If, instead of walking across the Heath, we desire to return to the town, we must turn back to Cannon Place, at the western end of Squire’s Mount Cottages, and, crossing the road at the bottom to the right, keep down a short lane, at the end of which is Well Walk. Keep straight past the Burgh, and Wetherall House, and, still bearing to the right, above the new districts of Gayton and Gardener’s Roads—the latter probably so called in memory of the allotments, formerly the garden, playground, and orchard of a rather celebrated school—keep on down Flask Walk to the High Street. Or return by Christ Church Road, here leading east and west; or by way of New End to Heath Street. And this reminds me that New End requires some notice.
Squire’s Mount, about 1840.
It marked, no doubt, as its name implies, a new epoch in the growth of Hampstead, and an attempt at making a straight street, which the genius of the place appears to have resented, the outline of New End representing that of an ill-proportioned funnel, with its mouth to the east, and its narrow termination in Heath Street, where, on both sides of the way (for the place was sadly in request by tramps journeying to London), used to be posted up ‘To New End and the Workhouse.’ Park does not mention the neighbourhood, except to notice the purchase by the parish of Mrs. Leggatt’s mansion for the new workhouse. Yet in 1811 there were fifty rateable tenements, besides some untenanted, in the district; eight of them rated at £25 per annum, one at £60—the residence of a Mr. Richard Otley—were probably private residences.
These houses rose on the rim of the bowl in which Mrs. Leggatt’s handsome red-brick mansion (as we see it to-day the façade remains unaltered) was set down, a reason, no doubt, for disposing of it, and which was objected to on the part of some of the people in authority as likely to prove detrimental to the health of its future inmates. From the schedule before me of the old materials, it is possible to rehabilitate the mansion, the body of which forms the centre of the present workhouse, and relieves, with brilliant ruddiness, the added ugly gray buildings overlooking it. It had a ventilator and turret on the roof; there were bows to the parlour, dining, and drawing rooms looking to the east, a probably uninterrupted view originally.
These rooms had handsomely stuccoed ceilings, cornices, and mouldings, and marble chimney-pieces, carved, no doubt, after the lovely fashion of their day, with an old Roman triumph, or a procession of Ceres, or a vine-crowned Bacchus and Bacchantes. The great stairs, with mahogany hand-rail and banisters, sprang up from the ground-floor in the centre of the building to the two-pair story; and these, and all the marble chimney-pieces, except those left in the Master’s room, and the room over it, were to be taken at a valuation by the contractors, unless available in the work. All the offices were at the west side, or back, of the house; there was a clinker-paved stable, a laundry, and greenhouse, and what are called stewing-stoves in the kitchen—in short, all the appointments of a well-arranged establishment, the finishing touch to which is suggested in the enriched chimney caps.
Since then the character of the whole district seems to have fallen, and New End is chiefly occupied by humble shops and cheap lodging-houses. The square, an imperfect triangle, still asserts itself superior to the dingy, sordid neighbourhood, about which the less said the better.