At the present day all that remains of the original Well Walk are the great elms on the bank above the bench at the Heath end of it, with two houses so facially improved that I do not recognise them, and the celebrated Long Room (Weatherall Place), converted to a private house about a hundred years ago. Gainsborough Mansions on one side of the way, and Gainsborough Gardens on the other, which memorise the name of the donor of the Wells, and the 6 acres of waste land lying about it, afford a striking proof of the growing value of ground for building purposes in the near neighbourhood of town, and the magnificent increase in the value of the Wells property to the poor of Hampstead.
In 1811 Well Walk and thereabouts contained thirty-nine houses. In one of these lived Thomas Park, the engraver, father of the precocious historian of Hampstead. It did not escape Mr. Abrahams that he was occupying a house rated at £24 per annum, which should rightly have been rated at £36. It is a pity that no inhabitant of Hampstead appears to have taken any particular notice, or have kept any record of the remarkable young man—Park junior—who, at an age when other youths are scarcely out of the playground, was eagerly collecting materials, and seeking every fragment of information he could obtain towards the history of this interesting suburb.
Beyond the fact of his valuable work[270] and that he was the son of a respectable inhabitant, we know nothing of the youth whose after-career it would have been interesting to follow.[271]
In 1817, between the publication of his first poems and ‘Endymion,’ Keats was lodging in Well Walk. The house was either the first or second from the tavern,[272] and its proprietor was Bentley, the postman. It was here, feeling the benefit that Hampstead air had been to himself, that he invited his consumptive brother Tom to join him; and here he nursed and tended him till his death, probably hastening by this act of fraternal devotion the development of the germs of the same fatal disease in himself.
His next-door neighbours were two ancient, soft-hearted single gentlewomen, whom Keats, who had a lively sense of humour, informed his sister ‘possessed a dog between them, who had grown so fat,’ ‘a corpulent little beast,’ he calls it, ‘that when taken out for its daily exercise it had to be coaxed along at the end of an ivory-tipped cane.’ The ladies, the Miss Jacksons, continued to reside in Well Walk long after Keats had left it, and the one who lived longest attained a sort of local fame and memory, from the fact of her leaving her dog a legacy, to insure its being taken care of after her death, the legacy taking the form of a life annuity to the animal.
Keats’ visit to Scotland occurred whilst he was Bentley’s tenant, and at a time when his bodily strength was scarcely equal to the fatigue of rough roads and climbing hills, and he writes:
‘I assure you I often long for a seat and a cup of tea at Well Walk.’
After his return, this walk with its seats and shade became his favourite outdoor resort; and here it was, as we have elsewhere said, that Hone saw him for the last time.