Solidly Thaddle-class
Isabel Quigly
c"riPstead: Building a Borough 1650-1964 L. Thompson (Rout ledge and Kegan Paul Sunday afternoon pastime in my family, as 41' so many others, is a walk on Hampstead ,eath,to climb the peaks, squelch through the 'Huddler lowlands, pick blackberries in season tiairld, in the present one, gather firewood, feed , look at the flora and fauna and watch the natives. These natives, loosely attrued to dogs and children, are what give these Walks their anthropological kick, fitting
eir habitat as perfectly as they do, fulfilling isrie's expectations so exactly. For Hampstead
1101 just a place, a one-time borough now 'flerged in the amorphous Camden, but a way 1313f0 life, a kind of person, a style of dress and willitviour, an accent and intonation, overlaid s 0 much immigration and outside tuHuence that homo hampsteadiensis has acfoallY become, through the years, a little Qhreign and exotic; which is what makes him aracteristic of Hampstead as opposed to “ter
wh: ighgate or Blackheath or Richmond,
Thr: any of his cousins are to be found. pr homogeneity of Hampstead is, as aeileonfr history. Itshows, a matter of anIt was always a prosperous and hurrtInst a one-class society. Aristocratic, no; poc,solidly middle-class, with scarcely any renlicts of poverty, it always was and still tisCuns. Out of mid-nineteenth century stast), ICS he has neatly confirmed this: Hamp411`4c1 had more maidservants per family than ,aY other district of London, but when it trle to butlers it was way down the list
seventh—manservants belonging to an altogether grander style. The unpretentious exterior is still a local characteristic. Gumbooted on the Heath tramp the native millionaires, indistinguishable from the squatters of Kentish Town except by the breed of their dogs. Ancradded to this there's' that whiff of foreignness, dashing but a little disconcerting, which makes Hampstead women faintly recall the Russian ballet and gives them the charming but slightly dishevelled, slightly askew and bunchy look known to local anthropologists as 'artyfrumpy.' Arty-frumpiness is so widespread in Hampstead that the lack of it rather than its presence is noticeable, for it is just the result of inborn unpretentiousness overlaid by an acquired sense of something more exotic.
Professor Thompson's book is not, thank heaven when you consider its size (459 large pages, small print, lots of maps and charts), a mere history of Hampstead but a detailed study of one aspect of that history — its urban development; its story in terms of bricks and mortar, streets and layout, plans frustrated or fulfilled; in other words why, when and where this or that part of it was built or not built, from the eighteenth century when it was a village to the nineteenth when it was rather like a small provincial town, peculiarly sited near a metropolis; and on to its present condition, or rather its condition until 1964, , just before it lost its identity as a borough. This means social as well as architectural history, of course: the story of class, business, politics and intrigue; especially because Hampstead is not just a built-up area like any other but has in its centre the enormous acreage of the Heath, on which you can stand in many places and nowhere see buildings; nothing but a skyline of great trees, a sweep of grassland with bosky hollows, .where you might think yourself in open country were it not for a wasp-like buzzing (not a roar, rather a high-pitched hum) of distant traffic. When the extended Heath was finally acquired for public use in the late nineteenth century it was not an island in the middle of buildings, as it is now, but the edge of north London, the start of real country. Just as Hampstead itself, until the middle of the cen tury, had been separated from central London not by the unbroken infilling of buildings that now exists but again by open fields. Today, the great spaces of the Heath seem to out siders some sort of urban miracle, a place to take your visiting foreign friends to and watch them exclaim. Not surprisingly, Professor Thompson's history of the development of Hampstead centres on the half-century battle to preserve it as open land. This was waged, with a legal and political complexity he has managed to make if not plain at least credible, across three generations of the Maryon Wilson family, the increasingly intransigent members of which were less villains of the piece than products of an age which put the owner's private rights far ahead of anyone else's. In the end what we should now call democracy but then had a rather different face won the day and the Heath. Hampstead settled into something like its present pattern. This is not, has never been, suburban if the word is used in its normal way. It was a village that grew into a small town that gradually became linked with central London, while keeping a good deal of its original openness in the Heath. Even today, though modern circumstances have altered and ruffled it (as all small towns have been altered and standardised by modern circumstances), it still keeps some of the character it had in the eighteen 'thirties and 'forties, some of the reasons why people liked to live there. "Several circumstances render society here peculiarly easy and pleasant," wrote a literary lady who lived in Church Row in the middle of the nineteenth century:
In many respects the place unites the advantages and escapes the evils both of London and the provincial towns. It is near enough (to London) to allow its inhabitants to partake in the society, the amusements, and the accommodation of the capital as freely as ever the dissipated could desire; whilst it affords pure air, lovely scenery, and retired and beautiful walks. Because everyone here is supposed to have a London set of friends, neighbours do not think it necessary, as in the provinces, to force their acquaintance upon you; of local society you may have as much, little, or none, as you please; and with a little, which is very good, you may associate on the easiest terms.
Those "easiest terms" still persist in social life. A century ago Hampstead lacked butlers; today's social equivalent of this is a simplicity in everyday life that (though ironical eyebrows may suggest it contains its own complexities and snobberies) is restful and reassuring to those who practise it. As opposed to the sneering word 'bourgeois,' 'middle-class' seems the gentler adjective for such a way of living. "Intellectuals don't polish the bathtaps," Marghanita Laski once remarked, and though Hampstead may.not be peopled entirely by intellectuals there are enough of them around for their influence to have seeped through to the rest and made them feel that bathtap polishing and allied pursuits are foolish; which of course generates a snobbery of its own, few things being more complex than a simple-life intellectual, but at least cuts out the grosser swank of the money-orientated. Ah, say its critics, but the simple-lifers of Hampstead are all based firmly on money, like the unpretentious-looking Schlegels, and any houseowner who sold up could buy all the colour-television sets in Golders Green.
These circular and frivolous arguments, though it implies them, don't enter Professor Thompson's book, which is extremely solid and clearly not intended to while away an idle afternoon. Building a Borough is the right subtitle for it, though the reader may not realise at once how literally he should take it, how this is an architectural history without the architecture, the story of how and why things were built, not what the aesthetic result was. It is very well written; for all its bulk and the complicated doings described,
full of charm and even sprightliness. And anyone who thinks speculation in land and
bricks peculiar to our day, a modern disease needing modern remedies, should read the jingle Professor Thompson quotes from a Handbook of House Property published just ninety years ago:
The richest crop for any field Is a crop of bricks for it to yield. The richest crop that it can grow Is a crop of houses in a row.
Isabel Quigly writes regularly for The Spectator.
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