The Fields Beneath (12 page)

This information is derived from an annotated ‘Panorama’ of the main roads of the district drawn at a slightly later period by J. F. King, resident of Kentish Town and a descendant of a Huguenot family called Leroy who had settled in St Pancras about a hundred years earlier. Between Mr Cooper’s house and the Suckling home, King also shows a large house gutted by fire many years before and known in his day simply as the Ruins. Its identity, however, may be more closely established. In the 1770s there stood next to Mr Cooper’s academy a home for the blind called Emmanuel Hospital. As is the way of such institutions on the perimeter of cities, it occupied an old building – perhaps even one of those half-timbered houses built by a well-to-do merchant in Tudor or Stuart times. At all events it must have been combustible, for one night in March 1779 it was burnt to the ground. At first it was thought to have been an accident, for such fires were very common in an age of candles, oil lamps and wooden panelling, but the affair was closely scrutinised by (in the words of a newspaper report) ‘some gentlemen who live in town, but have houses in that neighbourhood and whose confidence is not to be caught by every specious appearance.’ Once again, middle-class outsiders were having their effect on the district. They formed the impression that the building had been deliberately fired by the superintendent and his wife, a couple called Lowe, with a view to collecting the insurance money from the Bird-in-Hand Fire Office. Lowe’s alibi was that he had ostentatiously left London a day or two before, but the gentlemen unearthed, through cancelled turnpike tickets and inn bills, evidence of a secret return to London by fast post-chaise. Another fast post-chaise (sent by Magistrate Fielding of Bow Street) pursued Lowe, and he was eventually caught in Liverpool, from whence he had hoped perhaps to make his escape to the newly independent States of America.

This Lowe was perhaps a fairly typical example of one type of eighteenth-century social mobility. Starting life as a servant in a livery stables, he later took a public house where he made his fortune ‘by usurious means’. He then set up as a gentleman, and one with high ideals and charitable aims. Apparently he was assiduous and skilful in collecting funds for the Hospital, and endeared himself to local Kentish Town society on that account – does the phrase ‘gentlemen whose confidence was not caught by every specious appearance’ conceal an implication about other local gentry, less fly, who were taken in by him? When cornered at a hotel by Fielding’s men he swallowed poison, killing himself. Despite the modern nature of his crime – defrauding an insurance company must have been a relatively new ploy at that date – his end seems to reach back to a pre-eighteenth-century epoch: he was buried without office at a cross-roads, and a stake was driven through his heart.

The part played by fast travel in this story is significant also as regards the development of the suburbs generally. Fifty, even twenty-five years earlier, Lowe could not have hoped to succeed in his ingenious plan, but the general improvement in roads during the eighteenth century and the development of lighter, better-sprung vehicles speeded up travel – not dramatically, as the railways were to do in the 1840s, but to an extent comparable, perhaps, with the motorways replacing old, choked routes through towns in the 1960s. No longer did coaches bound for New-market risk overturning on the King’s Road, as they had in Pepys’s day. Completely new turnpike roads like the Camden Road and Fortess Road (both following roughly the line of old lanes) and the Caledonian Road in Islington were not built till the early nineteenth century, but the improvement of existing roads and the erection of toll gates had been going on then for some time.

With better roads came better public transport services, and in this Kentish Town was peculiarly well-placed. Indeed its substantial development in the last quarter of the eighteenth century may have been, in part, a direct result of this. Most of the north-bound stage coaches out of London passed through the centre of the village (the by-pass road for Highgate, the road under Nash’s Archway that became the start of the Great North Road, was not built till 1813). In the 1780s there were still only two coaches a day each way, but towards the end of the century houses being sold in the Kentish Town neighbourhood were advertised as having ‘the great convenience of coaches to and from London every hour of the day’. First the Vine, but later the Bull and Gate (‘Boulogne Gate’) public house and the Assembly House on the opposite side of the road, were the pick-up-and-set-down point for local travellers who wished to make use of the first or final stage of one of the long-distance coaches. This circumstance must have helped turn the junction of Highgate Road with the then-twisting Fortys or Fortess Lane into the geographical centre of the village. Later, in the days of horse omnibuses, the Bull and Gate continued to be the stopping point – and terminus – for some of them, and so this was the natural place to build Kentish Town railway station in the 1860s and the tube station in the 1900s. Inertia is a considerable force in town development.

Elliott, a somewhat pompous and sarcastic old person who wrote a brief local history in the mid-nineteenth century which has never been printed, described the newly mobile nature of late-eighteenth-century life thus – with hindsight, he could see the pattern more clearly than contemporary commentators:

Commuting was, however, still a gentleman’s occupation. The fare into town on the coach was 4
d
. and presently 6
d
. – sums well beyond the reach of all but the middle classes. Ordinary people walked, then and for the next sixty or seventy years. At any rate till the coaches became frequent, many of the gentlemen must have had their own carriages or chaises anyway. It was not till the middle of the following century that the commuting clerk, with his cheap mass-transport ticket and his mass-produced terraced villa to match, became the archetypal Kentish Town resident.

Indeed some residents were very grand, or had aspirations that way. In 1777, the Kentish Town House estate – part of the Deaconsfield, with a substantial house of the Tudor period standing on it – was sold to a solicitor called Bateman with a smart town practice. He proceeded to pull the old house down and to build himself a palladian-style mansion ‘on the Model of Wanstead House’, complete with an ornamental water-garden, utilising a convenient pre-existing pond fed by the Fleet. Unfortunately this exercise in the picturesque ruined him and he was forced to mortgage the property, henceforth irreverently known to the locals as ‘Bateman’s Folly’, or, more obscurely, ‘Annuity Hall’. A more substantial estate, further up the hill on the same side, belonged to the Duke of St Alban’s.

What such residents were clearly buying was not just fresh air, peace, Hampstead Water Company amenities and so forth, but the pastoral idyll – a daydream of a world of milk-maids, shepherdesses, swains and antique innocence, which developed apace in counterpoint to the urbanisation and industrialisation going on elsewhere. This was the period of Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon and Hameau, and the English aristocracy were not without similar conceits, though they escaped paying for them in the way the French royal family paid. In 1787 we find Mrs Barbauld’s daughter writing to her mother (an indefatigable
lettriste
) from Hampstead lodgings, of the views over Kenwood where Lord Mansfield lived –

The Southampton
hameau
– Fitzroy Farm – was at the end of Millfield Lane, half way up Highgate Hill – a locality which retains even today bosky exclusiveness and some fragments of past farm buildings, though the house itself was a stuccoed ‘seat’, nothing like a farmhouse. In 1786 the Southampton family had succeeded in securing to themselves in perpetuity the freehold of the Totenhall manor of which they had been the leaseholders (see Chapter 2), and over the next two generations the cows and the green lawns were to become even sleeker on the proceeds of the erstwhile fields of west Kentish Town, which were made to yield profitable crops of bricks and mortar. The large Mansfield dairy farm covered much of what is now Parliament Hill, so perhaps the smoothness of its slopes, on which people now play football, fly kites and take their dogs and children for runs, owes something to the late eighteenth-century use of garden rollers.

Just as, in our own day, the ‘gentleman farmer’ with an interest in the stock market as well is a feature of the Home Counties commuterlands, so was he a phenomenon in Kentish Town, Hampstead and Islington in the late eighteenth century. Indeed the term was then current: in 1801 a ‘gentleman’s farm’ was advertised for auction, complete with stock, including not only cows but also books. I believe this was the St John’s College farm, whose buildings seem originally to have been on both sides of the high road just south of the point where Gordon House Road now enters it: the farmhouse was on the western side where Mortimer Terrace now abuts onto the railway land. The buildings and land on the east were acquired for a while by one Meyer Cohen – a property dealer perhaps? – and then by William Minshall, ‘a county magistrate of high respectability’. It is recorded that here he cultivated nineteen acres ‘very tastefully’. But the house and possibly some land on the opposite side of the road were bought by a real if less gentlemanly farmer, Richard Mortimer, who already had substantial holdings in the Chalk Farm – Regent’s Park area, and had a ‘cow lair’ and field next to the Castle Inn. (Later this field was bought by J. F. King’s father, who turned it into a ‘truly picturesque’ garden; such transformations were typical of the era.)

The other important local farming family were the Morgans, already mentioned several times in this account. They may have appeared in the area before the end of the seventeenth century, and by the early part of the eighteenth century one of them was bailiff to Cantelowes Manor. By the 1770s his son, William, was established in Hewett’s old house in the high street, which became known from then on as ‘Morgan’s Farm’. William died in 1787, having made a will only a few days before leaving to his eldest son James the farm with its house and contents, which included plate, linen, and a wine cellar. Clearly, even if not a gentleman by birth or education, Farmer Morgan had prospered and acquired many of the appurtenances of one, even to the aforementioned Chinese wallpaper. Two years later another Morgan, Richard, who may have been James’s son or may have been his brother, bought the chapel of ease and its plot of ground on the other side of the high street – by this time it was known as the Old Chapel, since a new one had been constructed that year further north, on the site of the present parish church. The vestry were critical of the trustees of the church lands for disposing of consecrated land in this way, and the parishioners in turn criticised the vestry for not looking after their interests better, thus allowing to be ‘sold, along with everything else that was found there, the bones and ashes of the dead to be converted into bricks, or to be trampled upon, kicked by man and beast, and shattered to pieces on the roads and fields.’ The indignation of the villagers and the terms in which it was expressed would seem to support the theory that the land round the chapel was indeed used for burials at one time, even though it had never been designated for it. (Redevelopment would not have disturbed the deeper graves, then or later. It is curious to reflect that the counters of the present Sainsbury’s stand above the bones of ancient consumers of bread, meat and eggs.) It is said that Richard Morgan used some of the old gravestones to pave the yard of his new house, and some of the chapel panelling for wainscotting – ‘
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires
…’

Writing some sixty years later, Elliott held the belief that the slow but steady growth of Kentish Town at this time was not just due to a favourable combination of circumstances, but had been helped on its way by one particular man. He wrote:

Rowley (who had the lease of the Fortys Field and lived nearby in a big house in Willow Walk) sounds like a splendid public relations officer for the district, and must thereby have extended his own practice even further, so perhaps Elliott is right to be cynical. But he adds ‘Many are the instances in which they who laboured under hopeless and apparently incurable disease have been thus restored to health and vigour,’ and adds a note concerning Robert Wright’s marble-topped table.