1851, whose family had lived in Hampstead since the 17th century and owned property in North End since the 18th. The two inns survived and a school had been built, largely through the support of John Gurney Hoare, in 1849 on the western edge of North End. In 1841 Pitt House was occupied by a clergyman who kept a boarding school and in 1851 there was another boarding school in North End Lodge. A solicitor lived in one of the Hollybush houses in 1841, a barrister in Gothic Cottage in 1851, and solicitors in North End Lodge and Stowe House in 1871. Wildwood Lodge, a mid 19th-century cottage orné, belonged to Queen Victoria’s dentist before 1869 and to a provision merchant in 1871, when Myrtle Lodge housed a lamp manufacturer. The poet Coventry Patmore (1823-96) lived in Elm Cottage c. 1862, and the author Dinah Maria Mulock (Mrs. Craik, 1826-87) in Wildwood Cottage from 1857 to 1864.
A new school house was built in 1872 and by 1875 there were 77 houses and cottages in North End, including a few over the border in Hendon. A house was built at the Hare and Hounds in 1879, additions were made to the Bull and Bush in 1885, and Ambridge Cottages were extended by a further three in 1887. By 1890 one house in Wildwood Terrace had become a convalescent home, a lieutenant-colonel lived in Stowe House, and two Hoare sisters lived in North End, as they still did in 1911. Most of North End was still cottages in 1890 and there were several laundries, although a new feature was the number of tea gardens. Presumably visitors included hikers and cyclists, in addition to those attracted by the Bull and Bush, celebrated in a music-hall song.