Sweet Hampstead and Its AssociationsWhite, Caroline A.
History
Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations
White, Caroline A.
Hampstead (London, England) -- History
At the present day all that remains of the original Well Walk are the
great elms on the bank above the bench at the Heath end of it, with
two houses so facially improved that I do not recognise them, and the
celebrated Long Room (Weatherall Place), converted to a private house
about a hundred years ago. Gainsborough Mansions on one side of the way,
and Gainsborough Gardens on the other, which memorise the name of the
donor of the Wells, and the 6 acres of waste land lying about it, afford
a striking proof of the growing value of ground for building purposes in
the near neighbourhood of town, and the magnificent increase in the value
of the Wells property to the poor of Hampstead.
In 1811 Well Walk and thereabouts contained thirty-nine houses. In one of
these lived Thomas Park, the engraver, father of the precocious historian
of Hampstead. It did not escape Mr. Abrahams that he was occupying a
house rated at £24 per annum, which should rightly have been rated at
£36. It is a pity that no inhabitant of Hampstead appears to have taken
any particular notice, or have kept any record of the remarkable young
man—Park junior—who, at an age when other youths are scarcely out of the
playground, was eagerly collecting materials, and seeking every fragment
of information he could obtain towards the history of this interesting
suburb.
Beyond the fact of his valuable work[270] and that he was the son of a
respectable inhabitant, we know nothing of the youth whose after-career
it would have been interesting to follow.[271]
In 1817, between the publication of his first poems and ‘Endymion,’ Keats
was lodging in Well Walk. The house was either the first or second from
the tavern,[272] and its proprietor was Bentley, the postman. It was
here, feeling the benefit that Hampstead air had been to himself, that he
invited his consumptive brother Tom to join him; and here he nursed and
tended him till his death, probably hastening by this act of fraternal
devotion the development of the germs of the same fatal disease in
himself.
His next-door neighbours were two ancient, soft-hearted single
gentlewomen, whom Keats, who had a lively sense of humour, informed his
sister ‘possessed a dog between them, who had grown so fat,’ ‘a corpulent
little beast,’ he calls it, ‘that when taken out for its daily exercise
it had to be coaxed along at the end of an ivory-tipped cane.’ The
ladies, the Miss Jacksons, continued to reside in Well Walk long after
Keats had left it, and the one who lived longest attained a sort of local
fame and memory, from the fact of her leaving her dog a legacy, to insure
its being taken care of after her death, the legacy taking the form of a
life annuity to the animal.
Keats’ visit to Scotland occurred whilst he was Bentley’s tenant, and
at a time when his bodily strength was scarcely equal to the fatigue of
rough roads and climbing hills, and he writes:
‘I assure you I often long for a seat and a cup of tea at Well Walk.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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