New Georgia had long gone to increase Lord Mansfield’s demesne and the acreage of Caen Wood. North End Hall and Well had proved a failure; but the people of Hampstead and its neighbourhood still hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt, and regretted the affluent days of the Wells fashion, and the bankruptcy of Belsize. Nothing, however, appears to have come of the idea, and long years passed before the beautiful meadows in the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm disappeared. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HEATH. As early as 1829 we find the freeholders and copyholders of the Manor of Hampstead meeting at the Assembly Rooms on Holly-bush Hill, to discuss the best means to prevent further damage being done to the Heath, by destruction of the herbage, and digging sand and gravel thereon, as well as to inaugurate a subscription to try by law the right of the Lord of the Manor to so disturb and destroy it, or to build on or enclose any part of it. Even prior to this date there seems to have subsisted an ill-feeling between the inhabitants of Hampstead and Sir Thomas Wilson. The copyholders claimed the right to improve their own copyholds by building on them, or otherwise, as also to get materials for such purposes off their own land, or from the waste. This matter had been tried between Lady Wilson and Sir Francis Willes, and had gone against the latter, because his removing the herbage had been detrimental to the rights of the other copyholders, who on certain parts of the Heath had a right to turn in their cattle, _levant et couchant_. Yet from the beginning of the century, as we have seen, the digging of sand and gravel for the benefit of Lady Wilson, and subsequently for the Lord of the Manor, had been going on without stint, and with scarcely any intermission, though in doing so (to quote the phrase of Professor Vaughan of Oxford, a resident near the Heath) they were carting away the climate and the drainage, and therefore the health of the neighbourhood, which depended on the sand and gravel.