Copyholds were readily procurable, and Hampstead was soon dotted about in various directions with weather-boarded or brick dwellings, so that by the end of the seventeenth century twelve houses had risen upon the demesne, two upon the freeholds, and 257 upon the copyholds, besides cottages, barns, brewhouses, etc., together with a dancing-room, shops, and other tenements in connection with the Wells.[7]
In the first year of the present century we find that Hampstead possessed 691 houses, which in 1811 had increased to 842, with 5,483 inhabitants, and there were seventeen houses building, and forty-five unlet.
In 1815, when Britton revisited it, he tells us that Hampstead, from a beautiful rural village, had become a town, with hundreds of mean houses (intended for lodging-houses) disposed in narrow courts, squares, and alleys, many of them uninhabited.
Yet the rate of building mentioned was insignificant compared with its after-progress. In 1861 the inhabited houses had increased to 4,340, with 385 uninhabited dwellings, and 169 more in course of building, while the population of the whole parish amounted to a total of 32,271 persons, a very remarkable feature in the succeeding census of Hampstead, 1871, being the preponderance of female inhabitants, who exceeded by 711 the entire population of the previous census in 1861.
If anything can invest these dry details with interest, it is the contrast they present between the Hampstead of the past and present. At the census of 1891 the inhabited houses numbered 9,528, with 687 uninhabited, 461 in course of erection, whilst the population in the four wards comprised in the parish of St. John amounted to 68,425 persons. The population of Hampstead at the present time (1898) is said to be about 78,000. In thirty years houses and inhabitants had doubled their numbers. The man who published a book in 1766, called ‘London Improved,’ which proposed to make the New Road, now Euston Road, the boundary of building in that direction, ‘otherwise the Hills of Hampstead and Highgate may be expected to become a considerable part of the suburbs of London,’ wrote prophetically, for London stretches out its infolding tentacles on all sides, and is only nominally divided from them. This New Road, as it continued to be quite recently called, though made under the Act of the twenty-ninth of George II. (1746) under the control of the Hampstead and Highgate trust, intersected level fields from Tottenham Court Road to Battle Bridge.
It takes us a little aside from the story of Hampstead, but is a pleasant prelude to it, and one can hardly refrain from giving a glance at the London approach to the beautiful village as it existed at the time of, and for a considerable period after the opening of the New Road.
Midway on the south side of the road stood the Bowling Green House, famous for nearly a century previously as a place of rural resort, and lower down the Brill Tavern, rather more ancient than its rival.
The Old Mother Red Cap public-house (and a nickname for a shrew of the first quality, whom a recent writer claims as a sutler and camp-follower of Marlborough’s,[8] but who appears to have kept this house as long ago as 1676, and to have been widely known by the unpleasant sobriquet of Mother Damnable, under which name some doggerel verses addressed to her are preserved in Caulfield’s Eccentric Magazine)—the Old Mother Red Cap, and old St. Pancras Church, were the only interruptions in the view of Hampstead from Bedford House, Queen Square, and the Foundling, except some groups of trees near St. Pancras, and in a lane leading from Gray’s Inn Road to the Bowling-Green House.