The Northern Heights
London : The Northern Reaches. By Robert Colville. (Hale. t ss.)
IT is a little melancholy to have to write of a book which is on balance definitely good that it might have joeen so very much better, yet that is the only verdict to pass on Mr. Colville's contribution to the London section of the County Series. His subject,.particu- larly Hampstead and Highgate, is full of interest and his knowledge of it is extensive. He writes, moreover, in such a way as to stimulate the reader irresistibly to go exploring for himself. He is full of attractive and out-of-the-way bits of information—as that Cecil Rhodes' ancestors once farmed the area now covered by Euston Station ; that St. Pancras- was built primarily for the beer traffic from Burton, and that the vertical measurements of one of its levels were fixed by the height of beer-barrels ; or that Boadicea is alleged to have been buried under what is now Platform 10 at King's Cross. The origins of street- or district-names—such as Admiral's House or Flask Walk ; or the derivation of Camden Town from the well-known Chief Justice Pratt who, when raised to the peerage, took the title of Camden in memory of William Camden. the famous author of Britannia, and then built a house in the district that is now London N.W.1—furnish illuminating glimpses of past history at every turn.
For all this and much else Mr. Colville must be commended—and remain commended in spite of faults which are not only numerous but avoidable. In the first place the book should have been brought up to date before publication. A volume declared to be " First published 1951 " ought not to be allowed to speak of " St. Mary- lebone Station, now owned by the L.N.E.R.," or to discuss other railway matters in terms of the pre-British Railways era. There are other similar cases of " dating." What is more serious is the use Mr. Colville makes of his space. He has 250 pages available and is obviously full of interesting matter which he could have added (there is no mention, for example, of those attractive survivals Park Village East and Park Village West, or of Dr. Crippen, who brotight such stimulating notoriety to his neighbourhood). Yet at least forty or fifty of the pages he has filled might have been spared without the smallest loss. Vice is no doubt more interesting than virtue. but to devote close on ten pages to a detailed description of Holloway Prison, which is a national institution with no more than a purely fortuitous connection with North London (and another six to Pentonville), and accord to Miss Buss and the North London Collegiate School, which sprang direct from the soil of North London, just eleven lines, is to give vice something more, or virtue something less, than its due. In the same way the pages devoted to the history and past programmes of the Embassy Theatre and the Regent's Park Open-Air Theatre make a quite inordinate demand on the space available.
Errors are not numerous, but it is clearly Professor Henry Morley's (not Professor John Morley's) books that were bought by the Hampstead Central Library in 1895, and it is surprising that no mention is made of H. G. Wells among distinguished residents in Church Row. But the outstanding solecism, the credit for which must be disputed between author and printer, is the reference twice in one paragraph to " the great Pischcnporf "; and it is strung': enough that Mr. Colville, having mentioned that the great scholar whom I will take leave to write as Tischendorf presented the Code' Sinaiticus to the Czar some ninety years ago, should omit to add that that priceless document was acquired by the British Govern- ment from the Soviet Government in 1925 and now lies in the British Museum—not a mile outside Mr. Colville's area—side side with the equally priceless Codex Alexandrinus
I hope Mr. Colville's book will sell fast enough for him to produz: a considerably revised edition at an early date—with a much less
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