But one was free to wander in the unpruned wilderness and forgotten flower-garden, and under the large-limbed magnificent trees, the planting of which one or other of the Tradescants might have superintended.
At this time Belsize Lane was absolutely rural.[295] Great elms shaded its high grassy banks, with woodbine, wild-rose, and elder blowing in them. There you might still hear a ‘charm of birds’ on summer mornings, and gather blackberries in autumn. Between 1842-45 the estate fell into the builder’s hands, and the site of the famous mansion, which had had a name in local history from the time of the Crusades, became mapped out in formal lines, parallels, and parallelograms, which have since resulted in Belsize Avenue, Belsize Gardens, Belsize Square, Belsize Crescent, etc., and with a church in its own precincts. It may be that some of the fine old elms—part of the grand avenue that led from Haverstock Hill to the mansion; they were but few when I last saw it—may remain. If so, these and the name are all that are left to remind us of Belsize House, except the sketch of it in the doggerel verse of the satirist when the Welsh Ambassador was Master of the Revels:
‘This house, which is a nuisance to the land,
Doth near a park and handsome garden stand,
Fronting the road betwixt a range of trees,
And is perfumed by the Hampstead breeze.’
Belsize Lane, 1850.
There was, when I knew it, a little-used, gloomy, thorn-hedged footpath running out of Belsize Lane to Chalk Farm—now covered with houses, but then a very solitary place of ill repute after nightfall—which on the evening of February 21, 1845, became the scene of the murder of Mr. James Delarue by Thomas Henry Hocker, a young man only twenty-one years of age, who was convicted and executed. Jealousy was said to have provoked the crime, but the treachery, falsehood, and cruelty of the culprit appear to have hardened all hearts against him.[296] This is how Lucy Aiken writes of the unsavoury affair: