Dartmouth Park history and architecture

The name Dartmouth Park appears on maps of the early 19th century, in the old parish of St Pancras, which ran from Tottenham Court Road up to Highgate. The first houses came in the 17th century, strung out along the road north, with fields and meadows between them and Kentish Town.

Swains Lane is older still: Camden's appraisal records it as a medieval track, written Swaynes Lane in 1492, and one of the first ways up Highgate Hill.

Inns grew up to serve the traffic heading north. The Vine, first licensed in 1751, began as a coaching inn and was the first transport terminus built in Kentish Town.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

Most of the land was held by copyhold of the Manor of Cantelowes, which belonged to the Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral. Its chief copyholder here, Lord Dartmouth, enclosed part of the common beside Highgate Road in 1772, and Grove Terrace rose on the released ground between 1777 and 1824.

Building began at the north end in 1777, and by 1793 the twenty-two houses of the speculation stood in two groups either side of the lane to Grove Terrace Mews; narrow fronts and many floors earned the developer the most from each plot.

A thin strip of that common still lies in front of Grove Terrace and Grove End, and the open ground across the road is protected by the London Squares Preservation Act of 1931.

Nos 6 to 27, with their railings and lampholders, are now listed Grade II* as an unusually complete survival of 18th century speculative building, and Nos 1 to 5, finished by 1823, at Grade II.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

Private estate acts from 1830 allowed building leases and the closing of land once partly open to commoners, and large parts of the estates went for speculative housing, though the district kept a rural air well into the 19th century.

In 1868 the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction Railway crossed the southern edge and cut Mortimer Terrace in two.

Most of today's houses date from 1840 to 1890. A formal suburb climbing Dartmouth Park Hill was planned but never built; instead, building firms large and small worked plot by plot.

The neighbourhood plan puts it simply: the 19th century turned fields and hedges into streets, terraces and villas, and by 1890 much of the form still recognisable today was in place.

Sources: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009), Dartmouth Park Neighbourhood Plan (made by Camden, 2 March 2020)

On Dartmouth Park Road, building started at the western end in the late 1850s, carried out by Lawford for Lord Dartmouth.

In the 1860s the estate behind Grove Terrace was planned for good houses in spacious, landscaped gardens, with trees along the new road to keep a semi-rural look.

Woodsome Road and Laurier Road, then called Lewisham Road, followed on the same estate from 1870, while the local builder Smerdon put up Croftdown Road on the gardens of Croft Lodge.

Smerdon also built east of York Rise: pairs at Nos 53 to 75 Dartmouth Park Road between 1884 and 1889 and detached houses at Nos 77 to 83 in 1883, with No 55 as his own home. They share gault brick, Gothic porches and stucco surrounds.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

In the 1850s Lord Ingestre, whose family name was Chetwynd, and Lord Alfred Spencer Churchill bought land off Dartmouth Park Hill and east of York Rise from Lord Dartmouth for the Conservative Land Society.

The society's roads take their names. Its land ended at the north side of Chetwynd Road, intended for middle-class households, while the streets further south were for artisans.

Chetwynd Road east was laid out by 1860 as the best road on that estate. A few Italianate villas went up early in the decade, building then stalled, and only around 1890 was the road complete.

Spencer Rise, mostly of the 1870s, shows the artisan side: plainer houses on narrow plots set back from the road, many with a butterfly roof behind a parapet.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

West of York Rise, the appraisal describes builders adding Italianate stucco architraves and doorcases to the flat Georgian terrace, then porticoes and bays, and Gothic touches in the cheaper building of the 1870s.

At the top of Chetwynd Road the Italianate villas stand in pairs under hipped roofs with deep eaves, many still behind their first gate piers and cast iron railings.

The Gothic landmark is St Mary Brookfield, built between 1869 and 1875 by William Butterfield on the high corner of Dartmouth Park Road and Dartmouth Park Hill and listed Grade II*. It was meant as a free place of worship for the working families of Highgate New Town.

Holly Village, founded in 1865 by Angela Burdett-Coutts and designed by W A Darbishire, takes Gothic into fantasy; it is listed Grade II.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

The north-east corner filled from the 1860s with terraced housing for working people, cottages for the men building the railways and the houses, and by 1894 it was known as Highgate New Town.

Bertram Street's three-storey terraces of the 1860s were shared between households from the start.

In the 1960s Camden proposed rebuilding the corner's Victorian terraces wholesale. Its first stage, the Whittington Estate, went up north of Raydon Street in the 1970s, but the full scheme never happened and some terraces stayed, still in council ownership.

The last stage, along Dartmouth Park Hill where the borough meets Islington, was designed by Bill Forrest and Oscar Palacio in yellow brick with red bands under pitched roofs, and finished in 1983.

Neave Brown's terrace of five at Nos 24 to 32 Winscombe Street, built in 1963 and 1964, sits among that street's 1860s houses.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

West of Highgate Road, the early 1900s brought Lissenden Mansions, built where Clevedon House, a contemporary of Grove Terrace, had stood until its demolition in the 19th century; similar blocks and a terrace followed before the First World War.

Those flats were up to date for their time, with hot and cold running water, electric light in place of gas, a coal hoist to each kitchen balcony and caretakers on the shared stairs. John Betjeman was born at No 52.

In 1919 St Pancras Borough Council bought orchards and other land in the north for the Homes for Heroes programme, and the Brookfield Estate took Hampstead Garden Suburb as its model, with curving roads, big gardens and hedges.

The York Rise Estate was paid for by the London Midland and Scottish Railway, which had to rehouse people who lost their homes when Euston was enlarged; its blocks carry engineers' names, Brunel, Faraday, Newcomen, Stephenson and Trevithick.

Smerdon and his sons kept building, taking St Albans Road eastward and building Brookfield Park between 1906 and 1914, and wartime bombing explains several later infills.

Source: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)

North of the conservation area, the Holly Lodge Estate was built to a 1923 masterplan grounded in garden suburb ideas, laid over the grounds of the Holly Lodge mansion, sold that year.

Its taller blocks, timbered in black and white on the street side, were put up for working women by the Lady Workers Homes Ltd.

Camden made it a conservation area in its own right on 1 June 1992.

Source: Camden: Holly Lodge Estate Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 6 December 2012)

Dartmouth Park became a conservation area on 4 February 1992. A length of Highgate Road protected since 1985 as part of Highgate Village joined it that year, and Holly Village followed in 2006.

The neighbourhood plan quotes Pevsner on a network of small streets laid out haphazardly in the last quarter of the 19th century over the undulating foothills of Highgate.

The plan counts some 90 listed buildings and structures in its area, 35 of them at Grade II*, and Camden adopted it on 2 March 2020.

Sources: Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009), Dartmouth Park Neighbourhood Plan (made by Camden, 2 March 2020), Camden Council: Dartmouth Park Neighbourhood Forum

Most of what this page describes still stands, and much of our work in the area is careful repair. Our Dartmouth Park renovation guide sets out the planning position street by street.

For a villa or terrace, see house refurbishment in Dartmouth Park; for a mansion or estate flat, flat refurbishment in Dartmouth Park.

Before changing a roof, read our Dartmouth Park loft page: the rooflines this history left behind are what Camden and the neighbourhood plan look at first.

• Camden: Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (adopted 22 January 2009)
• Dartmouth Park Neighbourhood Plan (made by Camden, 2 March 2020)
• Camden: Holly Lodge Estate Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy (adopted 6 December 2012)
• Camden Council: Dartmouth Park Neighbourhood Forum