The Last Farms
It is easy to forget, looking at the dense Victorian and Edwardian development that characterises the Belsize Park neighbourhood today, that within living memory of the oldest Victorian buildings there were farms in the immediate vicinity — fields, hedgerows, farmhouses, and the animals that maintained the agricultural economy of the area north of London before the speculative builders arrived. The dairy trade that survived in various forms in and around the neighbourhood into the twentieth century was a living connection to this agricultural past, a reminder that the suburb had been built on farmland and that the rural economy it replaced had not entirely vanished.
The cow-keepers of Victorian London were a distinctive occupational group — urban farmers who maintained herds of dairy cows in the increasingly unlikely settings of the expanding city, supplying fresh milk to the surrounding residential population before the development of the refrigerated transport and pasteurisation techniques that would eventually allow milk to be sourced from distant rural farms and distributed across the city. The cow-keepers operated from yards and small farms that survived in the interstices of the urban development, often in the back streets and service areas that the grand Victorian terraces kept invisible from the respectable residential fronts.
The milk rounds that supplied Belsize Park's residents with fresh milk in the Victorian and Edwardian periods were conducted with a regularity and a social intimacy that has no contemporary equivalent. The milkman who delivered to each house on his round knew the habits and needs of each household, the hours of each family, the credit status of each customer. The daily delivery of milk — and later of cream, butter, and other dairy products — was a form of domestic service that connected the household to the food economy of the city in a way that the supermarket has entirely replaced.
The Urban Dairy Economy
The urban dairy economy of Victorian and Edwardian London was a complex system that connected the cow-keepers of the inner suburbs to the distributors, the retailers, and eventually the consumers of milk and dairy products across the city. The development of the Midland Railway and its connection to the dairy farming areas of the Midlands gradually undermined the economic basis of the urban cow-keepers, as railway-transported milk from rural farms became cheaper and more available than the milk produced in the urban yards. The process of substitution was gradual — urban cow-keeping persisted in some London areas into the 1930s — but its direction was clear from the late nineteenth century onwards.
The surviving evidence of the dairy economy in the Belsize Park neighbourhood is fragmentary but real. The names of some streets and some former commercial premises preserve the memory of dairy uses that have long since been converted. The layout of some back yards and service areas reflects the accommodation of animals and equipment that the urban dairy trade required. And the social memory of the neighbourhood — preserved in family histories, local histories, and the oral traditions of long-standing residents — retains some knowledge of the cow-keepers and milkmen who were part of the neighbourhood's everyday life before the supermarket and the refrigerated lorry made them obsolete.
The End of Local Food
The disappearance of the urban dairy trade was part of a broader transformation of the food economy — the shift from local, seasonal, and perishable food production to the national and international food distribution system that now supplies the urban population with food from every part of the world, every season of the year. This transformation had profound implications for the character of urban neighbourhoods: it removed from the immediate vicinity of residential streets the sounds, smells, and visual interest of agricultural production, replacing them with the more anonymous and more efficient infrastructure of the modern food distribution system.
The contemporary interest in local food production — the farmers' markets, the allotments, the community gardens, the urban bee-keeping and urban chicken-keeping that have become significant features of the NW3 neighbourhood's contemporary culture — represents, in part, a nostalgia for the kind of direct relationship between food production and food consumption that the urban dairy trade embodied. The Belsize Park farmers' market, which brings producers from the Home Counties to sell their products directly to consumers in the neighbourhood, is a modern version of a connection that was once entirely local — the milk from the cow in the nearby yard to the jug on the kitchen table.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*