Every other field between Regent's Park and Hampstead was built over in the nineteenth century. That Primrose Hill was not is the result of a decision taken in Whitehall and Windsor rather than a victory won on the slope itself — and the story is a good deal odder than a straight fight between developers and the public.
Eton's building plots
The hill formed the southern end of the Chalcots estate, held by Eton College since the middle of the fifteenth century and farmed, for most of that time, unremarkably. That changed as London came north. In 1826 the college obtained an Act allowing it to grant ninety-nine-year building leases, and Adelaide Road was driven across the estate from the late 1820s. According to the historic register entry for the hill, Eton had been considering dividing Primrose Hill itself into building plots since 1822, and by 1829 plans had been drawn up to develop the whole of it. On paper, the hill was simply the next parcel of land waiting for a street pattern.
A pyramid, a botanic garden and a burial ground
What arrived instead was a run of schemes so peculiar that none of them happened. In 1829 the architect Thomas Willson published a proposal for a vast brick pyramid faced with granite, to be built as a general metropolitan cemetery in the vicinity of Primrose Hill. His prospectus described a structure of ninety-four storeys with a base covering something like eighteen acres, intended to hold millions of London's dead at a moment when the city's churchyards were dangerously overfull. Doubts about its weight and stability were never resolved, and Willson withdrew his scheme in favour of George Carden's more sober General Cemetery Company, whose ground at Kensal Green opened in 1833.
Other proposals followed and also failed. A lease to the Royal Botanic Society was floated in 1831. In 1836 the London Cemetery Company applied for land on the hill for a burial ground. The Victoria County History's summary is blunt: Eton entertained the idea of a giant mausoleum, a cemetery and a botanical garden for the southern part of Chalcots, and the whole business ended in 1842 with the hill's acquisition for public recreation.
The 1842 exchange
The mood in Parliament had shifted. A Select Committee on Public Walks, reporting in 1833, had argued for open spaces near populous towns for the health and recreation of the working population — an argument that took decades to translate into legislation, but which changed what officials thought they were for. On a government recommendation, the Crown Commissioners approached Eton in 1838 with a view to adding the hill to Regent's Park. The site became Crown property in 1841.
The following year a public Act was passed. Old and New London gives its citation as 5 and 6 Victoria, chapter 78, and describes its purpose as effecting an exchange between the Crown and the Provost and College of Eton. The Victoria County History records the terms: Eton received thirty-two acres of Crown land at Eton in exchange for fifty-three acres of the southern portion of Chalcots, which became Primrose Hill public open space. Many accounts describe the hill as having been bought from Eton, and money may well have moved as part of the settlement, but the instrument itself was a swap of land.
What the Act actually did
The public were freely admitted the year after the Act. The new boundary was marked with an oak fence and the old hedgerows were taken out; a year later the bridge linking Regent's Park to the hill was completed. Gymnastic apparatus was put up near the southern boundary around 1847, lamps followed in time, and by the 1860s the hill had become a standard place for public gatherings. In 1864 an oak was planted on the south side by the tragedian Samuel Phelps to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth. By the turn of the century buildings surrounded the hill on three sides — which is precisely the point. The park had been secured just in time.
Not quite a commons fight
It is tempting to file Primrose Hill with Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest as a common saved by popular resistance, but the record does not support it. No evidence has been found of a petitioning campaign or a legal battle over the hill; it was not a common in the manorial sense, and its rescue came through a government recommendation, a Crown negotiation and an exchange of acres.
The genuine commons fights came a generation later, when the Commons Preservation Society was founded in 1865, the Metropolitan Commons Act passed in 1866, and Hampstead Heath was finally secured by an Act of 1871 after years of conflict with the lord of the manor. Primrose Hill belongs to the same long argument about who London's open ground is for. It simply had the good fortune to be settled early, quietly, and on paper.