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When Portland Place was planned, more than half a century later, the then Lord Foley insisted on a clause in a lease he held of the Duke of Portland to prevent the building of any street to intercept the pure air of Hampstead and Highgate from Foley House, a fact to which the width of Portland Place is attributable.[12]

Gray, writing from Southampton Row as late as the summer of 1759, tells his friend Palgrave that ‘his new territories command Bedford Garden, and all the fields as far as Hampstead and Highgate.’[13]

In contrast with the poet’s triumph in the beauty of his views, we find Sir Samuel Romilly, many years later, complaining, in a letter to his sister written from his chambers in Gray’s Inn, ‘that, having but one row of houses between him and Hampstead, a north-west wind, sharp as the piercing bise, blows full against his windows.’[14]

Long after this date, Rosslyn House and Park could be seen from Clerkenwell Green, and later still the green heights of Caen Wood were visible from Bedford Row.