There were three alehouses in Hampstead in 1552 and three after suppressions by the justices in 1630. Victuallers were often prosecuted for keeping disorderly houses in the 17th century, when offences included Sunday drinking in 1641 and a quarrel resulted in death in 1653. Alehouses nonetheless multiplied: after several had been suppressed at the petition of the minister and others, a further nine innkeepers remained to be investigated in 1667. Licences for Hampstead and Paddington were to be renewed only if one of the justices lived nearby in 1673.
Since Hampstead was not on a major road from London, it lacked large hostelries for travellers. The number of inns rose with the exploitation of the wells and of Belsize House but thereafter remained fairly constant throughout the 18th century. Thirtyfour alehouse keepers were licensed in 1723, 30 in 1726, 37 in 1730, 34 in 1751, 1760, and 1770, and 27 in 1800. They included the licensees of two coffee houses in 1730 and, soon afterwards, of the Long Room connected with the wells. Most of the identifiable inns were in Hampstead town, but a few were on the road from Camden Town or on the Heath, and at North End, West End, or Kilburn.
Kilburn Wells were merely an 18th-century adjunct of the much older Bell Inn. The chalybeate spring in Abbey field was encased in a brick reservoir dated 1714 but apparently not exploited until 1742, after Hampstead’s waters had become known. The Bell’s proprietor advertised his extended gardens, refurbished house, and great room for polite public entertainments in 1773. Visitors were given an ’eminent physician’s’ account of the waters but little was recorded of their use, which had ceased by 1814.
The garden of the Bell, with grottoes and summerhouses, was popular c. 1840, when patrons could watch the trains speed by.
The brick reservoir survived the rebuilding of the Bell in 1863 but had been built over, behind the corner of Belsize Road, by 1896.
The Britannia in Fairfax Road, built by 1872, was used by many sports clubs early in the 20th century. A new building was opened on the other side of a roundabout, at the corner of Hilgrove Road, in 1971.
At North End the Bull and Bush, dated traditionally from c. 1645 but probably from c. 1700, in 1876 furnished a rare example of ‘the old Hampstead tavern garden’; the inn was reconstructed in 1924, a few older windows being retained.
The Chicken House, opposite Vane House, in 1807 was an old building said by tradition to have been visited by James I and to have been a hunting lodge of James II; it may have been licensed only for a few years c. 1760-70.
Closer to the springs, in Well Walk, was the Green Man, licensed in 1751, perhaps connected with an earlier Whitestone tavern and demolished in 1849 to make way for the Wells hotel (later tavern).
Jack Straw’s Castle in 1837 still had its tea gardens and in 1876 had for long been favoured by artists and writers. They included Washington Irving c. 1824 and Dickens, who from 1838 often read manuscripts to his friends over dinner there. By 1914 it was associated with theatrical figures, boxers, and many local clubs. As a three-storeyed building with bay windows, it was given a castellated addition soon after 1834; after damage in 1941 it was rebuilt to a controversial design by Raymond Erith and Quinlan Terry, with white weatherboarding and battlements, in 1962.
In Haverstock Hill the Load of Hay, so named by 1723 although said once to have been called the Cart and Horses, had a varying reputation. Its boisterous landlord Joe Davis (d. 1806) was widely caricatured in prints and patronized by the nobility, whereas Washington Irving remembered it for its rowdy Irish haymakers.
In 1863 the Load of Hay was rebuilt and from 1965 until 1974 it was called the Noble Art in honour of the Belsize boxing club and of a gymnasium behind used by the British Boxing Board of Control.
The Lower Flask in Flask Walk, rebuilt in 1873-4 as the modern Flask tavern, and the Upper Flask, in Heath Street, owed their names, if not their existence, to the exploitation of the Hampstead Wells. Both figured in Clarissa Harlowe, the Lower Flask as ‘a place where second-rate persons are to be found, occasionally in a swinish condition’.
Mother Huff’s Tavern was recorded on the Heath, near the Elms, in 1680 and was mentioned in a play printed in 1706. It had different licensees in 1723 and 1730, although Mother Huff herself in 1728 had moved only recently to the Hoop and Bunch of Grapes at North End.
The original host of the Spaniards, was thought to have been the servant of the Spanish Ambassador. Wrote Anna Maxwell in 1912: “The inn is extremely old, and its date unknown : the upstairs parlour is rich in oak beams, and the savour of age. The coffee-room below interestingly covers the boundary of two parishes : the closing licence at the Hampstead end extended, to 12.30, while that of the Finchley end expired at 11 o’clock. It is not surprising to find that the fireplace in this comfortable old room is found in the Hampstead parish, and that the side door in this part of the house was a more popular exit than the front door into Finchley. The tea-gardens are memorialised by Dickens, for it was from here that he represented Mrs. Bardell being fetched away by the young man from Dodson and Fogg, and unsuspectingly conducted to the Fleet Prison.”
Its pleasure gardens, with an artificial mound and mechanical tableaux, were depicted by Chatelaine in 1750.
It was the subject of controversy in the early 1960s after a proposal by Finchley Council to demolish the tollhouse on the east side of the road in order to improve the flow of traffic. An early victory for conservationists was marked in 1967 by the building’s conveyance to the G.L.C. and its repair by the Hampstead Heath and Old Hampstead Protection Society
The Swiss Cottage tavern had a former pugilist, Frank Redmond, as its first landlord in the early 1840s and became famous as the starting point for foot races along Finchley Road. After much alteration a new building was finished by 1966; it was in the original style, that of an alpine chalet, made popular after the opera Le Chalet was performed in Paris in 1834.
Returning to the pond, along the Spaniard’s Road, we find the Upper Flask Inn. “No remnant of old Hampstead is more arresting than the sight of the high, strong garden wall at the summit of Heath Street, with its ancient towering trees within.” wrote Anna Maxwell in 1912. She continues: “More than two hundred years ago, the inn was called the Upper Bowling Green but the velvet turf bowling-green has been diminished in size, a large portion of it now forming the lawn of the neighbouring garden, High Close. At the eastern extremity of the original grounds, a postern gate once gave entrance to foot passengers from London, who might walk hither over the Kentish Town Fields and East Heath. This place was the summer resort of the forty-eight members of the Kit-Kat Club, which existed from the year 1700 to 1720″.
On the club’s dissolution c. 1720 the Upper Flask continued as a tavern until the 1750s, when it became the residence later called Upper Bowling Green House, which made way in 1921 for Queen Mary’s maternity hospital.
The Wells Tavern in 1876 also had tea gardens, although much smaller than those of its predecessor the Green Man. At the Vale of Health there were tea gardens, scornfully described by Dickens, from 1841 or earlier until the Second World War.
Sources:
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.
“Hampstead, its historic houses, its literary and artistic associations” Anna Maxwell (1912)
A History of Middlesex