The Old Road to Hampstead
Haverstock Hill climbs north-west from Chalk Farm towards Hampstead, changing its name to Rosslyn Hill near Belsize Lane. It forms part of what is now the A502, and long before that it was the working link between the hilltop village and the city below. The name is recorded from the eighteenth century, though its origin is disputed; one suggestion connects it to a landowning family, but no explanation is settled.
For most of its history the road's importance was simple. Anything that reached Hampstead by cart, coach or foot came up this way, and anyone leaving NW3 for London went down it. That remains the honest description of the street: it is where the district ends and the rest of the city takes over.
Steele's Cottage on the Hillside
A small house once stood on a mound on the western side of the road, and it became the hill's best-known landmark. It was long associated with the essayist Sir Richard Steele, who is said to have taken refuge there in 1712 to escape his creditors. The association is traditional rather than documented, but it was firm enough by the nineteenth century for the building to be known simply as Sir Richard Steele's Cottage, and firm enough for Constable to paint it.
The cottage was demolished in 1867 as the surrounding estates were built over, and by 1870 a row of shops stood in its place. Steele's Road, laid out nearby, keeps the name in circulation. It is a fair emblem of what happened to the whole hillside in those decades: a picturesque survival cleared away for something that paid better ground rent.
Tidey, Batterbury and the Villa Boom
From the 1850s the Belsize estates on either side of the road were let for building, and the transformation was rapid. Daniel Tidey became the dominant developer, putting up more than 250 houses across the three Belsize estates by 1870, the year he went bankrupt. On the St John's Park estate, Richard Batterbury of Camden Town built substantial grey-brick-and-stucco villas fronting the road, known as St John's Park Villas; by 1862 around sixty houses stood on the new streets behind them. Later in the century William Willett and his son brought a red-brick manner that set a different standard for speculative building in the area.
The houses were large, generally eight- or ten-bedroomed, and built for professional and commercial families rather than for the aristocracy. A guidebook of the 1860s described the residents of Haverstock Hill as City men: stockbrokers, merchants and commercial agents. In 1883 Congregationalists built a church at the corner of Lyndhurst Road and Haverstock Hill, one of several institutions that arrived to serve the new population.
A Vestry Hall for a Growing Parish
Growth on this scale needed governing. The vestry of St John had been meeting in workhouse offices, an arrangement that became untenable as the parish filled up, and a purpose-built hall was commissioned. Designed by Henry Edward Kendall and Frederick Mew in an Italianate manner, and built by William Shepherd of Bermondsey, it opened without ceremony in June 1878.
From 1900 the building served as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead. A substantial Baroque extension by John Murray was added along Belsize Avenue in 1911. It ceased to be the seat of local government when the enlarged borough of Camden was created in 1965, and it was listed at Grade II in 1994.
Lifts, Tunnels and the Modern Hill
The railway had already tunnelled beneath the district; the Underground arrived at the surface. Belsize Park station, at the northern end of Haverstock Hill, opened on 22 June 1907, built by the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway. Its frontage is one of Leslie Green's ox-blood faience designs, and the platforms lie deep enough that lifts, rather than escalators, still do the work.
The depth was put to a second use during the Second World War, when one of London's deep-level shelters was driven beneath the station, with entrances on Haverstock Hill itself. Twentieth-century blocks of flats now stand among the surviving stucco, and the shopfronts change with each decade. The road, though, does what it has always done: it carries the district's traffic, its buses and its residents down the slope and out into London.