INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
‘But if the busy town
Attract thee still to toil for power or gold,
Sweetly thou mayst thy vacant hours possess
In Hampstead, courted by the western wind.’
Dr. Armstrong.
To the inhabitants of London and its suburbs a history of Hampstead and the Heath may seem wholly unnecessary. What London lad who has not fished in and skated on its ponds, played truant in its subrural fields and lanes, gone bird-nesting in its woods, or spent delightful, orthodox half-holidays upon the heath?
As for the free brotherhood of the lanes and alleys before the plague of Board schools afflicted them, or the Board of Works stood sponsor for the preservation of the Heath, what hand’s breadth (of its mile-wide waste) of its hundreds of acres was there that they did not know and continue to renew acquaintance with on every recurrence of the high festivals of Easter and Whitsuntide?
But it is not of ‘’Appy ’Amstead’ that I am about to write, but of that older Hampstead the materials for the history of which lie scattered through many books not often read, and in the correspondence of dead men and women.
Lysons and Park are not for general readers, and such works as William Howitt’s ‘Northern Heights’ and Baines’s ‘Records of Hampstead’ are not companionable volumes. Yet I know of no intermediate work between them and mere guide-books.