Wyldes by George Barnard (watercolour)
Following the path to the left, after leaving Stow House, we come to a quiet corner of the Heath, and to an ancient dwelling. Collins’s later in the century, Tooley’s Farm is in the present day a private residence, being bereft of its pastures, the more distant of which have become roads in the Garden Suburb ; while those immediately adjacent to the farm- buildings are devoted to parklands for the benefit of the new population.
Mr. Unwin, architect and expert, who now occupies this picturesque house or unified collection of rooms, dating from different periods says that the age of the original building defies calculation. The house has now resumed its mediaeval name Wyldes, Wyldewood Corner having been mentioned in Doomsday Book, at which time the measurements of this estate were the same as in modern days. No explanation of the name can be traced other than the natural one of its wild condition, ” on the fringe of Hamstede Manour.”
Wyldes was given by Henry VI to his newly founded college at Eton. The two estates were previously the property of a Westminster conventual hospital a relic of the time when all Hampstead belonged to the abbot : “Chalcot and Wyldes lyinge and beinge in the parish of Hamstede, in the county of Middlesex, late belonging to the House of St. James in the Fields, which is situated in the village of Westminster, within the parish of St. Margarets.”
From “Hampstead, its historic houses, its literary and artistic associations”
Anna Maxwell (1912)