During the two years it took in building, the Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk was rented at £50 per annum (which benefited the Wells Charity to that amount), and it was used as the parish church, although it had not been consecrated.
Meanwhile the monuments and mural tablets within the demolished Chapel of St. Mary were necessarily displaced, and have not, Mr. Howitt tells us, ‘found their way back to the depositors they marked, and the memory of which they were intended to perpetuate.’
The design of the church was furnished by a resident architect, Mr. Flitcroft,[68] ‘Burlington Harry,’ as he was familiarly called from circumstances elsewhere referred to; and the building entrusted to a resident builder, Mr. Saunderson, who was not, it appears, able to follow the original design of the church (the spire of which was very handsome) for want of funds. A note in the trust book, 1744, relating to the building of the church, throws a strong light on Mr. Saunderson’s dilemma, and the small importance of architectural beauty, or even propriety, in the minds of the trustees of that period.
‘The tower, being placed at the eastern end of the church, would be a considerable saving of expense.’ As a result of this saving, the church appears the wrong side before, with the tower and belfry at the east end, and the chancel at the west. You pass the altar on entering, and the font is at the further end. There is an altar-piece, but no east window, and the whole is further darkened by galleries north and south. Park says it is a neat but ill-designed church, and we can only repeat what Park says.
An engraving of the old church (said to be from an oil painting by Grisoni) in Park’s ‘History of Hampstead’ represents a picturesquely irregular rustic building, with low walls, rather high-pitched roofs, sharply-pointed gables, and a small open timber bell-tower. It has dormers in the roof, a square mullioned window in one gable, a different sized one in another, and other lights thrown in anywhere. A transverse addition forms the whole into an irregular cruciform structure.
Trees crowd around it at the west end, as they do at the present day, and in the graveyard are several recognisable monuments, notably that above the burial-place of the Delamere family; of Daniel Bedingfield, Clerk of the Parliament, 1637; of —— Popple, Esq., Secretary of the Board of Trade, 1722. A flat stone (recut since its discovery), beside the second pathway to the left on entering, bears the date of the Great Fire, 1666. There is also that of John Harrison, the inventor of the chronometer, who died March 24, 1776, after sixty years’ application to the improvement of watches and clocks, and of whom Mrs. Montague, writing to her brother, Mr. Robinson, from London, May 28, 1762, observes: ‘Mr. Harrison’s watch’ (the fourth, Dr. Doran says), ‘and most perfect timekeeper for ascertaining the longitude at sea’ (and for which he ultimately received £2,400), ‘has succeeded beyond expectation. Navigation will be improved by it, which all who have the spirit of travelling shall rejoice at.’[69]
The clean-swept paths, the flowery garden-graves, the close-mown turf, the shrubs and bowering trees, and the varied, often elegant tombs amongst them, give Hampstead churchyard an air of beautiful repose and quiet.[70] Two magnificent yew-trees with straight, tall, channelled trunks, centuries old, spread their wide horizontal branches over spaces ‘sacred to many sorrows.’ Beneath the first of them, to the east, is the grave of Sir James Macintosh, ‘a man,’ says Mr. Howitt, ‘of grave, practical, useful, and moderately reforming character and talents, rather than of that broad and original stamp which marks the foremost leaders of mankind.’
If we take the first path to the left hand on entering the graveyard, we pass on the side nearest the wall the tombstone of Henry Cort, ironmaster, who greatly improved the manufacture of British iron, and according to Mr. William Fairbairn, in his ‘History of Iron and its Manufacture,’ conferred on his country during the last three or four generations equivalent to six hundred millions sterling, and has given employment to six hundred thousand of the working population, but who himself was suffered to die of disappointment and broken fortune in the sixtieth year of his age. Passing on to the second cross on the right of this path, we find the headstone which marks the simple grave of Lucy Aikin, who lies at the feet of her friend and neighbour, Joanna Baillie, whose railed-in altar-tomb has still a little footpath worn by pilgrims’ feet on the grass beside it.
‘Oh, who shall lightly say that fame
Is nothing but an empty name?