Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

A few of the houses in Well Walk in the early part of the century were probably of this description, and, I suspect, of an earlier date than the flat-faced, narrow-windowed brick edifices with fan-lighted hall doors that faced the Walk in the fifties. Instead of that decorous straight line, I imagine irregularity in the appearance, as well as in the positions, of the original structures, which followed no fixed plan, but were added to as wanted.[233]

Neither do I imagine that the tenements which arose between the date of the advertisement of the letting of the Wells, and that which announces their opening in the summer of the same year (1701) could have been of very solid construction. There was no time for the work that English builders in those days put into the building of brick houses, and everything shows that the preparation for the convenience of visitors to the spa must have been of a hurried, and for the most part of a temporary, nature.

Very soon we read of bun-houses and raffling-shops, which appear to have been set up over against the Long Room, from which some years later Steele crossed over to watch the cheating play in one of them. In deference to the religious wants of the visitors, we find the proprietor of the Wells building a chapel at his own expense, of which I shall have more to say farther on.

Happily, the most interesting, from its associations, of the Wells buildings, the Long Room, still exists in Weatherall Place, a long, low, white structure when I first knew it, of timber, brick and mortar. It has been used as a private residence for quite a hundred years, and a late proprietor, Mr. Routh, has wholly metamorphosed its appearance by having it cased with red brick.

Sion Chapel, which afterwards became notorious in the history of Hampstead, was a much-needed and, for some time, decently conducted place of worship, at which one or other of the many ejected Nonconformist ministers of the time officiated, for even then the ancient chapel of St. Mary (now St. John’s) was almost ruinous, and inadequate to the yearly increasing number of parishioners, and so could afford little, if any, accommodation for strangers.

From 1701 to 1712-13, that happy period when, as Dr. Gibbons tells us, the Wells were frequented by ‘as much and as good company as go yearly to Tunbridge Wells, in Kent,’ the searcher of old newspapers will find concerts of vocal and instrumental music, as well as other entertainments, to have been constantly advertised to take place in the Long Room. The prices of admission to the concerts were one shilling in the morning, and (except on extraordinary occasions) sixpence in the evening, when, ‘for the convenience of gentlemen returning to town,’ the concerts commenced at five o’clock. The early hour is suggestive of the then state of the roads in the suburbs of London. At this period a stage-coach started for Hampstead every morning, from the Greyhound in Holborn, and another from the Chequers, returning at night,[234] besides a carrier daily; but in all probability the coachmen preferred driving home by daylight, not only on account of the roughness of the roads, but to avoid running the risk of being stopped by highwaymen on their track, or at the meeting of the ways at the half-way house, the Old Mother Red-Cap, a place noted for waylaying the coaches, probably from the facility of escape which the divergence of three separate roads afforded.

It happened, fortunately for the fashionable visitors to the Wells, that the summer meetings of the Kit-Cat Club, which had been instituted a few years before (though some say after their opening) coincided with the period of drinking the Hampstead waters, and as people walked after dinner in those days, some one or other of the witty brotherhood would often saunter down from the bosky covert of the gardens of the Upper Flask, or across the Heath from the Bull and Bush, at Wildwood Corner (as Camden calls North End) to greet their friends in the Long Room or in the walks, or look in, as Steele was wont to do (with an eye to copy and the correction of morals), at the cheating play in the raffling-shops, the proprietors of which appear to have been knaves of the worst order. Steele took great pleasure in exposing them. It is to such a passing inquisition that the subscribers to the Tatler in the summer of 1709 owed the witty paper that describes one of these rogues as ‘a person deep in the practice of the law, who, under the name of his maid Sisly, had set up this easier way of conveyancing and alienating estates from one family to another.’

Some years later, the Spectator informs us—probably by the same hand—that ‘a Count figures amongst this fraternity, who is humorously described as “the errantist Count of all the Courts of England,” and who, believing the fair diversion-table at Hampstead to be all foul play, has vouchsafed to set up another himself, in imitation of it.’ The company, under these circumstances, became, we may be sure, considerably mixed; adventurers of both sexes found their way to the upland village, and the idle and profligate, as well as the invalid and ennuyé, mingled with personages of rank and fashion at the Wells.

Card-playing went on all day in the Long Room, and dancing pretty well all night. But, then, card-playing was the general amusement of all classes in that day. At Hampstead it became a passion, especially with women, ‘who, possessed by excitement and avarice, and in the hope of winning seven guineas for one by giving the enamelled ball a graceful twirl to induce it to fall upon four cards nominated for luck’s sake, out of two-and-thirty, staked and lost money, diamonds, beauty, and reputation at the fair diversion,’ as our essayist calls it, all which had been translated from the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury and Red Lion Square to the Wells and raffling-shops of Hampstead.

It is not until 1710 that I find in the Postboy (April 18) the following advertisement: