Rosecroft Avenue: On Hampstead Heath: The Hampstead Heath Extension

A few blocks north of Golders Hill Park, Hampstead Heath Extension juts awkwardly from the northwestern tip of Sandy Heath into the surrounding community of Golders Green. Such strange appendages in the urban landscape usually have some sort of historical explanation, and so it is here.

In the late 19^th Century, the East London area known as Whitechapel was infamous for crime and poverty, its notoriety peaking between 1888 and 1891 due the Whitechapel Murders – the brutal murders of eleven women, including those attributed to Jack the Ripper. During this time, the vicar of St. Jude’s Church in Whitechapel was Samuel August Barnett; his wife was Dame Henrietta Octavia Weston Barnett, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Henrietta was a close friend of celebrated social reformer Octavia Hill, who, among other things, was instrumental in preserving the Parliament Hill area of Hampstead Heath as an open space “for the poor.” In 1889, Henrietta and Samuel took a house on Hampstead Heath, near The Spaniards Inn, as a weekend retreat.

Wyldes Farmhouse

From Henrietta’s house on the Heath, she had a magnificent view across Sandy Heath to the 340 acres of adjoining Wyldes Farm. Wyldes had been part of the estates of the Leper Hospital of St. James from medieval times; over the centuries, the hospital accumulated great wealth from the bequests of charitable Londoners. In 1440, however, Henry VI decided all of that wealth could go to a better use and, when he founded Eton College that year, he decreed that Eton should have “perpetual custody” of the hospital. Henry VIII later decided that the site of the hospital would be better suited to a royal manor house, so he acquired the site from Eton, demolished the hospital, and built St. James’ Palace.

Heritage Plaque for Linnell and Blake at Wyldes

Eton retained Wyldes Farm, however, letting it out to farmers and collecting rents. In the early 1800s, Wyldes was let to a dairy farmer named J. Collins, who expanded the farmhouse and, in turn, let rooms to painter John Linnell. Linnell was a great friend of and patron to poet and painter William Blake, and Blake often stayed with Linnell at Wyldes. Wyldes was also home to Charles Dickens for a brief period in 1837; he rented the farmhouse for a few weeks while mourning the death of his sister-in-law. Now a Grade II* listed building, the farmhouse still stands across Hampstead Way from the Heath Extension.

In 1903, Henrietta was horrified to hear of plans to build an underground station at North End, near Wyldes Farm. In addition to the “ruin of the sylvan restfulness” the train line would wreak, Henrietta believed the underground would inevitably result in the development of “rows of ugly villas” such as those that “disfigure[d]” nearby Willesden. Henrietta formed the Hampstead Heath Extension Council for the purpose of raising money to purchase land from Wyldes Farm and add it to the Heath. She succeeded, and in the summer of 1904 the Council purchased for £36,000 the 80 acres of Wyldes Farm adjoining the Sandy Heath.

On the Heath Extension. The Garden Suburb visible in the background.

But Henrietta did not stop there. She engineered the purchase of an additional 240 acres from Wyldes Farm, with the purpose of founding a planned, orderly “garden suburb” for residents all across the economic spectrum, where “houses will not be put in uniform lines nor in close relationship built regardless of each other, or without consideration for picturesque appearance. Great care will be taken that the houses shall not spoil each other’s outlook, while the avoidance of uniformity or of an institutional aspect will be obtained by the variety of the dwellings, always provided that the fundamental principle is complied with that the part should not spoil the whole, nor that individual rights be assumed to carry the power of working communal wrong.”[1]

Lovely terrace housing in the Garden Suburb

The result of Henrietta’s labors was the founding in 1907 of Hampstead Garden Suburb, which ultimately grew to 800 acres of meticulously planned and maintained suburbia. The extent to which Henrietta’s original vision ultimately was realized, however, is open to debate. With flats currently on the market priced from £310,000 to £750,000 (and detached houses priced from £2.75 million to £14 million)[2] it’s safe to assume the lower income brackets are not well represented among the Suburb’s inhabitants.

Although among the least interesting landscapes on the Heath, the Extension remains a lovely park. Its genesis in farmland remains apparent, as the Extension is divided by hedgerows into large, gently rolling paddocks. There is a series of small ponds near the southeastern end, among some reeds and trees, but most of the park is meadowland or, toward the northern end, playing fields for cricket, football and rugby. The Extension is enclosed at the northwest by the Great Wall (perhaps a misnomer – the Very Good Wall or Perfectly Nice Wall might be more fitting). This is a brick wall designed by architect Charles Padget Wade and built between 1909 and 1912; Raymond Unwin, the chief planner of the Garden Suburb, intended the wall to provide a dramatic boundary between the rural Heath and the center of the Garden Suburb.