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It was on Highgate Hill that the great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some believe to have written Shakespeare’s dramas, fell a martyr to his scientific enthusiasm. Driving up this chilly eminence one winter’s day when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred to him that, from its chemical constituents, snow must possess admirable preservative properties, and he accordingly resolved immediately to put this theory to the proof. Stopping his carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he purchased a fowl and stuffed it carefully with snow. Being in weak health at the time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home, became so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord Arundel’s house at Highgate. There a damp bed aggravated his seizure, so that in a few days he died, in 1626.
Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new roads and streets of shops being more general. With the end of the eighteenth century, Highgate became a populous little town, but its outskirts did not altogether lose their terrors for travellers. Suburban villas had begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads, who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth, reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at leisure. It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads. They spared him the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one else about, and so it did not matter in the least how loudly he might shout for help. Among minor articles of spoil, they secured a remarkable watch which had been given him two years before as a testimonial by his many admirers. The dial represented his face in character when singing his popular comic song, “Me and my Neddy.” The robbers, seeing this, immediately recognised him. Looking at one another, they could not make up their minds to rob him of his treasure, and so they gave it back, Grimaldi goggling and grinning at them the while, as on the stage. So, with a vivid recollection of Sadler’s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they left him.
It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names beginning with the letters “A” and “H.” Cockneys have ever—or ’ave hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey, ’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.” The classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a Mayoral banquet.
“Don’t you think ’Iget pretty?” he asked.
“Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you long enough to say.”
“I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the ’Ill.”
Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the Hill, through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into East End, Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until quite recently so greatly cut off from London by these comparatively Alpine heights and the lack of suburban railways, that it was, for all practical purposes, as distant as many other places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on more level roads or on direct railway routes. To remedy this the Archway Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East End, saving half a mile in the distance to be travelled and a hundred feet in the height to be climbed.
The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the hill-top. The Hill is a great outstanding knob of London clay, a substance both difficult and dangerous to pierce; but it was not until the work was nearly completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily before the labours of the day had been begun. The present open cutting of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place of the projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the purpose of carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap. If an unlovely, it was in its way an impressive, structure, even though the impression was, rather of the nightmare sort. It was scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at no time a place of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to cross the Archway Road by a circuitous route. Highgate Archway has now disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure, spanning the road without the support of the cumbrous old piers which, until the summer of 1900, continued to block three-fourths of the way. It has gone because the road-traffic has grown with the suburbs and the way was not wide enough; but its disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town and country met.
The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high. Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill. Sixpence was levied on every laden or draught horse.
It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this direction. In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no less than £13,000. The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving £9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the road was to be declared free. It was accordingly opened free of toll in 1876. And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it was demolished and the roadway widened. The present Archway was opened in 1900.