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Camden Town, which had been begun to be built in 1791, consisted for the most part of one-storied brick or weather-boarded houses, the outlines of some of which could be traced in my own time, though heightened and otherwise altered. Other houses, with gardens and orchards lying wide apart, led up to the half-way house we have just mentioned—the Old Mother Red Cap—where, at the point where the roads to Hampstead and Highgate diverge, stood, as it still stands, Brown’s Dairy. A thatched cottage in those days, with deep eaves, and little leaded, diamond-paned casements sparkling under them. Over the half-hatch door of this rustic dairy-house ladies and children from the neighbourhood of the old-fashioned squares (who took their morning walk through a turnstile at the top of Judd Street, leading by hawthorn-shaded hedgerows to the open fields), were wont to refresh themselves with a cup of new milk, or equally innocent sweet curds and whey.

At the top of Tottenham Court Road, in the fields on the left-hand side, were the remains of a mansion, the removal of which my old friend Valentine Bartholomew, the artist, remembered. It gave its name to the road, and is said to have been a palace of Henry VIII.’s; it was taken down towards the end of the last century (1791).