Several streams rise within the London Borough of Barnet and quickly flow beyond its bounds. On this page I will take a look at two of these, the Westbourne stream, one source of which rises on Telegraph Hill, just inside the Borough before entering the Borough of Brent within half a mile of its source,and the little Green Brook that runs to the north of Hadley Wood and feeds into the Pymmes Brook.

I have been tracking a buried tributary of the Westbourne stream, following with nose to ground from its gushing under a metal plate at the top of Kiddepore Gardens, Hampstead, to where it runs beneath Finchley Road and laps against the houses set deep below the embankment of the turnpike.

Another stream rises (if that is the right word, given that it too never sees the daylight) at the back of the houses on Arkwright Road, flowing under the road named Frognal and then somewhere alongside the cottage at 25/a. The cottage garden is set way below street level, showing again the road engineering needed to offset the hill’s declivity. The tops of a couple of apple trees growing here stick above the parapet of the small area used for car parking. The trees, the coolness of the white walls of the cottage, the sunken garden by the buried stream - there is a healing here, a place where the eye and the mind rest momentarily before they are called on in their search.

I lose my sense of the stream somewhere at the start of that long alleyway that runs from Frognal station towards West Hampstead. I give up and walk north again to where yet another stream runs down off Langland Gardens and into the deep dip where the tennis courts line Alvanley Gardens. I walk down this road now, trying to assess where the stream cuts between houses before heading south. I find the gaps, I see the grates and, tired now, I head up to Finchley Road and prepare to head home.

I turn at the top of Alvanley gardens and look back down along the steep road I have just left as it curves south towards the Metropolitan Railway. I realise I am looking into the Thames basin. Somewhere down there my little streams will combine. They will run under cobbled mews’ before filling the Long Water in Kensington Gardens. Later there is the confluence with our City’s main waterway close to where the trains from Victoria run across to the vast stacks of a powerhouse.

It is here, balanced on the edge of this downward view that I feel not only the wonder and discovery of the new angle, the new knowing, but the darkness also. The immense mauve and orange mass of the Hospital of St Mary’s, Praed Street, the HR Giger greys and silvers of the M&S at Paddington Basin; these are as nothing to the bare 1970s tower set slightly apart further to the right. Paddington Green police station has been very busy recently. Lights blaze all night in rooms I can hardly imagine. There are special guests staying at the station. They are being waited upon, served, even as I stare from my position alongside the northbound traffic. Sealed now, like my streams, in concrete, they wait. They will continue to wait through the coming years while this city they sought to harm moves around them. While its turmoil and complexity persists, its denizens passing within yards of this unknown, these minds wedged into steel.

Far off, further than the church spire at Kensington Church Street, on the other side of the dip to the Thames, an expanse of green rises. It is Clapham Common, where people walk dogs, where, in this late July heat, the burdock swarms with black aphids and with ants intent on nectar. Further still, rising darkly to the electric hum of the building storm clouds, the Downs glower, sealing off the opulent homes and gravel drives of Hampshire and Surrey from my gaze.

I took a couple of walks through the cool evening streets of Hampstead recently, seeking out and finding a certain feature of the landscape; a hill which, despite its immense presence and authority, has been effectively screened out by bricks and mortar.

Behind the large yet discreet houses along Redington road, Rosecroft Avenue and the top of Platt’s Lane is hidden Telegraph Hill, the highest point thereabouts. And like Turner’s Wood down by the Heath Extension (the subject of an earlier essay of mine) it has been sealed off from the public eye and is impossible to reach without carrying out serious trespass.

I had, of course, heard of Telegraph Hill. It is named from the military signal station erected on its summit in 1798 as part of a national chain. Telegraph Hill is also the name of a row of houses on a steep slope rising off from the top-end of Platt’s Lane, houses indistinguishable in their faceless wealth from many others in the area (though the road itself boasts a highly individual “rustic” wooden street sign). And that, I thought, was that. The two were synonymous. Telegraph Hill sealed and delivered in one!

Not at all: as so often in our relationship with the landscape, even with our immediate surrounds, a slow process of unconscious gestation eventually revealed a detail previously overlooked, one which threw much of what I already thought I knew upside down, or the right way up.

About a year back I took a walk along Redington Road, one prompted by reading Will Self’s novel Great Apes. One of his characters, the psychiatrist Zach Busner, lives on this road. I was a little concerned at not knowing such an obviously important literary element in the area (me being the arch-topographer and all, you understand) so I grabbed my copy of The Streets of Hampstead (1972) and set off.

Redington Road is part of that curious complex of streets covering the western and southwestern edge of the Hampstead petit massif. These include Rosecroft and Ferncroft Avenues, which were laid out by the builder George Hart in the 1890s. I admit, Mr Self had beaten me to it with regard to taking an interest in this area. I had always put off studying these streets, basing my decision on a mixture of class hostility and the unreasonable notion that the slopes of Hampstead were merely “boring.”

I also found that navigating the streets was a nightmare. Once or twice I have succumbed to the temptation of trying to shorten the walk from Chalk Farm, up over Hampstead to where I live in Child’s Hill by cutting left from, say, Belsize Park and walking through the area under consideration. “If I go this way I will surely come out far enough along the Finchley Road to reach Child’s Hill in a further five or ten minutes.” Alas, not so! I always end up at Finchley Road faced with a two-mile walk along the turnpike to get home. Likewise, walks designed to cut through more rapidly from around Platt’s Lane to Hampstead village, bypassing West Heath Road, always seem to finish at Finchley Road. Or back on Platt’s Lane!

Yet the ease with which I get lost can have its compensations. On occasion the area takes on a dreamlike quality. Roads climb vertiginously to other roads, which then curve back to the first further along. Rumour has it a Canadian visiting London in 1964 got lost in these streets and only resurfaced in the mid-1970s. Weary and long of hair and beard, he fitted in so well with the general state of the culture around him that his incoherent babbling and ragged appearance were instantly in great demand. He was last heard of playing bass-guitar for the Third Ear Band.

Yes, I admit something in me likes these streets, in spite of their aura of self-satisfaction and frequent bad taste. To walk them is to walk a land of dreams and potentials, of psychedelic possibilities. I imagine Hungarian psychotherapist-shamans, neo-Pruzzian mystics and psilocybin-sexologists clamouring together in sumptuous rooms for semi-dressed bridge parties or drinking sherry on lawns I will never know.

I digress. A year back I was struck by a vision. As I walked down Redington Road from West Heath Road I chanced to look back over my right shoulder while passing the house built by Sir Edward Maufe at number 83. In doing so I caught a glimpse of something through the gap between this house and the curious modernist building adjacent to it. I saw a lawn rising steeply to a clump of trees. Beyond that, and much higher, were more trees. There was a sense of great height rising from the street, of a dome almost, perched high over the surrounding land. So great was the lateral shift from my knowing engagement with the opulent yet everyday street to this new unexpected angle that I had the sensation of looking into a previously unimagined world, one hidden, like CS Lewis’ Narnia, right there in the corners of our own. Later I went into denial about what I had seen. It was merely an impression, a slight rise undoubtedly topped by swings or some such. My pride would not allow me to be trounced in this way in my own manor.

Time passed and I got on with my life. Than recently I read David Sullivan’s The Westminster Corridor, an account of the history of Westminster Abbey and the part it has played in regional politics and land ownership. Opposite page 97 there is a map illustrating Mr Sullivan’s argument (If I understand him right) that the Westbourne Stream once formed the boundary between Hampstead and Child’s Hill. Marked clearly at the top end of the road from Cowhouse to the Heath (modern Cricklewood Lane, Hermitage Lane and the top of Platt’s Lane) is a dark circle of the sort usually used to suggest hill-forts and so on.

Something shifted and stirred deep inside me and I found myself thinking back to my experience along Redington Road a year before. Correlating the map with various old ordnance surveys and a street atlas or two was the work of a few minutes. Next thing I was having one of those moments where the synthesising power of the brain is experienced as a searing rush of connections, of images and memories. I saw, once again, that singular hilltop beyond the houses, that angled lawn leading into the sky!

So I took off one evening and once again walked those streets, this time with a clear sense of what I was looking for. I admit, so strange was my memory of the hill, so out of place did it seem in the utility-world of daily existence that I still wondered if I hadn’t dreamt it. For some reason I reversed my direction of approach and walked up Redington Road from Heath Drive, all the time keeping my eyes to the left, looking through any gaps in the line of houses. Eventually I got to number 83 and there it was, clearly visible up a sandy track running between this and the next house. A steep slope rose up though flowerbeds and shrubs. Higher still and further even than I recalled was the clear top of a hill surrounded by a cluster of Lombardy poplars.

A lady pottered about in her garden next door. I asked her a couple of questions about the hill and the land thereabouts. She verified that:

a) The soil in her garden was sandy. I’d had a suspicion the hill was of sufficient height to actually be layered with a stratum of Bagshot sands, like similar highpoints on the heath nearby.

b) That there was a waterlogged patch in the soil behind her house. This bore out maps I had seen that placed one of the tributaries of the Westbourne stream near the crest of the hill.

Both these details elevated the hill to the status of grand geologic presence; a Hampstead Elder forcibly separated from his region. I continued on my way up to where the road to Hampstead village crosses. So high was the dome of land to my left that its outliers passed under Redington Road and I actually descended onto West Heath Road. I wandered along this road to the left, checking the scale of the mound and wondering why I had never noticed its presence from along this route. After all, I had walked along here hundreds of times before.

I descended Platt’s lane still glancing at the height of the ground to my left, at the retaining walls topped by twisting roots of large old oak trees. A little down the road I turned back. Looking ahead from the drive that sheers the road called Telegraph Hill off from Platt’s Lane I was struck by how much further the land still had to climb despite the already-considerable altitude here. Long flights of steps led up to the front doors. Pathways between the houses climbed yet further. Everything went upwards. I stared through on of these gaps and caught a patch of alpine majesty, of solitude and pure thin air. Looking back over the wall separating the drive from Platt’s lane below I noted the fine view across towards Harrow and the North Middlesex Ridge around Stanmore.

I walked back down Platt’s Lane and onto Rosecroft Avenue, trying to get a sense of the Hill from this side. Again I saw a substantial knob of land behind the houses, and, clearly visible from this angle, the rows of Lombardy poplars. A gentleman pulled up in his car and made to enter one of the houses backing onto the hill. I asked him if the land behind climbed much higher but he adamantly denied it. There was something shifty about him, his eyes avoiding mine, a slight tightening of the shoulders suggesting he was hiding something from me.

My next visit, a week or so later threw  things into sharp relief. I have in my possession a highly detailed map of the area dating from the early 1970s. Among many other things it shows the boundary between properties. Studying this map it became clear that the main culprit in the hill’s enclosure was the house Sarum Chase, that vast neo-Tudor pile at the top of Platt’s Lane. It was obvious when I thought about it. This architectural curiosity dominates the area and often excites controversy and comment. Nicholas Pevsner described it as “pure Hollywood Elizabethan.” A friend of mine insists the banqueting hall is genuinely old. Years ago somebody told me Robert Stigwood, onetime manager of Eric Clapton and the Bee-Gees lived there. Rumour has it that the Rolling Stones used the house for some of their promotional material for Beggars Banquet. Later, the house was a music school or the headquarters of a cult. Or so I have been assured.

I made my mind up and paid a visit, intent on getting onto the hill. The property is currently uninhabited, signs on the grand oak door informing me that a security company patrol the grounds with guard dogs. I looked up the steep driveway at the garden wall with its ornate ironwork gate. The red light of a CCTV camera blinked from above one of the windows. It was all so clear now. There, behind the house was the row of Lombardy poplars, obviously marking the property’s edge.

I knocked on the door hoping nobody would answer. However, a young man opened the door looking as if he had stepped straight from a rigorous workout. Dressed in a sweaty tracksuit bottom and T-shirt, he exhibited a well-developed musculature, particularly in his strong sinuous arms. I asked him if I could come in and have a look around the back garden but he refused. However he kindly gave me a phone number to contact. He said he thought it unlikely I would get clearance to wander about the crest of the hill. I thanked him and left.

So there it is, the highest point thereabouts, hidden behind vast houses and accessible only to the elect. As we mere mortals wander about Hampstead desperately seeking a westward view, these dwellers of the silent suburb languidly gaze out at the gem right there in their backyards. These are the Children of the Hill, these discreet ones with their Silver Shred and their shuttered windows. These are the ones seldom seen. And they see it all.

07/05

Addendum – 05/06

Developers are currently converting the house to flats. An old gentleman, Mr Green, who walks his dog on the heath told me all about it. As an architect, Mr Green had been granted a private view of the work done to the building. He was appalled at the thin partitions, the sense of invasion, the speculative eye cast over the grand place. I visit, in rain, climbing the slope to gaze through hoarding into that forbidden garden. Hogging runs around to the back of the house from the drive I stand upon. Piles of rubble indicate drastic changes. Suddenly I shift from the contempt I’d aired earlier in this piece to a conservative regard for status quo.

This hidden mount, the source of one of our rivers, falling under the sway of they who drive psychedelic minis! Surely not! I fret, figuring out whether to use that phone number, or maybe I should just climb over the wall and snap away with my cheap old SLR.

I return home and dig out a book I’ve uncovered in the intervening months: - Sarum Chase by Frank O Salisbury (John Murray, 1953), picked up from a second-hand bookshop in Borehamwood in January while researching the Tyke Water.

Frank Salisbury was a portrait painter of some renown. He painted, amongst others, Winston Churchill, Viscount Montgomery and Princess Elizabeth (our Queen). As well as doing such sterling work for the establishment, he had the house on the hill built for him back in 1932. Clearly the name of the house is a play on the artist''s family name!

Here are some selective quotes from the book about the building of the house and the arrangement of its garden:

“Telegraph Hill rises from the junction of Platt’s Lane and West Heath Road to one of the highest points in Hampstead overlooking London, with a wonderful view across country to the Chilterns. It was the place where the beacon was lit to carry the tidings of the Spanish Armada. What a place for a garden! What a situation for a House! The land was as bare as the heath itself except for a group of giant oaks in front, and it was the glory of these trees which ultimately decided the matter. This was the last primeval site on Hampstead Heath, the very summit of London, and I resolved to have a house worthy of the situation […]

This wonderful little hill at the very top of London was a wilderness of stinging nettles and wild plants and it was thrilling to look forward to what might be made of it.”

 

Sarum Chase in May 2006.

 

Mr Salisbury then goes on to describe in detail the tailoring of the house to suit his needs and his personal mythos. I am not so interested in all of this, except to state that the bricks were fired in a small, practically bankrupt brickyard in Sussex, which rebounded on the strength of the contract awarded. The author’s wife cut the first sod on the site, on September 4th 1932. They moved in on July 4th 1933.

 

Sarum Chase and the garden: a page from Frank Salisbury''s
book of the same name.

Here is what Salisbury says about that garden:

“A garden is as important as a house and few sites ever gave such scope as Sarum Chase. Vast quantities of earth were removed to make the terraces, which are formed in a crescent radiating from the drawing-room doors, the centre of the building. The sloping lawns, the rising steps, the sculptured group by the French sculptor Corrat, gave scope to an interesting design, and the making of the garden developed simultaneously with the building of the house.”

Looking at the house now, its garden in danger of ruin, its walls redolent of the blitz, it is worth recording this final quote from Salisbury:

“One remark has remained with me, the words of a Cabinet Minister who said ‘Well, this is a beautiful house; enjoy it till you are taxed out of it.’ ”

(c) Riverrun 2004