Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 11/A summer day at Hampstead

by Edward Walford

A SUMMER DAY AT HAMPSTEAD.

A song, now or lately very popular, enunciates an undoubted truth, when it says that, of all the suburbs of this great metropolis,

Hampstead's the place to ruralize.

Standing, for the most part, on ground that rises to about the level of the cross of St. Paul's, on the edge of a gravelly and sandy heath which has been dug at various times into the most eccentric shapes, the whole parish presents an appearance of picturesqueness which the demon of brick and mortar will find it difficult altogether to destroy for many a long year to come. The tenure of land at Hampstead is also for the most part copyhold, a fact which presents a firm stand against all modern "improvements" in street building, so that in all probability the twentieth century will look upon some at least of the old red-brick mansions and high-pitched roofs which delight our eyes at the present day with a pleasing variety, and are not easily to be found elsewhere within four miles of Oxford Street. Hence Hampstead has always been comparatively classic ground, the favourite haunt and home of poets and painters and artists. For where, within the magic circle of Sir Rowland Hill's suburban postal district, can our Herberts and our Stanfields find such "bits" and effects, such foregrounds and distances, as are to be found in the fields and lanes which fringe that undulating Heath? Long may that heath remain sacred and intact, the fairest of pleasure grounds for the North-London cockney on Sundays and Mondays, and of rosy Hampstead children and their nurserymaids the other five days of the week.

Hampstead is in every respect a watering-place,—except in there being no sea there. With that important drawback, it possesses all the necessary attributes: it has its donkeys, its bath-chairs, its fashionable esplanade, its sand and sandpits, its chalybeate spring, its "eligible" houses "to be let furnished," its more humble "apartments;" its "Vale of Health," where "parties" can be supplied with "hot water for tea," at various prices, from 2d. to 4d. per head; and last, not least, its fancy stationers' shop, with the proper supply of Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/185 Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/186 Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/187 Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/188 Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/189

 

---