This house was built by a Mrs. Lessingham, an actress of no very good repute, on a piece of gorse-covered waste about 1775. Having wit as well as beauty, she appears to have done pretty much as she liked, for having a mind to a villa at Hampstead, no obstacle appears to have been thrown in the way of a grant of land to build on, either by the Lord of the Manor or his agent, although she was not a copyholder of the manor, upon which the copyholders, headed by one Master Folkard, asserted their common rights, and destroyed the building as fast as it was raised. In order to obviate the illegality of the transaction, Mrs. Lessingham[112] purchased an insignificant cottage, and so became a copyholder; and being supported by Mr. Justice Addington, she braved the lawsuit (by means of which the Hampstead people hoped to exorcise the witch) and won it. The accounts of the riots at Hampstead between the builder’s men and the copyholders, or the mob who represented them, afforded the newspapers a subject for some time, and engaged the satirical pen of George Steevens, who sided with the Helen of the local war. She, clever as impudent, turned her opponents and their efforts into ridicule, and published an account (metrical) of the transaction and of the actors in it, which is not to be bought at the present day. She was sufficiently popular as an actress to figure on articles of pottery of the period, and I have met with her effigy at Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinsons’ rooms, in the character of Ophelia, on one of Sadler of Liverpool’s printed tiles. Mrs. Lessingham appears to have held quiet possession of her Hampstead villa for the brief remainder of her life, dying there in 1783; she was interred in the village churchyard, where her son subsequently erected an altar-tomb to her memory.[113] At present Heath Lodge is the residence of D. Powell, Esq.,[114] since whose occupation a pretty bosky bit of waste between his premises and those of Hill House has been enclosed, and a meagre footpath substituted. In 1750 the hamlet of West End contained about forty houses. Abrahams, in his ‘Book of Assessments’ (1811), has unfortunately included it with Frognal, and by thus confusing the localities has deprived us of the exact information his pamphlet would otherwise have supplied. [Illustration: _West End House._]