THE SPANIARDS
The old Spaniards inn, still standing on the north side of the road between the upper and lower Heath of Hampstead, deserves a brief mention, seeing that about the middle of the eighteenth century or earlier, it had attached to it a curious garden laid out by one William Staples, who was probably the keeper of the inn.[197]
A contemporary account describes how “out of a wild and thorny wood full of hills, valleys, and sandpits,” the ingenious Mr. Staples “hath now made pleasant grass and gravel walks, with a mount, from the elevation whereof the beholder hath a prospect of Hanslope steeple in Northamptonshire, within eight miles of Northampton; of Langdon hill, in Essex, full sixty miles east,” and of other eminences, the visibility of which was perhaps less mythical.
The walks and plats were ornamented with a number of curious devices picked out with pebble stones of variegated colours. There were over forty of these quaint designs, such as the sun in its glory, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the Tower of London, the grand colossus of Rhodes, the pathway of all the planets, the spire of Salisbury, Adam and Eve, the shield of David, the Egyptian pyramids, and an Egyptian sphinx: an odd association of things earthly and celestial.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Spaniards was much resorted to, especially on Sundays.[198] During the Gordon Riots of 1780, its landlord, Giles Thomas, is said to have arrested the progress of the mob bent on the destruction of Caen Wood House, Lord Mansfield’s residence, hard by, through rolling out his beer barrels into the road, and setting them abroach, thus gaining time to summon the military for the defence of the house.
SOUTH VIEW OF THE SPANIARDS, 1750.
In the present century, though the mount and the pebbled plots had disappeared, the Spaniards gardens were rendered attractive by a bowling-green, and by pleasant arbours and parterres: it was resorted to by many a party of tea-drinkers like that of Mr. Raddle, Mrs. Bardell and her friends.[199]
[Park’s Hampstead; Baines’s Hampstead; Walford, v. 445, ff.; Thorne’s Environs of London, 1876.]
VIEWS.
1. The south view of the Spaniards (showing the garden as laid out by Staples) near Hampstead (Chatelain del., J. Roberts sculp. 1750, W. Coll., reproduced in Chambers’s Book of Days, ii. 71).
2. The Spaniards Tavern, Hampstead, Middlesex, drawn and engraved for Dugdale’s England and Wales.
3. View of the inn as at present, Walford, v. 445.
4. “View of a skittle ground at Hampstead” (either the Spaniards or Jack Straw’s Castle), Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions, coloured print, pl. iv. p. 14 (1796).