Hampstead as special constables, attended the fair on Tuesday, to detect and apprehend the various gangs who attacked defenceless individuals, if possible more brutally than on Monday night. They pushed the people down, and not only robbed them of their watches and money, but actually tore off and possessed themselves of their clothes. One woman had her earrings torn from her ears. A number of desperate characters were taken up on this occasion, several of whom were committed, and others summarily dealt with as rogues and vagabonds. Long years after this date (for West End Fair was not suppressed), attendance at it appears to have been ‘a desperate pleasure.’ Apart from the perils of the fair itself, as soon as night fell the lanes and footpaths about Hampstead—the Kilburn meadows, the hedgerows in Pancras Vale, even the highways themselves—were infested with footpads and robbers, so that in the memory of an eye-witness living in 1849 it was customary for the decent part of the company to wait till the drummer went round the fair to recall the soldiers present to their quarters, and then to fall in with them for safety’s sake, and thus escorted march back to town. Now if silence and dulness be signs of propriety, few places can be better behaved than West End Green, or what is left of it; even the cheerful clangour of the blacksmith’s forge, which used to stand at the further end of it, where many a traveller’s tire has been mended, and many a loose shoe replaced for gentlemen of the road in their wake, has passed away, and though the Cock and Hoop stands where it did, that, too, is changed, and has taken to new ways, and ‘lives cleanly.’[108] Only the conservative old houses still set their faces against class confusion, and aim at retirement behind tall walls and taller trees. But rank upon rank of modern minor houses is rapidly approaching from the south, while New West End, on the other side of the highway, threatens to absorb the fields still stretching between the Finchley Road and Kidderpoor Hall—a mansion which is said to occupy one of the healthiest situations in Middlesex, and was at one time recommended for a royal nursery.[109] A short distance along the main-road brings us to Platt’s Lane, leading to Child’s Hill. Almost opposite to this a path takes from the Finchley Road by Fortune Green Lane back to West End.