JOHN MAHONEY
Highgate Village stands proudly on London’s highest hilltop ridge, elegantly poised between Hampstead Heath and Muswell Hill. There was a hamlet here in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth the Bishop of London allowed a road to be built over the hill as the old track around the hill was often impassable in winter. The name ‘Highgate’ dates from this time, the ‘High’ an obvious reference and the ‘Gate’ for the tollgate that was built, now sadly long since dismantled. As with so many of London’s constituent villages, a huge amount of history is crammed into a relatively small space, spiced with, in the case of Highgate, exquisite glimpses of the city below.
BECAUSE OF THE cleaner air here – a contrast with the fetid air of the city – many of London’s wealthier citizens built their homes high on Highgate Hill. It was a migration that began in the late medieval times, increased through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continues today with the rich and famous. It’s a desirable place to live: handsome houses, good schools, fine views and open spaces.
Clean-air considerations may have been influential but location was more important. Highgate Village sits across the Great North Road, one of the main routes out of the capital. It all started at the entrance to the Bishop of London’s hunting park on top of the hill. The Gatehouse pub, which dominates the high street, is built on the site of the old park’s entrance. One of the earliest residents was a hermit who lived on site, and who was charged with the job of maintaining the road’s surface using gravel dug from what is now Pond Square, the village centre.
Another important reason for Highgate’s growth was that it became the last stop for the drovers taking their animals to London’s Smithfield Market. Over the course of a year, thousands of cattle and sheep were driven long distances ‘on the hoof’, so a chance to pause, graze and fatten up was welcome before the final downhill miles to market. In summer the air would be thick with dust kicked up by the animals; in winter mud was a big problem. In parts of the high street today there are still houses with elevated entrances and steep steps down to the road, to distance the problems of dust and mud.
Naturally the drovers themselves needed places to stay and, of course, to drink. The Gatehouse and the Angel on the high street, and the Wrestlers a bit further on, are among the first five recorded pubs in the village. In all, 49 pubs can be traced back through Highgate’s long and thirsty history. In 1841 there were 21 pubs for the 700 men in the village.
Over the years the problems with the road were not just the steep gradients and the waves of four-legged beasts coming down the hill. Because this was the main north–south route there were also traffic problems, in particular those caused by stagecoaches and wagons that ploughed deep ruts in the surface of the road. By 1780 at least eighty coaches a day were passing through the village. The situation eased slightly during the nineteenth century with the construction of a bypass. By 1884 the good burghers of Highgate proudly acquired Europe’s first cable tramway on the hill.
WHERE TO READ THIS
Try a seat in Pond Square, at the heart of the village. For a read with refreshments, try the Flask pub. For a read with a view, take a seat in Waterlow Park near the statue of Sir Sydney Waterlow himself – it’s one of only two statues in London holding an umbrella!
From the Gatehouse to the Grove
At the top of Highgate High Street stands the Gatehouse. First mentioned in 1634 records, there have been rebuilds and facelifts aplenty since then. Tolls were collected here from 1318, and the tollgate was demolished in 1892 because the arch wasn’t high enough to allow loaded haycarts through.
Just beyond the tollgate crossroads is Highgate Public School and chapel. Its royal charter was granted in 1565, in the reign of Elizabeth I. T S Eliot was a schoolmaster here and in 1916 taught the young John Betjeman, later to become poet laureate.
For years the school chapel doubled as Highgate’s parish church and was the original burial place for Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Southwood Lane alongside the chapel lived Mary Kingsley. A distinguished African traveller and scholar, she was the inspiration behind the founding of the Africa Society in 1901, one year after her death. Years later former Prime Minister Harold Wilson sketched out plans for the home-study programme, the ‘Open University’, on the kitchen table there.
Opposite the Kingsley house is a row of quaint, well-preserved Widows’ Almshouses, rebuilt in 1722. Tenants were required to attend church every Sunday; no men were allowed to stay on the premises.
Beyond the Gatehouse, in North Hill, is picturesque Byron Cottage. The poet A E Housman was the upstairs lodger here when he wrote A Shropshire Lad, a poem at one time familiar to every English schoolboy and a copy of which, it’s said, found a place in the kitbags of many an English soldier in the 1914–18 war. A little further on is Dickens’ House – in fact, his two-week holiday home in 1832, when with sickness in his family, they spent time recovering in Highgate where they could escape the pestilential airs of the city below.
The Grove is Highgate’s smartest address. Known locally as ‘Quality Walk’, it’s quintessential Highgate for quintessential Highgate people. Dating from the 1680s, the Grove’s six most famous houses were built as three semi-detached dwellings. Former residents include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great poet/writer/philosopher. Known as ‘The Sage of Highgate’, his many works include Kubla Khan and, at Wordsworth’s suggestion, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Other famous residents of the ‘big six’ were Gladys Cooper, actress and 1914–18 pin-up, Yehudi Menuhin, J B Priestley, Sting, Annie Lennox, playwright John Drinkwater, Robert Donat and the artist and scholar Roger Fry, who did much to introduce Impressionism to the British.
‘Witanhurst’ at the far end of the Grove is the second largest residence in London after Buckingham Palace. Built by Sir Arthur Crosfield, the soap millionaire, the mansion’s private grounds were once famous for tennis. Crosfield’s Greek wife was well known as the ultimate tennis enthusiast and the house became a famous venue for the pre-Wimbledon weekend society garden parties that were often attended by the Royal Family.
The estate fronts on to Highgate West Hill, one of London’s steepest streets and which in the early days of the motor car was used for testing car engines. A few metres down from Witanhurst is the old Fox and Crown, now no longer a pub. Once, when the young Queen Victoria was returning from a drive, a wheel came off her carriage and the horses were on the verge of bolting down the hill. It’s said that catastrophe was averted by the pub’s landlord, who brought the horses under control.
No. 31 Highgate West Hill is the childhood home of Sir John Betjeman. His autobiography Summoned by Bells immortalised the bells of St Anne’s at the bottom of the hill. Also on West Hill is the former Russian Trade Mission campus, infamous for espionage activities during the Cold War. At one point British security services set up a double-glazing company that won a contract to double-glaze the Mission’s windows. Over two years the British workforce proved highly effective at their work, which included much planting of electronic bugging devices!
The elegant spire that can be seen from miles around belongs to St Michael’s, Highgate’s parish church in nearby South Grove and final resting place for Samuel Taylor Coleridge after his remains were moved from the school chapel. Built in 1832, the spire gets a mention in Dickens’s David Copperfield.
Sharing the skyline with St Michael’s is the BBC communications tower, Highgate’s only ugly structure. Built during the early days of television in the 1930s, the tower was built to transmit broadcast signals from down in the city to the main studios at Alexandra Palace. When during the Second World War television was closed down, the tower was adapted to beam signals up at enemy bombers to interfere with their navigation systems and cause them to miss their targets.
The Flask in Highgate West Hill is one of Highgate’s most famous and popular pubs. The main building dates from 1767 but there was a pub here as early as 1716. There’s nothing better than a Sunday morning walk over Hampstead Heath followed by a well-earned pint at the Flask. The origin of the pub’s name is non-alcoholic, however. It comes from the flasks of special Hampstead spa water brought across the heath for sale in Highgate.
Like most Highgate pubs, the Flask has its ghost and, of course, stories of Dick Turpin, famed as a highwayman but who was in fact more of a deer poacher and horse thief. (His famous ride to York on his horse Black Bess is total fiction.) The Flask’s ghost is female and, it’s said, causes the temperature to drop noticeably whenever she’s in the bar. The Gatehouse’s ghost is also female – Mother Marnes – but she won’t appear when children or animals are about. At other times, though, you might need to have your wits about you. There are even stories of a chicken ghost in the main Pond Square, the result it’s said of an early experiment in refrigeration using snow in 1626.
Highgate’s unique custom of ‘Swearing on the Horns’ is believed to date from the seventeenth century; it may have its origins in entry rituals relating to the Fraternity of Drovers. The ceremony consists of swearing a nonsensical oath – administered, unsurprisingly, by the landlord – in front of a pair of horns. Some even say that men taking the oath got to kiss the prettiest girl in the tavern. More likely it was a way of selling more ale and fleecing even more money from passing travellers. Lord Byron took the oath and famously devoted a verse of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to it.
At the top of Highgate West Hill you arrive at Pond Square, the village’s main open space – although ‘pondless’ for quite a while. The two original ponds were the result of years of gravel extraction. They were drained in 1844. Pond Square is the venue for the annual Highgate Festival.
Overlooking Pond Square is Church House, said to be the inspiration for Steerforth’s house in David Copperfield. It’s next door to the handsome ‘Lit & Sci’, the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution. Dating from 1840, its purpose is: ‘to improve the mind by the cultivation of science and general literature’.
Up close – Highgate Village
Highgate may be ancient in origin but there’s one architecturally world famous building that’s relatively modern – Highpoint, a superb example of art deco design. Built by the Russian-born architect Berthold Lubetkin (1901–90), it has the highest penthouse apartment in London and an unrivalled 360-degree view of the city from the roof. It was one of the very first high-rise apartment blocks and is unique in its pioneering, imaginative use of reinforced concrete. Built between 1933 and 1935, it was far ahead of its time and was praised by Le Corbusier, the great French architect, who called it ‘the seed of the vertical garden city’. Located on North Hill, just opposite Charles Dickens’s house, it is notable for clean lines, maximum light and space, with imaginative but earthy use of natural materials to complement the basic concrete structure. Lubetkin was a committed socialist, convinced that architecture was a tool for social progress.
The High Street and the Hill
No. 44 Highgate High Street, on the corner of Townshend Yard, was once a chemist’s shop with a discreet side door, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge would call in regularly to get his supplies of laudanum, a derivative of opium to which he was addicted.
Further on, halfway down the Hill is Lauderdale House, just inside Waterlow Park, built in the sixteenth century in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I by the Master of the Royal Mint. Charles II is said to have used the house for his favourite Nell Gwyn. In a moment of tantrum she is supposed to have threatened to throw their baby out of the window unless the King did something to recognise the boy, whereupon the Merry Monarch is said to have called out: ‘Save the Earl of Burford!’ Waterlow Park is pretty but unpretentious, except for magnificent views over London. It was given to London as a ‘Garden for the Gardenless’.
Highgate’s most famous character is Dick Whittington and at the bottom of the hill outside a pub stands the Whittington Stone. Dated 1821, it’s the third stone to be placed there and is topped off with the figure of a rather fat cat installed in 1964. It marks the spot where Dick Whittington, according to legend, was told to ‘turn again’ on hearing the chimes of Bow Bells. Legend says he was a poor boy; the historical record has evidence that he was from a well-to-do Gloucestershire family.
Back to Waterlow Park, which you can walk through to Highgate’s greatest glory, the world famous Highgate Cemetery, a magnificent invocation of the Victorian way of death. When burial conditions in London became intolerable in the early nineteenth century, Parliament authorised the creation of private cemeteries in Inner London. Highgate (West) Cemetery opened in 1839 and was extended in 1854 with the opening of the East Cemetery.
No Victorian was more fixated on death than Queen Victoria herself. She mourned Prince Albert for forty years, dressed in black every day and kept their rooms exactly as they were the day he died. Death was a very big player in Victorian times in Britain and elaborate rituals were developed around it. Many of the graves and monuments at Highgate are theatrical spectaculars. Among hundreds of graves containing civil servants, lawyers, administrators, local worthies and their families is a roll call of the famous dead. The East Cemetery is the last resting place of, among others: Russian pianist Shura Cherkassky; William Friese-Green, cinematographer; Claudia Jones, Black Freedom campaigner and founder of the Notting Hill Carnival; Karl Marx; Sir Sidney Nolan, Australian artist; Sir Ralph Richardson, actor; Herbert Spencer, philosopher, who coined the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘survival of the fittest’; and Polish artist Feliks Topolski.
In the West Cemetery in 1862 Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his young wife and model in the family grave plot. So intense was his grief that, against the advice of his friends, he placed a collection of manuscript poems in the coffin. Seven years later he had the grave reopened to retrieve the poems for publication.
Other notables buried in the West Cemetery include Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, and the chemist Michael Faraday. Recently they have been joined by Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB, who was poisoned in London with polonium-210. Radioactive, he’s buried in a large lead-lined casket.