Campden Hill
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY* THIS summer's unobtrusive opening of the famous groves and walks of Holland House as a hew London park may recall to mind Macaulay's, prophecy on the future of a house and garden which he, in common with many of the most cultivated and distinguished persons of that generation, frankly regarded as sacrosanct. To re-read his prophecy is to realise once again how very unpredictable everything is, particularly everything to do with the growth of a city, and most particularly perhaps anything to do with the growth of London. Declaring that this " wonderful . . . ancient and gigantic " city was expanding " as fast as a young town of logwood by a water-privilege in Michigan," Macaulay opined that in a few years' time it would soon have displaced " those turrets and gardens which are associated with so much that is interesting and noble, with the courtly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the counsels of Cromwell, with the death of Addison." A few old men, last survivors of their generation, would " in vain seek amidst new streets, and squares, and railway stations, for the site of that dwelling which was in their youth the favourite resort of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers and statesmen."
More than a century has passed. Although itself a sad, war-scorched shell, Holland House still stands in its own grounds, and the paths and policies along which all that was most brilliant in the European world of the third Lord Holland's day would wander talking still exist and are now likely to be preserved for as long as London and Londoners survive. But how astounded would Macaulay and his friends have been to learn that, while a country house and estate full in the path of suburban development have been spared, almost all the great private palaces which constituted the splendour of their London have gone—Lansdowne House, Norfolk House, Chesterfield House, Dorchester House, to name but a few. And we have only to think of the destruction of Berkeley Square to feel assured that future generations of Londoners will not readily forgive the landlords and speculators of the period between the two world wars, who have indeed earned for themselves a *Mr. Pope-Hennessy, a former Literary Editor of the "Spectator," is an authority on London. His book "London Fabric" was awa;ded the Hawthomden Prize in 1939. This article Is the first of a series In which he proposes to re-explore the by-ways of post-war London. name for vandalism and greed probably unparalleled in the history of any capital city in Europe. It might be no exag- geration to say that more buildings of historical and archi- tectural interest were destroyed in London by sale and demo- lition in those two selfish and careless decades than were afterwards lost in the Nazi bombardments. All this should make us doubly grateful for the preservation of Holland Park.
Living near the northern end of Holland Walk and frequently using that shady countrified lane which leads one uphill between .mossy palings to the Duchess of Bedford's Walk and then down into Kensington High Street, I have often wondered at how basically unchanged is this corner of London from what it must have been a hundred years ago. Were Macaulay to return to the spacious library, green lawns " worthy of the country house of a Lord Lieutenant," the laurels, hawthorns, lilac and laburnum bowers and standard rose-trees of Holly Lodge, the villa in which he spent the last three years of his life, he would find no difficulty in getting his bearings in the neighbourhood. Holly Lodge, described by G. 0. Trevelyan as occupying " the most secluded corner of the little labyrinth of by-roads which, bounded to the east by Palace Gardens and to the west by Holland House, constitute the district known by the name of Campden Hill," is now an adjunct of the University of London, but by and large the houses that remain on Campden Hill are still used as settings for the sort of life—civilised, comfortable, middle- class—for which they were designed. In a London which the last fifty years have turned topsy-turvy this is somehow satisfying : while Mayfair is commercialised, Bloomsbury a mass of lodging-houses, the Nash Terraces in Regent's Park perverted into use as Government offices, Hampstead a foreign colony and Wren churches lunch-hour concert-halls, it is restful to know that a few terraces on an airy hilltop in North Kensington are still permitted to perform their quiet and proper functions. Airy and salubrious even in this muggy summer's leaden-headed weather, Campden Hill, with its profusion of clematis and bright 'flowering shrubs, its ivy- wreathed porches' and neatly painted front doors, has never quite lost the air of being a calm and self-sufficient village.
That modern London is virtually nothing but a coagulation of country villages is a fact so obvious as to be often over- looked. Yet if you keep it in ,mind, you will find proof of it wherever you go. It is not only in the quiet culs-de-sac of Campden Hill, or in the more publicised areas such as Shepherd Market and Farm Street that • you stumble upon reminders of this fact. Bulmer Terrace, a row of tiny country cottages (with hollyhocks in their front gardens and a paved walk) which lurk-behind the Woolworths in Notting Hill Gate, forms one such fragment of old rural life isolated in a region not otherwise noted for its freshness, while at Wandsworth, where the sluggish river Wandle looks as dirty as a back canal in Venice, there is a paved market, and several other traces of earlier, happier days. For those of us who are forced by circumstances to spend the summer in London it is neither unrewarding nor unamusing as an idle Saturday or Sunday pastime to set off, almost as archaeologists, in search of such relics, choosing some specific London area that we do not know—Hoxton, maybe, or Camden Town, or Catford, or Tulse Hill—and see what we may discover. One finds unsuspected beauties—the churchyard, feathery with sheep's parsley, near Lamb's cottage at Edmonton, for instance— and learns strange facts such as that Tooting Bee was once a property of the monks of the great Norman monastery of Le Bec Hellouin.
Walking, as I often do, about " the little labyrinth of by- roads " that constitute the limited area of Campden Hill, I have sometimes speculated upon the reasons for its highly individualised atmosphere. A part of the Royal Borough, it seems to have little in common either with the emporium- world of Kensington High Street or with Notting Hill Gate, that centre of petrol-fumes, sordid milk-bars, predatory figures on street corners and memories of crime—all that now remains of the fine old manor of Knutting-barnes which Lysons tells us was once more valuable than the whole manor of Kensington put together. Standing between Nottingham House (afterwards transformed by Wren into Kensington Palace) and Holland House, the hilltop took its own name from a third important country house—that built upon it in 1612 by Sir Baptist Hicks, and called after his country proper- ties at Chipping Campden and Broad Campden. Campden House, which later acquired fame from the residence there of Queen Anne's child, the Duke of Gloucester (whose name is preserved in Gloucester Walk), remained untouched until 1862, when, according to Augustus Hare, it was extensively renovated, only to be later burned and then again rebuilt. It is now long since demolished while Little Campden House, also connected with Queen Anne, which was apparently still standing in Homton Street twenty years ago, has also disappeared. But the chief glory of Campden Hill today is another country house, standing in a large garden at one end of Aubrey Walk, near the reservoir. This is Aubrey House, well-known as the haunt of Whistler, and still inhabited by the ladies whom as girls he loved to paint. Aubrey House, which contains an interesting collection of pictures and furniture, was opened to the public for a week earlier in the summer, and as one stood looking out through the french windows into the sunny peaceful garden it was impossible to realise that London lay all around one, and that the year was 1953. More even than most great cities London seems full of anomalies. Campden Hill is one of these.
Previous page
