The Pond That Gave Its Name
At the centre of Highgate village, set back from the High Street and enclosed on all sides by houses and shops of various ages and styles, there is a small, irregularly shaped open space that the maps call Pond Square. It is not, in any geometrical sense, a square — its outline is closer to a triangle, and its surface is not flat but gently undulating, following the contours of the hillside beneath. Nor is there a pond. The water that once stood here, in a shallow depression that served the village as a watering place for horses, a source of water for domestic use, and a habitat for the ducks and geese that were a common sight in English villages until well into the modern period, has long since been drained away. What remains is the name, and the space, and the memory of a feature that defined the village for centuries.
The pond was, in all probability, a natural formation — a hollow in the London clay that collected rainwater and surface runoff from the surrounding slopes. Its position, at the heart of the settlement, suggests that it predated the village itself, and that the earliest inhabitants of Highgate chose to build around it precisely because it offered a reliable source of water on a hilltop where springs were scarce. In an age before piped water, a village pond was a vital resource, and its maintenance — keeping it clear of rubbish, preventing livestock from fouling it, managing the drainage that fed it — was a communal responsibility of the highest importance.
The draining of the pond took place in stages during the nineteenth century, as the village evolved from a rural settlement into a fashionable suburb and the presence of a muddy, malodorous body of standing water in the centre of the community became an embarrassment rather than an asset. The Victorians, with their passion for sanitation and their horror of the miasmas that they believed caused disease, had no patience with village ponds, and the Highgate pond was filled in, paved over, and converted into the paved open space that exists today. The transformation was part of a broader programme of civic improvement that also included the installation of drains, the widening of roads, and the erection of the various public amenities — a drinking fountain, a post office, a fire station — that marked the transition from village to suburb.
Francis Bacon and the Frozen Chicken
No account of Pond Square can avoid the story of Francis Bacon and the frozen chicken, even though the story is almost certainly apocryphal and even though the events it describes, if they happened at all, probably took place some distance from the square itself. The legend runs as follows: in March 1626, Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans — the philosopher, statesman, and father of the scientific method — was travelling by coach through Highgate when he was struck by the idea that snow might be used to preserve meat. He stopped the coach, purchased a chicken from a woman in the village, and proceeded to stuff it with snow, in what may have been the first recorded experiment in food refrigeration. The exertion, combined with the cold, brought on a chill from which Bacon never recovered. He was carried to the nearby house of the Earl of Arundel, where he died a few days later, on 9 April 1626.
The story has been told and retold so many times that it has acquired the patina of established fact, but the evidence for it is less solid than it appears. The principal source is a brief passage in John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written some fifty years after the event, in which Aubrey gives an account that is vivid but characteristically imprecise about details of time and place. Aubrey does not mention Pond Square, and he places the purchase of the chicken on the road rather than in the village. The connection with Pond Square appears to be a later embellishment, grafted onto the story by local tradition and sustained by the appeal of the image: the great philosopher, in his fur-lined cloak, kneeling in the snow on the village green, stuffing a dead chicken with handfuls of the stuff while the villagers looked on in bemusement.
Whether the story is true or not, it has become an inseparable part of Pond Square's identity. Visitors to Highgate are still shown the spot where Bacon is supposed to have conducted his experiment, and the tale is recounted in every guidebook and every local history. There is even a persistent ghost story — the ghost of a plucked chicken, seen running headless around Pond Square on cold winter nights — that has attached itself to the legend and that adds a further layer of whimsy to an already improbable narrative. Bacon himself, who valued rigorous inquiry above received tradition, might have been amused by the irony: a philosopher famous for his insistence on empirical evidence has become the subject of a story that has almost no empirical evidence to support it.
The Surrounding Buildings
The architectural character of Pond Square is defined by the ring of buildings that enclose it, a diverse collection that spans four centuries and that gives the space its distinctive atmosphere of aged informality. There is no single dominant style; instead, the buildings represent a sequence of additions and alterations that reflect the changing fortunes and changing tastes of the village over time. The result is a composition that is picturesque in the truest sense of the word — not designed to a plan, but grown organically, each element finding its place in relation to its neighbours through a process of accretion rather than intention.
The oldest buildings around the square date from the seventeenth century. These are modest structures in brick and timber, their facades bearing the marks of centuries of alteration — windows enlarged, doorways moved, upper storeys added — that give them a characterful irregularity. Their proportions are domestic, their scale intimate, and their presence on the square is a reminder that Highgate was, before it was anything else, a village of small houses and small businesses, a community that measured its prosperity not in grandeur but in comfort. These early buildings set the tone for the square, and the later additions, for all their variety, have generally respected it.
The eighteenth century contributed some of the finest buildings on the square. The Georgian houses that line the eastern side are handsome, well-proportioned structures in the restrained classical manner that was the default style of English domestic architecture throughout the period. Their facades of pale brick, with their evenly spaced sash windows and their simple doorcases, create a sense of order and elegance that contrasts pleasantly with the more irregular buildings opposite. The Georgian houses were built for the professional and merchant classes who were making Highgate their home in increasing numbers, and they express a confidence and a stability that speaks of the village's growing prosperity.
The Victorian period added its own contributions, including some commercial buildings — shops and premises that replaced earlier domestic structures as the village acquired the amenities of a suburban centre. These are generally of less architectural distinction than the Georgian houses, but they contribute to the variety of the square and provide the retail frontages that give it its everyday vitality. A coffee shop, a restaurant, a small gallery — the specific occupants change over the years, but the general character of the square as a place of modest commercial activity has been constant since at least the eighteenth century.
Market History and Commerce
Pond Square has served as a commercial centre for Highgate since the earliest days of the village. The presence of the pond, which drew people to the square for practical reasons, created a natural gathering point where buying and selling could take place, and the market that developed around the pond became one of the defining features of village life. The exact nature and extent of the medieval and early modern market is not well documented, but it is clear from the pattern of buildings around the square — with their ground-floor shops and upper-floor living quarters — that commerce was established here long before the modern era.
The market was probably never a formal affair, with a charter and a market cross and all the apparatus of a chartered market town. Highgate's commercial life was more modest than that, shaped by the needs of a community that was too small to support a full market but too distant from the City to do without one. The shops and stalls around the square would have sold the basic necessities — bread, meat, candles, cloth — supplemented by the products of the surrounding countryside and by the goods brought in by the carriers whose wagons rumbled through the village on the Great North Road. The inn trade, serving the constant traffic of travellers, was a major source of income, and the square's proximity to the main road ensured a steady flow of potential customers.
By the nineteenth century, the commercial character of Pond Square was well established. The draining of the pond and the paving of the square created a more formal and more sanitary trading environment, and the shops around the perimeter evolved to serve the increasingly sophisticated tastes of a suburban clientele. Butchers, bakers, grocers, and drapers were joined by stationers, chemists, and the various specialist retailers that a Victorian suburb demanded. The square became the commercial heart of the village — the place where you went to buy your provisions, to collect your post, and to exchange the gossip that was the social currency of a close-knit community.
The Square as Village Green
Beyond its commercial function, Pond Square has always served as Highgate's informal village green — a public open space where the community gathers for the events and occasions that punctuate the year. The space is not large — you can walk across it in a minute — but it is large enough to accommodate a modest crowd, and its enclosed, sheltered character gives it an intimacy that larger spaces lack. When something happens in Highgate — a celebration, a commemoration, a protest, a performance — it tends to happen in or around Pond Square, because this is the place where the village comes together.
The tradition of public gathering in the square is ancient, reaching back to the days when the pond still stood at its centre and the village was a self-contained community with its own rhythms and its own calendar of events. Fairs, markets, celebrations of national events — coronations, victories, royal births — all took place on or near the village green, and the continuity of this tradition into the present day gives Pond Square a significance that extends far beyond its modest physical dimensions. It is the place where Highgate enacts its identity as a community, where the abstract idea of neighbourhood is given concrete, visible form.
The seasonal rhythms of the square are well established. In summer, the benches and the few outdoor tables at the surrounding cafes are occupied from morning to evening by residents and visitors enjoying the light and the air. In autumn, the trees around the perimeter shed their leaves onto the paving, creating a brief, golden carpet that is swept away within days. In winter, the square is quieter, but the lights from the shop windows and the glow of the pub give it a warmth that draws people out even on the coldest evenings. And in spring, the first outdoor tables reappear, the first cups of coffee are drunk in the open air, and the annual cycle begins again.
Modern Character and Community Life
Pond Square today is recognisably the same space that it has been for centuries, even if the details have changed. The pond is gone, the horse troughs have been removed, and the cobblestones have been replaced by smooth paving, but the essential character of the place — enclosed, intimate, human in scale, animated by the comings and goings of a community that uses it as its living room — is unaltered. It is the kind of space that urban planners spend careers trying to create and that Highgate has possessed, by accident and by history, since the village was founded.
The community events that take place in and around the square are numerous and varied. The Highgate Fair, held annually, brings stalls and entertainment to the village in a tradition that has its roots in the medieval market. Christmas carol services, summer concerts, and various charity events use the square as their setting, drawing crowds from the surrounding streets and reinforcing the sense of community that is one of Highgate's most valued assets. The Highgate Society, the local civic organisation, uses the square as the backdrop for its campaigns and celebrations, and the seasonal markets that appear at intervals bring local producers and craftspeople to the village in a modern echo of the ancient market tradition.
The character of Pond Square is not fixed; it evolves, as all living spaces do, in response to the changing needs and changing tastes of the community that uses it. The arrival of coffee culture has transformed the daytime character of the square, creating an atmosphere that is more Continental than the traditional English village green. The growth of the evening economy — restaurants and wine bars replacing shops that close at five — has given the square a life after dark that it probably did not have before the twentieth century. Yet through all these changes, the essential quality of the place persists: a human-scaled space at the heart of a hilltop village, where the past is present in the buildings, the layout, and the very ground beneath your feet, and where the community that has grown up around it continues to find its centre and its identity.
To sit on a bench in Pond Square on a fine afternoon, watching the life of the village pass before you, is to understand something important about what makes a place work. It is not grandeur, or architectural unity, or historical significance, though Pond Square has all of these in some measure. It is simply the combination of enclosure, scale, and habitual use that turns a piece of paved ground into a place — a somewhere rather than an anywhere, a destination rather than a route. Highgate has many treasures — its cemetery, its wood, its grand houses and its ancient pubs — but Pond Square is the truest expression of its character: modest, sociable, quietly distinctive, and utterly its own.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*