Gay and Pope both refer to the Tottenham Fields, and William Blake, painter and poet, sings of
‘The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood.’
Where Harrington and Ampthill Squares now stand ‘stretched fields of cows by Welling’s Farm,’[9] the reputed proprietor of 999 ‘milky mothers of the herd,’ which could never be increased to 1,000, a singular tradition common to the fields by Clerkenwell, and to the once green pastures between the Old Kent Road and Peckham. A lady well acquainted with Hampstead tells me that the same legend existed with regard to a local cow-keeper, a Mr. Rhodes,[10] in the early years of the present century.
A venerable friend of the writer’s in the fifties, an old inhabitant of the neighbourhood, remembered that where Francis Street now is there were fields called Francis’s Fields running up to the Tottenham Court Road, which few persons cared to pass through after dark. Some houses then below what is now Shoolbred’s had little gardens with green palings before them, which she specially remembered from the figures of the traditional blind beggar and his daughter, who so marvellously escaped the Great Plague of London, ornamenting one of them. Harrison Ainsworth has preserved the story in one of his graphically-written novels. A gentleman tells me that an old lady born in 1800, and only lately deceased, remembered as a child waiting in the evening at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street till a party of six or more persons collected, when, in fear of footpads, they were convoyed across the fields to Kentish Town by a watchman.
Camden Town, which had been begun to be built in 1791, consisted for the most part of one-storied brick or weather-boarded houses, the outlines of some of which could be traced in my own time, though heightened and otherwise altered. Other houses, with gardens and orchards lying wide apart, led up to the half-way house we have just mentioned—the Old Mother Red Cap—where, at the point where the roads to Hampstead and Highgate diverge, stood, as it still stands, Brown’s Dairy. A thatched cottage in those days, with deep eaves, and little leaded, diamond-paned casements sparkling under them. Over the half-hatch door of this rustic dairy-house ladies and children from the neighbourhood of the old-fashioned squares (who took their morning walk through a turnstile at the top of Judd Street, leading by hawthorn-shaded hedgerows to the open fields), were wont to refresh themselves with a cup of new milk, or equally innocent sweet curds and whey.
At the top of Tottenham Court Road, in the fields on the left-hand side, were the remains of a mansion, the removal of which my old friend Valentine Bartholomew, the artist, remembered. It gave its name to the road, and is said to have been a palace of Henry VIII.’s; it was taken down towards the end of the last century (1791).
On the same side of the way stood a well-known tavern and tea-gardens, called the Adam and Eve,[11] the bowery arbours, lawns, smooth bowling-green and garden-alleys of which have been ill-exchanged for the gin palace opposite its site.
This house is mentioned in the curious trial of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq., and others, in the King’s Bench, May 30, 1787, for conspiracy against his wife, Lady Strathmore—a postboy, one of the witnesses of the lady’s forcible abduction, having orders to hire a chaise with excellent horses, and wait at the Adam and Eve, described as on the road to Barnet. ‘Lady Strathmore, while shopping in Oxford Street, was made prisoner, and the peace officer who presented the warrant, a creature of her husband’s, under colour of taking her before Lord Mansfield, had her carriage driven up the Tottenham Court Road, Mr. Bowes himself on the box, where, meeting the postboy, he bade him follow in the chaise.’
Twenty-seven years afterwards Leigh Hunt tells us Mr. Bowes was still in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, expiating, on the debtors’ side of the prison, his misconduct to his wife, and the non-payment of the fine to which he had been condemned.