The “Crown” at Cricklewood is the terminus of bus traffic on the high-road. Thence an electric tram, coming round from Willesden, spins out the straight road as far as Edgware, through a chequer of open spaces that are every day being filled up like a backgammon board. On this road we may well hurry at tramway speed, looking for interest rather to either hand of it. As soon as we get out of what a year or so ago was the edge of building, where on the right stands a forbidding fortress of the Midland Railway, on the other side Dollis Hill Lane is about to be overshadowed by Dollis Hill Avenue. This leafy lane leads along the brow of Dollis Hill to Neasden, passing a house of Lord Aberdeen’s, more than once visited by the statesman in honour of whom its sloping grounds, now a public play-place for Willesden, have been named the Gladstone Park. Mark Twain for a time occupied the house, which has a fine view over the north-western suburbs. The word Dollis, recurring in Middlesex place-names, has been held as connected with “dole,” an old word for a mark of sharing or partition, replaced in our Prayer Book by “neighbour’s landmark”; but this is not a point on which pundits are agreed, and in many cases such names, the popular etymology of which is generally wrong, might turn out to come from an owner long forgotten.
From the back of Dollis Hill a footpath leads down to the “Welsh Harp,” the next point of note on the road. This tavern flourishes on the edge of what is the largest lake in Middlesex, or indeed in South-Eastern England, the Kingsbury Reservoir, popularly known as the Welsh Harp Water, a sheet more than a mile long, formed by damming the waters of the Brent and the Silk Brook, as a store for supplying the Regent’s Canal. Fishing, boating, and skating make attractions for customers of the landlord, who in hard winters must coin ice into gold; and in summer there are the tea-garden dissipations of a popular Vauxhall. At the top, the artificial lake’s feeders are bridged by the road; at the bottom, the Brent is released from a dam not so large as that of the Nile at Assouan; then below, the once flowery banks of this stream seem as if blighted by the Metropolitan Railway works at Neasden.
Mr. Chadband might well rebuke the writer who should compare the Welsh Harp Water to Loch Katrine or Windermere; but there is some pretty scenery to be looked for about its lower end. One surprising feature here is Kingsbury Church, that, not 300 yards off a suburban road, stands among quiet meadows almost out of sight of any house. On a slight eminence, shaded by funereal evergreens set in a frame of hedgerow timber, its red roof makes a cheerful spot of colour, and the interior shows a refreshingly old-fashioned simplicity. So close to London, one might suppose it a secluded country church, but for the predominance of elegant tombstones betraying its congregation as no mere villagers. The original structure has been claimed as Anglo-Saxon. Some antiquarian spectacles make out here the site of a Roman camp; while there seems better reason to take this King’s burgh as the first Saxon settlement in Middlesex, in a sense the nucleus of modern London, when the place may have been more populous than it is to-day, but for its annexe Neasden. The
village of Kingsbury has drifted nearly a mile to the north, where it lies stranded about its “Green Man,” past which a by-way from Harrow leads into the Edgware Road at the hamlet called the Hyde. Hyde House Farm here, a little off the highway, is understood to have given a country retreat to Goldsmith, who is heard of as lodging at other points on the Edgware Road.
The mile or so’s breadth of country stretching two or three miles back from the Edgware Road, between Kingsbury and Harrow, makes an extraordinary vacuum in the teeming life of Greater London. For reasons based on a heavy clay soil, it does not lend itself to builders’ designs. Of late a few villas have straggled on to the lanes between Kingsbury and its lonely church; else few but scattered farm-buildings break this green expanse, a preserve of real rurality, traversed by lanes and hedgerow paths giving solitary ways across brooks and meadows, northward to Edgware, westward to Harrow, so little trodden that blackberries can grow ripe here within sound of the Metropolitan Railway whistles, and the plainest hint of London’s close neighbourhood is a crop of notices to trespassers. On the north side lurk two isolation hospitals; in the centre, towards Harrow, come the hamlets of Preston and Kenton; on the south, at the foot of a bold hill-swell towards Wembley, lie the buildings of Uxendon Farm, where poor Anthony Babington was captured to answer for his abortive conspiracy. Horseflesh seems to thrive on these fat pastures. Though Kingsbury Races have been well abolished, there are stud paddocks on the Wembley side, as well as great army stables near the Edgware Road; and it was somewhere hereabouts, if one be not mistaken, that Mr. Soapey Sponge came to equip himself for his sporting campaign.