THE VILLAGE OF HIGHGATE The London County Council deserves well
of historians and architects alike for its publication of the monumental Survey of London, in. co-operation with the London Survey Committee which provides the text and illustrations. The seventeenth volume on The Village of Highgate, as part of St. Pancras parish, is not merely attractive for its long series of plates of the fine houses of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which still stand or have but lately disappeared. It is also the first account of old Highgate which can be regarded as trustworthy, for the authors, Mr. Percy W. Lovell and Mr. W. McB. Marcham, have made a close study of the manor records that other local historians ignored. The volume covers only that part of Highgate which lies in St. Pancras, and therefore in the County of London, but the topography of this portion is for the first time made clear. For example, Arundel House, which the Earl who collected pictures for himself and for Charles I built as a suburban retreat on a grand scale, and in which Bacon caught a chill and died, stood on the very top of the hill where St. Michael's Church now stands, and not, as earlier writers thought, in a lower part of the village. The history of Ken Wood, one of Robert Adam's finest houses, is worked out most tho- roughly, but the accounts of the smaller houses, many of them, like Church House or No. 4 The Grove, still ex- quisite in detail, are even more valuable to the local .historian. The volume is extremely cheap at a guinea.:
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