There is a point on Spaniards Road, the narrow lane that runs along the northern edge of Hampstead Heath between Hampstead and Highgate, where the road narrows to a single lane, squeezed between a weatherboarded pub on one side and a small toll house on the other. This pinch point, which causes considerable irritation to modern motorists and regular tailbacks during busy periods, is one of the most historically significant bottlenecks in London. The pub is the Spaniards Inn, Grade II listed, built in the late sixteenth century, and steeped in more history, legend, and literary association than any other drinking establishment in north London. The toll house opposite, now a private dwelling, once controlled access to the Bishop of London's park and collected the fees that maintained the road. Together, the two buildings create a physical gateway between Hampstead and Highgate that has been shaping the movement of people and vehicles for more than four hundred years.
To enter the Spaniards Inn is to step into a building that has been serving drink and offering shelter since the reign of Elizabeth I. The interior is a warren of low-ceilinged rooms, interconnected by narrow passages and unexpected steps, with dark timber panelling, uneven floors, and fireplaces that have been warming travellers since Shakespeare was writing his early plays. The atmosphere is of genuine antiquity, not the manufactured "olde worlde" charm of pubs that have been renovated to look old but the authentic character of a building that has been in continuous use for centuries. The timber beams bear the marks of age, the walls lean at angles that suggest centuries of settlement, and the floorboards creak with the weight of history. It is a place where the past is not merely remembered but physically present, embedded in every surface and every shadow.
Origins: The Spanish Connection
The origins of the Spaniards Inn are, like those of many ancient pubs, shrouded in a mixture of documented fact and colourful legend. The most reliable evidence suggests that the building dates from around 1585, during the reign of Elizabeth I, though there may have been an earlier structure on the site. The name "The Spaniard" (it was originally singular) has been explained in several ways, none of them conclusively documented. The most popular explanation is that the pub was named after a Spanish landlord or innkeeper who ran the establishment in its early years. This would not have been unusual: Spanish merchants and diplomats were present in London during the sixteenth century, and it was common for inns and taverns to take their names from the nationality or occupation of their proprietors.
An alternative explanation, favoured by some local historians, connects the name to the Spanish ambassador. According to this theory, the building was used as the country residence of the Spanish ambassador to the Court of St. James's, and the name derives from this association. The theory is plausible but unsubstantiated. During the reign of Elizabeth I, relations between England and Spain were frequently hostile, and it seems unlikely that a Spanish diplomat would have maintained a residence so far from the court without attracting attention and comment. A third explanation, even more speculative, suggests that the name commemorates a duel between two Spanish brothers over a woman, fought on the heath near the pub. This story, which has the hallmarks of a nineteenth-century invention, is entertaining but almost certainly apocryphal.
What is certain is that by the early seventeenth century, the Spaniards was well established as a wayside inn serving travellers on the road between Hampstead and Highgate. The road itself was of considerable importance: it connected two hilltop villages and provided a route across the northern heights that avoided the low-lying, often waterlogged ground of the Holloway Road and Archway. Travellers, whether on foot, on horseback, or in carriages, would stop at the Spaniards for refreshment before continuing their journey, and the inn's position at the narrowest point of the road, where the toll was collected, ensured a steady stream of custom.
The building that survives today retains elements from several periods of construction and alteration. The oldest parts, including the timber frame of the central section, date from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The weatherboarded exterior, painted white, is characteristic of the vernacular building tradition of the Middlesex countryside, though it has been repaired and renewed many times. The brick extensions to the east and west were added during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the pub expanded to accommodate growing demand. The overall effect is of a building that has grown organically over time, each generation adding its own contribution while respecting the character of what already existed.
Dick Turpin and the Highwayman Legend
No account of the Spaniards Inn would be complete without the legend of Dick Turpin, the most famous highwayman in English history, whose name is inextricably linked with the pub and its surroundings. According to tradition, Turpin was a regular at the Spaniards and used it as a base for his robberies on the heath and the surrounding roads. Some versions of the legend claim that Turpin was born at the inn, or that his father was the landlord, though neither claim is supported by historical evidence. What is certain is that Turpin was active in the area around Hampstead Heath during the 1730s, and that the heath's isolated stretches of road, bordered by dense woodland and heathland, provided ideal conditions for highway robbery.
Richard Turpin was born in Hempstead, Essex, in 1705, the son of a farmer and innkeeper. He began his criminal career as a butcher who dealt in stolen cattle, graduated to burglary and housebreaking as a member of the notorious Gregory Gang, and eventually took up highway robbery as a solo operator. His career on the road was relatively brief, spanning only a few years in the mid-1730s, but it was during this period that he is said to have frequented the Spaniards Inn and the surrounding area. The heath's geography was ideally suited to his purposes: the roads were lonely, the travellers were often wealthy, and the thick woodland and rough heathland provided ample opportunities for concealment and escape.
The room at the Spaniards that is traditionally identified as "Turpin's Bar" is a small, dark chamber on the ground floor, panelled in dark timber and furnished with a few heavy tables and chairs. Whether Turpin actually drank in this room is impossible to verify, but the association has been maintained for centuries and has become an integral part of the pub's identity. The landlords of the Spaniards have, understandably, been reluctant to debunk a legend that brings custom and celebrity, and the Turpin connection is prominently featured in the pub's signage and marketing materials. A first-floor room is also associated with Turpin, said to be the chamber from which he could watch for approaching coaches and then slip away through a secret passage to ambush them on the road below. The secret passage, like much of the Turpin legend, is more atmospheric than evidential, but it contributes to the aura of romantic criminality that surrounds the pub.
The historical Turpin was considerably less glamorous than his legend suggests. He was a violent and often brutal criminal who is known to have tortured an elderly woman during a burglary and who shot and killed a man while resisting arrest. He was hanged at York in 1739, at the age of thirty-three, for horse theft rather than highway robbery. The famous ride to York on his horse Black Bess, which is the centrepiece of the romanticised Turpin legend, was in fact performed by an earlier highwayman named John Nevison and was attributed to Turpin only in the nineteenth century by the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. Nevertheless, the legend persists, and the Spaniards Inn remains its most important London setting, a place where the boundaries between history and mythology have been blurred for so long that even the brickwork seems to believe the stories.
The Gordon Riots of 1780
If the Turpin legend represents the Spaniards' connection to romantic criminality, the Gordon Riots represent its connection to the great convulsions of English history. On 7 June 1780, during the worst civil disturbance that London had experienced since the Great Fire, a large mob set out from the City with the intention of attacking and burning Kenwood House, the home of Lord Mansfield. Mansfield, as Lord Chief Justice, had made himself deeply unpopular with the anti-Catholic rioters by his tolerant views on religious liberty, and his town house in Bloomsbury Square had already been sacked and burned. Now the mob turned its attention to his country residence, and the road to Kenwood led directly past the Spaniards Inn.
What happened next is one of the most celebrated episodes in the pub's history. According to the traditional account, the landlord of the Spaniards, hearing of the mob's approach, threw open his doors and offered the rioters free beer. The mob, thirsty after their march from the City, accepted the offer and settled in to drink. While they drank, the landlord sent word to the authorities, and a detachment of Horse Guards was dispatched from London to intercept them. By the time the soldiers arrived, the rioters were too drunk to offer serious resistance, and they were dispersed without violence. Kenwood was saved, and the Spaniards' landlord became a local hero whose quick thinking had preserved one of the finest houses in north London from destruction.
The historical accuracy of this account has been questioned by some scholars, who point out that the available contemporary sources are thin and that the story may have been embellished over time. What is well documented is that a mob did march towards Kenwood during the Gordon Riots, that they were intercepted and turned back before reaching the house, and that the Spaniards Inn was the point at which the interception occurred. Whether the free beer was the decisive factor, or whether the arrival of the soldiers was sufficient on its own, is a matter of conjecture. But the story has become an inseparable part of the Spaniards' identity, and it illustrates a truth about the pub's position on the road between London and the heath: it has always been a place where the movements of people and the currents of history are funnelled through a narrow physical space, creating moments of drama and significance that larger, less strategically located establishments could never experience.
Literary Connections: Keats, Dickens, and Byron
The Spaniards Inn has been patronised by an extraordinary roll call of literary figures, reflecting both its long history and its location on the edge of the heath that has attracted writers and artists for centuries. John Keats, who lived at Wentworth Place (now Keats House) on the other side of the heath, is known to have drunk at the Spaniards and to have walked past it on his regular excursions across the heath to Highgate. In a letter to his friend Charles Armitage Brown, Keats describes a walk to the Spaniards and back, a round trip of several miles that was typical of the long walks he took for both pleasure and inspiration. The pub's position at the far end of the heath from his home made it a natural destination for his afternoon rambles, a place to pause and refresh before the return journey.
Charles Dickens, that most London of novelists, featured the Spaniards in "The Pickwick Papers," his first novel, published in 1836-1837. In the novel, Mrs. Bardell and her friends visit the Spaniards for tea, arriving in a coach from the City and enjoying the pub's garden before being arrested for debt. The scene captures the Spaniards' character as a place of escape and pleasure, a rural retreat within reach of the city where Londoners could enjoy fresh air, good food, and convivial company. Dickens's description of the pub and its garden is vivid and affectionate, and it helped to cement the Spaniards' reputation as one of the most appealing hostelries in north London. The fact that even Mrs. Bardell's moment of relaxation is interrupted by the intrusion of legal troubles is characteristically Dickensian, a reminder that the cares of the city could pursue you even to the furthest reaches of the heath.
Lord Byron, the most flamboyant of the Romantic poets, is also associated with the Spaniards, though the evidence for his patronage is more anecdotal than documentary. Byron was a frequent visitor to Hampstead during the years before his departure from England in 1816, and the Spaniards, with its romantic setting and its associations with Turpin and the highwayman legend, would have appealed to his taste for the dramatic and the transgressive. Whether he actually drank there is uncertain, but the association has been maintained by the pub and its promoters, and Byron's name appears on the various lists of famous patrons that adorn the walls of the bar.
Other literary figures connected with the Spaniards include Leigh Hunt, the journalist and poet who lived at the Vale of Health and who was a central figure in the Hampstead literary circle; William Blake, the visionary poet and artist who is said to have visited the pub during his walks on the heath; Joshua Reynolds, the painter who frequented the area during the eighteenth century; and Mary Shelley, who walked on the heath during her time in London and may well have stopped at the Spaniards for refreshment. The pub's literary connections are so numerous and so well documented that it has become, in effect, a literary landmark in its own right, a place where the physical history of the building and the literary history of the neighbourhood are inseparably intertwined.
The Tollhouse and the Road Pinch Point
Directly opposite the Spaniards Inn stands the small building that was formerly the tollhouse for Spaniards Road. The tollhouse, now a private dwelling, is a modest structure of brick and weatherboard that dates from the eighteenth century, though it may incorporate elements of an earlier building. It was from this building that the toll was collected from travellers using the road, which passed through the Bishop of London's park and was therefore a private road maintained at the bishop's expense. The toll continued to be collected until the mid-nineteenth century, when the road was taken over by the local authority and made free to use.
The tollhouse and the pub together create the famous bottleneck that is one of the most recognisable features of Spaniards Road. The two buildings face each other across a gap of barely four metres, creating a passage so narrow that only one vehicle can pass at a time. In the age of horse-drawn traffic, this arrangement was merely inconvenient; in the age of the motor car, it has become a significant traffic problem. The bottleneck creates queues in both directions, particularly at weekends and during busy periods, and there have been periodic proposals to widen the road by demolishing the tollhouse or setting back the pub's garden wall. These proposals have been consistently resisted by local residents and conservationists, who argue that the bottleneck is an integral part of the area's historic character and that its removal would damage the setting of two listed buildings.
The debate over the bottleneck reflects a broader tension in the management of historic environments: the conflict between the demands of modern traffic and the preservation of historic features that give a place its character and identity. The Spaniards Road pinch point is, by any rational measure, an impediment to the efficient flow of traffic. But it is also a physical reminder of the road's origins as a private lane through a bishop's park, a tangible connection to the centuries when Hampstead and Highgate were separate villages linked by a narrow country road rather than suburbs connected by a metropolitan highway. The tollhouse and the pub, facing each other across their narrow gap, are a tableau of the pre-industrial landscape, a fragment of the old world preserved within the new, and their survival is a testament to the value that communities place on historical continuity even when it comes at a cost in convenience.
Architectural Features and the Character of the Building
The Spaniards Inn earned its Grade II listing from Historic England in recognition of its architectural and historical significance. The listing protects the building's exterior and interior from inappropriate alteration and ensures that any changes are carried out with sensitivity to its character. The building's architectural interest lies not in any single feature but in the cumulative effect of centuries of use and adaptation, which have created an interior of remarkable complexity and atmosphere.
The oldest part of the building, the central timber-framed section, dates from the late sixteenth century and retains much of its original structural character. The oak frame, darkened by age and smoke, is visible in several of the ground-floor rooms, where it creates a pattern of vertical posts and horizontal beams that divide the walls into panels. These panels were originally filled with wattle and daub, a mixture of woven sticks and clay plaster, though in most places the original infill has been replaced by brick or plaster. The timber frame is of the type common in the domestic architecture of Middlesex and Hertfordshire during the Elizabethan period, and its survival within a building that has been continuously occupied and repeatedly altered is remarkable.
The panelling in the bar rooms is a mixture of periods and styles, ranging from simple plank panelling of the seventeenth century to more elaborate moulded panels of the eighteenth century. The fireplaces, of which there are several, include at least one that dates from the seventeenth century and retains its original stone surround. The floors are of worn brick, stone, and timber, their surfaces undulating with the irregularities of age and settlement. The ceilings are low, rarely more than seven feet in height, creating a sense of intimacy and enclosure that is characteristic of Tudor and Stuart domestic architecture. The windows, a mixture of casements and sashes, let in light that is filtered through the trees and hedges of the garden, giving the interior a dappled, greenish quality that changes with the seasons and the time of day.
The pub's garden is one of its most appealing features and one of the reasons for its enduring popularity. The garden occupies a generous plot behind the pub, sheltered by mature trees and hedges that screen it from the road and the heath. In summer, the garden is thronged with visitors who come to drink, eat, and enjoy the atmosphere of al fresco dining in a setting of genuine historic charm. The garden has been used for social gatherings for centuries, and its character reflects the informality and conviviality that have always been the Spaniards' hallmarks. Children and dogs are welcome, conversation flows freely, and the boundaries between social classes and age groups dissolve in the shared pleasure of a drink in a beautiful garden on a summer afternoon.
The Spaniards Today: Continuity and Change
The Spaniards Inn continues to operate as a public house, serving food and drink to visitors who come for the beer, the food, the garden, the history, or simply the pleasure of spending time in one of London's most atmospheric buildings. The pub has changed hands many times over the centuries, and its current operators have invested in sympathetic refurbishment that has improved the facilities while respecting the building's historic character. The food offering has been upgraded to reflect contemporary tastes, with a menu that emphasises seasonal ingredients and traditional British dishes prepared with care and served in the bar rooms and the garden.
The Spaniards' location on the edge of the heath ensures a steady flow of visitors throughout the year. Dog walkers, joggers, families, and hikers pass through on their way to or from the heath, and many stop for refreshment. The pub is a popular destination for Sunday lunches, and on bank holidays and summer weekends, the garden is filled to capacity with visitors from across London who have made the journey to enjoy one of the city's most celebrated pubs. The Turpin legend, the literary connections, the Gordon Riots story, and the atmospheric interior all contribute to the pub's appeal, but its greatest asset is something less tangible: the sense of continuity that comes from drinking in a building that has been serving the same purpose, on the same spot, for over four hundred years.
The challenges facing the Spaniards are those facing all historic pubs: the pressure to modernise without losing character, the need to attract new customers while retaining the loyalty of regulars, and the constant tension between commercial viability and heritage conservation. The pub's Grade II listing provides a measure of protection, but it also imposes constraints on what can be altered and how. Every change must be negotiated with the local planning authority and with Historic England, ensuring that the building's significance is not diminished by inappropriate intervention. This process can be slow and frustrating, but it has helped to preserve the Spaniards' character through periods of change that have destroyed many less well-protected buildings.
For those who know its history, a visit to the Spaniards Inn is an experience layered with meaning. The low-ceilinged rooms where Turpin may or may not have plotted his robberies, the garden where Mrs. Bardell enjoyed her ill-fated tea party, the bar where the Gordon Rioters drank themselves into a stupor, the road where coaches once paused to pay the toll: every element of the building and its setting is charged with the accumulated stories of four centuries. The Spaniards is not a museum; it is a living pub, noisy and convivial and sometimes a little rough around the edges. But it is also a monument, a physical repository of London's history that continues to function in the way it was always intended: as a place where people gather to eat, drink, talk, and share the human experience, as they have done on this spot since the time of Elizabeth I.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*