APPY WANDERER: Why the 'Hampstead Heritage Trail' lost its way with bookletswww.camdennewjournal.com/reviews/books/2012/jul/appy-wanderer-why-hampstead-heritage-trail-lost-its-way-bookletsPublished: 26 July, 2012
by GERALD ISAAMAN
The outskirts of London, in almost all directions, are rich in historical and biographical reminiscences.
The Northern suburbs are amongst the more affluent in this respect.
“Before the aristocratic class acquired the tendency to spread itself over the flats of the West, the City itself and the hills which arose on its northern confines were the chosen abodes of its nobles and wealth merchants.
“Hampstead and Highgate bear even today, amid all the changes of the last two centuries, the traces of this former predilection of the affluent dwellers and frequenters to the metropolis….”
You might find it surprising to know the above passage was written in 1869 by William Howitt, prolific author of The Northern Heights, a book that was part of his “Remarkable Places” series.
The area remains remarkable today – each passing generation adding to our enjoyment and enlightenment by writing about the precious environment of their own times.
Names such as Daniel Defoe, John James Park and Thomas Barratt, FE Baines and FML Thompson are familiar to many – along, in more modern times, with that of Christopher Wade, creator with his late wife, Diana, of the Hampstead Museum at Burgh House, and for the brilliant paperback breakthrough series of The Streets of Hampstead for the Camden History Society.
Now we have a new series for the 21st century: a set of booklets described as a “Northern Heights Partnership” of four major groups – the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust, the Heath and Hampstead, Highgate and Hornsey Historical societies – who have combined to create the first Hampstead Heritage Trail.
It is very much a labour of neighbouring love to be applauded, and a substantial one, too, covering a 15-mile route from Camden Town to Alexandra Palace, described in five booklets covering a total of some 500 points of interest.
Significantly, the first three of them cover a nine-mile circular walk devised by Richard Webber of the Highgate Society, and on which I shall focus, given the size of the landscape and the huge numbers who have trampled over it.
But while they are all slim booklets that will slip into your pocket or handbag, the problem – as always – is: what do you include and what do you leave out?; and how well they are edited.
What exactly will stimulate couch potato kids to walk the walk, to discover some fascinating history in an age where history is so often dismissed in a world of 24-hour news coverage and instant gratification.
Who will want to discover the iconic architecture from every significant period that surrounds so much of Hampstead and its dedicated Heath, its own existence the result of radical action by determined residents, and learn about the roll call and drum beat of people who have left their mark on time?
Did you know, for example, that Hampstead is referred to in the songs Young Conservatives by The Kinks and Cross Eyed Mary by Jethro Tull; that Hampstead is the location of Lucy Westenra’s tomb in Bram Stoker’s Dracula? But I picked that up in Wikipedia, not the excellently edited new booklets, which will undoubtedly open eyes to those who passed this way before and in whose footsteps you now tread.
There’s the rub.
Surely in the age of the smartphone you can roam the roads of the world without buying a single map to determine exactly how to get there, what it will cost and what is best to see when you arrive.
So, when it comes to booklet forms, elegant and beautifully illustrated as they are, is it enough just to identify the forgotten architect of a familiar church, the owner of a fine mansion, the creator of some magnificent work of art without adding a little spice to inspire the passing “tourist” to dig for more?
And, as was the case with Christopher Wade’s exercise, do you deliberately leave out the “celebrity” currently living at number whatever and allow them some kind of privacy. After all, this is not a Beverly Hills tour with a grotty T-shirt souvenir thrown in at the end.
My answer, as a journalist who has kicked around these streets for half a century, is that the significant added value you won’t find anywhere else is the exciting key to success.
So it was that even I was amazed to discover, for instance, that my old office at the Ham & High now has Ricky Gervais as its real business resident, not the TV version.
For example, a brief mention is made of the parish church St Michael’s, Highgate, which is listed as the work architect Lewis Vuillamy, but no mention is made there that one of its central aisles contains the remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
That important fact is mentioned in reference to the house in The Grove, where Coleridge lodged with Dr James Gillman and his family, who tried desperately to stop him taking drugs.
But nobody has added the current celebrity fact that the formidable terrace house is now the property of supermodel Kate Moss.
Yet, if I was the tour guide, I would want to reveal that, in 1961, Coleridge’s remains were taken from Highgate School’s dilapidated chapel, then an uncared for doss house for tramps, thanks to a campaign inspired by Ernest Raymond, author of Tell England and We, the Accused, and that John Masefield, the then-ageing Poet Laureate, shuffled into the pulpit in his carpet slippers to acclaim Coleridge’s great talent.
I know.
I was there.
While John Constable is identified as living in Well Walk – No 40 with blue plaque – the booklets don’t reveal that this was where his wife died in his arms, that the very house is the same one from which DH Lawrence eloped with Frieda von Richtofen, and, moreover, the house where the Irish poet Sturge Moore lived, giving Sunday soirées to which itinerant and impecunious Hampstead dweller George Orwell once took his mother.
A moment to savour since the dire warnings that Orwell left us with are now reduced to tacky TV shows called Big Brother and Room 101 when his prophesies of world power domination is igniting conflagration all around us.
The incidental fact that a world famous musician lives across the road from Constable’s abode and an author known to millions round the corner equally goes begging.
And when it comes to Keats House, the same information appears in sections 3 and 4 of the circular walk, not a word about the poet’s romance with Fanny Brawne being referred to, the replacement plum tree under which he wrote Ode to a Nightingale or the more recent film version of Bright Star, his love letters and poems miserably omitted.
Is the walker expected to stand and stare or take time out and go inside to catch the marvellous magic of the place, saved by the City Corporation after Camden Council wanted to flog it off, the left-wing councillor who promoted the idea having not a clue of Keats’ radical beliefs, let alone the spot on the Heath where he “stood tip-toe on a little hill”?
At Jack Straw’s Castle, we are told that the name is but a generic one for a farm worker, nothing to do apparently with the Peasants’ Revolt, and while its grounds were once licensed for bowling, there’s no mention of the racecourse that existed or the Second World War landmine.
Architecture, such an essential ingredient of the guides, is not well served – the name of Wells Coates omitted alongside his modern movement triumph known as The Isokon – and in politics there is no reference to the house in Howitt Road where Ramsay Macdonald formed Labour’s first ill-fated cabinet in 1924, a poignant place for me when I attended the blue plaque commemoration in company with Clement Attlee and Lord Reith.
Then there’s The Logs, in East Heath Road, considered Hampstead’s ugliest folly, which is pictured but, alas, without mentioning it subsequently being the home of the comparable sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper, Boy George and Marty Feldman.
Am I over the top?
Or are these booklets simply eye openers, key pointers, markers to what can be picked up, smelt, felt, dusted, visited and delved into in depth later?
The effect, I fear, is confusing, too many cooks failing to sort out the mix for their enticing and elegant menu and what sexy sauce to add.
Perhaps what is really needed is a simple mobile app.
Bingo!
• The booklets are available from local shops, or via
www.northernheights.eu They cost between £3 and £4.50 each. A complete Set of 10 booklets (Heritage Trail and Circular Walk) is available for £25 when ordered through the website.