They may call me an old fogey, these spry youngsters who follow so keenly their elaborate pastimes, but I laugh in my beard and chuckle to think how in its day our generation was more active, though it made less fuss about its amusements. Schoolboys of that day did not need to be harnessed and driven to their games, undertaken with spontaneous mirth rather than with solemn zeal. We never wasted a holiday in applauding the feats of professional champions, and our wholesome spring, surely, had a better chance of a lusty winter. I sometimes go out a country ramble with a contemporary who has sons brought up at schools that make a religion of athletics; then we have to leave his young hopefuls behind, lest they should be a clog to our gouty feet. I never—more’s the pity—can get any son of mine to encounter the stiles and the clay-bottoms of Middlesex. Such simple recreation is voted “too much fag” by an age that has little relish for sport unless spiced with excitement, costume, renown—that is, indeed, changing the very meaning of sport from doing something oneself to seeing something done by the idols of the gate and the gallery.
A popular writer has braved his public to flout this craze for athletic performances as distracting “muddied oafs” and “flannelled fools” from the great game of war. I would more humbly put in a word of lament over the decay of walking, when even the men of my time have too much gone astray after golf, which is simply an intermittent walk, attended with considerable expense, made in the unprofitable and unprofited society of caddies, and spoiled at every turn by the anxiety of driving little balls into ugly holes with instruments which a scientific observer has pronounced “singularly ill adapted for that purpose.” As for the girls who stretch their limbs at this game, as at hockey or tennis, they may be not so ill employed, since walking over Middlesex fields seems contra-indicated by their boots and other impediments.
The right way to see and love Middlesex is at the jog-trot pace of Shanks’ mare, breaking no wind and no records. In my guide, Around London, I have traced many paths which are also pointed out to willing eyes in other booklets of the kind. The present volume’s aim is to take a more general and sweeping view of this county; yet I hope, as we trudge along together, to give the reader many hints as to where and how he may explore its often hidden charms. As for matters of history, statistics, geology, and so forth, I refer him to the tomes in which I should have to look for such information, only advising him that a certain encyclopædia must not be trusted in its flattering of Middlesex soil as “mainly gravelly.” Let him not go by that authority when choosing his boots for a tramp here. Nor should they be seven-leagued boots, as thus, in every direction, their first stride would take him over the border of a neighbour shire. On one side, indeed, less than four miles beyond the limits of a London borough, he can shake off the dust of this county in Herts; on another, he has only to cross the Lea to be in Essex before he seems to have got clear of London streets; on a third, any bridge of the Thames will take him into Surrey, from which, when all is said and seen, he may be in no haste to get back into Middlesex.
II
HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE
THE Switzerland of Middlesex is a name that has been fondly given to those heights closing the vista up northward openings from Oxford Street. Hampstead ranks as a London borough, and so should stand out of the scope of our survey. But we cannot pass by the cream of the county’s scenery, even though it has been half spoiled to make the choicest of suburbs, a crowd of homes for the classes, and a holiday resort for the masses, with suburblets and dependencies of its own in once outlying hamlets like South Hill, North End, Child’s Hill, Belsize, and so on, not to speak of adjoining districts that cling to its skirts by such usurped titles as South Hampstead and West Hampstead.
Middlesex has other hills as high and bold as Hampstead, which owes its eminent amenity to a topping of Bagshot sand, here rarer than in Surrey, giving a dry and broken surface, natural nursery for heath and copsewood. Heedless digging out of sand and gravel has but increased the picturesque irregularity; and even the enclosures filched from the common in former days add a charm of contrast, where the richer greenery of private groves or avenues masses itself above the scarred mounds and hollows, so wildly overgrown, so deviously threaded by embowered tracks among thorny tangles, bosky knolls, thickets of bracken and broom. It takes a poet to describe the manifold aspects of this half-tamed wilderness:
Thine ever-shifting looks surprise:
Streets, hills, and dells, trees overhead now seen,
Now down below, with smoking roofs between—
A village revelling in varieties.
Then northward, what a range, with heath and pond,
Nature’s own ground; woods that let mansions through,
And cottaged vales, with billowy fields beyond,
And clump of darkening pines and prospects blue.
The “village” itself, grown to a borough of more than eighty thousand people, may well be said to “revel in varieties,” all the more now that its smart, newer streets make a frame for the intricate ascents on which stately mansions, snug villas, and tumbledown cottages stand huddled together; and trim suburban roads are still here and there lined with the remains of park-like avenues. Hampstead is much changed in our time, but, more conscientiously than most suburbs, it clings to fragments of the past, unwilling to destroy scenes and buildings whose embalmed memories go to keep up its rents.
This favourite purlieu of London has larger books than mine devoted to its history. Through the mists of the past is dimly seen a homestead clearing in the great Middlesex forest, that became a manor of Westminster Abbey and a hunting-ground of our kings; then, by-and-by, a resort of Londoners when they could stroll out safely across the open fields of St. Pancras and Marylebone. At the time of the Plague it made a camp of refuge, as it had done from a great flood of the Thames in the previous century, and would do again when, on its wooded heights, homeless families looked back to the glare of the Great Fire, which they took for a prelude of the Judgment Day. The Middlesex elections were at one time held on the Heath, serving also for a racecourse and fair-ground. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Epsom and Tunbridge Spas set the fashion, the chalybeate well at Hampstead became a resort, like other wells about London that had long enjoyed a name as miraculous remedies. The Hampstead Spa, still commemorated in Well Walk, soon came to be a scene of idle diversion and heady revels, more like to kill than cure, about which the village of lodgings grew fast, as Defoe notes, “even on the very steep of the Hill, where there’s no walking Twenty yards together without Tugging up a Hill or straddling down a Hill.” Several other pleasure-grounds sprang up in the vicinity, such as the once-famed Belsize Gardens, the most noble that Pepys ever saw, before the mansion was turned into a “folly-house,” precursor of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. This suburban Vanity Fair advertised among its attractions “twelve stout fellows completely armed to patrol between Belsize and London”—a guard which had to be increased as robbers swarmed like flies round the concourse of gamblers. The sign of the “Flask” preserves the name of another resort in vogue for a time. Our Bank Holiday Saturnalia seem a flicker of those more expensive high-jinks that went out in a snuff of scandal. The Long Room of the Wells is said to have been turned into a chapel, of better repute than their Sion Chapel, which, like the Fleet, was once notorious for illicit marriages. After ranking for a time as “one of the politest public places in England,” in the latter part of the century Hampstead seems to have had a quieter reputation, when the philanthropist Thomas Day brought his wife here to be out of the world; and it figures as a secluded spot in the Fool of Quality, that Sandford-and-Mertonish romance so much admired by Charles Wesley and Charles Kingsley. Here also are laid some of the scenes of Clarissa Harlowe, and of Evelina.
By this time Hampstead was attracting famous residents as a retreat from the smoke and din of London. It had borne a humble name for laundresses from a time when they might have ducked Falstaff in its ponds. In the age of wigs and waistcoats we have glimpses of Steele, Addison, Goldsmith, Johnson, the Kit Cat Club, and, indeed, almost all the literary notabilities, as occasional lodgers or visitors; then about a century ago Hampstead drew together a galaxy of artists and poets, who found inspiration in its lovely surroundings. A later inhabitant, Coventry Patmore, tells us how Millfield Lane, leading round Caen Wood