Stanmore is a roomy and bowery place, that perhaps owes a certain air of dignified seclusion to the fact of its being reached only by a short branch of the London and North-Western Railway. The first feature that strikes one is the handsome new Church, standing beside the ivied shell of its predecessor, consecrated by Laud, in which some monuments are preserved; but there was an older church that has disappeared. One next observes that Stanmore is uncommonly well off for wealthy inhabitants, to judge by its mansions. The most illustrious of these is Bentley Priory, showing stately on the side of the wooded ridge westward. This, taking its name from an ancient monastery, has had notable owners and visitors. A century ago it was the seat of the Marquis of Abercorn, who entertained here many celebrities, among them Sir Walter Scott while he was revising the proofs of “Marmion.” After the death of William IV. Bentley Priory was occupied by Queen Adelaide, and she died here in 1849. For a time it was turned into an hotel, and when this enterprise did not prosper, the house was taken for his own residence by a well-known hotel proprietor. Stanmore Park, to the south, houses a school; and a golf-ground stretches below the partly artificial mound of Belmont, looking over to Harrow from its south edge.
On the upper side of the road, mounting beside the grounds of Bentley Priory, spreads Stanmore Common, a fine piece of heath and copsewood, whose knolls and hollows are the highest open ground in Middlesex. When the west end of the Common is left behind by the road, it rises gently to the highest point (503 feet) at the cross-roads, with an “Alpine Coffee House” for hospice. The milestone, some 200 yards ahead, marks the edge of Herts, in which the main road runs on to Bushey and Watford, with turns dropping to Harrow Weald and Pinner, and ways on the other side to Aldenham and Elstree.
At the corner of the Common behind Stanmore Hall, above the village, a path is marked for Elstree, leading down a slope and past a curious obelisk in a circle of trees, which, like the celebrated monument discovered by Mr. Pickwick, bears various interpretations, local legends varying from the tomb of Boadicea to a record of the ending of pursuit after the Battle of Barnet. The red roofs of Elstree soon come in sight, and, to the left of it, the Aldenham Lake, another canal reservoir which plays a fine part in the landscape. Elstree welcomes us into Herts and back to Watling Street, going on greenly to St. Albans, the oldest city of England, its Roman structures beheld with such wonder by rude Saxon invaders that they attributed it to the Watling giants of their mythology: hence the road seems to have taken on this name.
But one might choose rather to turn towards Harrow and the scenes of our next chapter. This we can do delightfully in various ways: by the park-bordered road coming down over Harrow Weald from the highest point of Middlesex; by a beautiful path beginning near Stanmore Church, to wind at the foot of the ridge under the grounds of Bentley Priory; or by a field-way leaving the lowest road to Stanmore on the left, just as it gets out of Edgware, and holding on past Belmont to the green lanes about Kenton. The stranger needs no guidance where the far-seen spire of Harrow makes a beacon.
VI
HARROW AND PINNER
THE road to Harrow is as crooked as the Edgware Road is straight. Through Paddington the former takes puzzling turns, in part forced upon it by the great railway terminus; and only beyond the “Royal Oak” station is its course clearly buoyed by red and yellow omnibuses. Browning lived in this quarter, beside the Regent’s Canal, where he found a touch of Venice; but it takes a poet’s eye to discover picturesqueness on the first stages of the Harrow Road, as it mounts between Westbourne Park and Maida Vale to a confluence of half a dozen ways at the “Prince of Wales.” Now choked by a tramway, it passes Kensal Green, London’s largest cemetery, where lie in peace all kinds of celebrities, from princes to authors, beneath a forest of tombstones, spaciously enclosed among streets, chimney stacks, gas-works, railway and canal banks, public houses for the cheering of mutes and mourners—an elaborate contrast to such a country churchyard as might make the weary soul half in love with death.
Thence our road runs on through the town that has grown up about Willesden Junction, which should properly be Harlesden; but, like Clapham Junction, this labyrinth of bridged platforms has made a wide cast for a name. A mile or two further the road is no better than a street; and when it at last gets out into fields across the Brent, the shades of building begin to close upon it again beside Wembley Park, its gaps of green soon becoming more and more filled up by the spasmodic growth of Sudbury, which seems uncertain whether it wants to tack itself on to Wembley or to Harrow. To the north is designed for it a new growth styled the Sudbury Model Garden City, whose placarded promises appear in the fields through which the highway turns shirkingly along the side of Harrow Hill. Henceforth known as the Pinner Road, this is the shortest way to the stations at the lower north end of Harrow, and gives off paths to its high quarters. But to them the arduous approach for wheels is by the loop road climbing the ridge at Sudbury Hill.
An opener way on foot towards Harrow is by the Paddington Canal, that, to the left of the road, indulges in most uncanal-like windings, so as to supply an ornament of the landscape. This may be gained beside Wormwood Scrubs, which, overcast by a gloomy prison, seems one of the least attractive parks of London; nor is the canal bank for a time more pleasant to the eye than to the nose, when one comes in wind of its refuse-destruction stations. But about Alperton it has pretty views of the heights of Ealing and Hanwell across the sinuous course of the Brent; then, as it gets below Horsendon Hill, that tiny Alp may be ascended for a prospect over green flats broken by straight railway-lines and by the curves of the canal. The most striking feature here is the cluster of red roofs on the wooded top of Harrow Hill, to which we can hold on by paths and lanes. But if we keep the canal bank, our warning to turn off for Harrow will be the group of idle chimneys at Greenford Green, the monument of a ruined industry—those aniline dyes, introduced by Sir W. H. Perkin, which have gone to be made in Germany.
The pleasantest way to Harrow is on the right of its titular road, by Willesden and Neasden. From the Edgware Road one can turn up Willesden Lane, rising as a lane of gentility, or by its loop, Brondesbury Park, leading past the Manor House, transformed into a girls’ boarding-school. This rejoins Willesden Lane where the latter has become the High Road, beyond Willesden Green Station in Walm Lane; then for a time one must bear with a tram-line and other traffic through the meaner part of the place. But at the sign of “The Case is Altered,” leaving the church quarter to the left, a way goes up by the “Spotted Dog” and the Metropolitan Station of Neasden to Neasden Green, here uniting with Dollis Hill Lane along the north side of Gladstone Park. Thence our way on to Harrow is rural—the first mile or so, indeed, being rather commonplace—down to the hollow of the Brent, and up, past the turning for Kingsbury Church, to a fork of roads at the top of Blackbird Hill. The left branch leads shadily and windingly above Wembley Park, that ambitious attempt at a north-western pleasure palace, whose stumpy Tower of Babel, long at a stick, will now cease to be a landmark and an eyesore. Beside Barn Hill, on the other hand, one bears to the left under the Metropolitan Railway, then over the London and North-Western Railway, skirting the back quarters of Sudbury, and coming into the highroad below Harrow at the well-named One Hundred Elms Farm. But, if the clay soil be not too well soaked, the pedestrian may take most of his way by field-paths through that green interval pointed out under the head of Kingsbury as refreshingly free from suburbification. I have walked across it on a fine summer evening without meeting a human being once I got off the roads.[B]
[B] In my guide Around London, the main paths over this interval were traced from Harrow, but not outwards, a fault that may be here repaired. The road from Willesden and Neasden forks at the top of its ascent from the Brent. Follow the right branch till it makes a sharp crook, opposite which, over a gate (left), a path mounts the side of a spacious paddock. The stile at the top opens a fine view of the Stanmore and Mill Hill heights, and henceforth the way is most truly rural. Keep the path downwards, which beyond the first hedge turns left over a stile, then, with Harrow Church in view, trends right over a large slope, and wanders into a lane beside a little bridge at Preston. A sign-post opposite shows its continuation to Kenton, crossing two foot-bridges and coming out on the road by a crooked green lane. Across the road, it is continued past Kenton Lodge by a blind by-way, at the turn of which another sign-post points the path on to Edgware. Hence its line is almost straight, made plain by stiles and wicket-gates, over a lane, past a group of red-brick hospital buildings and up a slope, from the top of which one sees Whitchurch nestling among the trees of Canons Park, and the more conspicuous tower of Edgware to the right. In the last field, near a little brook crossed by a foot-bridge, this path joins one from Edgware to Harrow, which of course would make a roundabout route from Kingsbury, yet worth taking for its long stretch of green. The direct way for Harrow is to turn left on the lane from the bridge at Preston, going up to crossways marked by a block of buildings that seem to have strayed out of a London street. Opposite this, on the right, a field-path leads to Woodcock Hill, and across the road here, by the north side of the farm, goes on to Harrow, traversing the North-Western and Metropolitan lines near where they intersect each other.