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It was not, indeed, till after the first decade of George III.’s time that this state of things began to be seriously remedied, and roads, in our present meaning of the term, laid through the length and breadth of the land. Pretty deep in the present century, except for a few cottages in the fields, there were no habitations between the George Inn, Hampstead Road, and the Load of Hay, on Haverstock Hill. In other ways, the road continued to be pretty much the same as in Colonel Esmond’s time, ‘hedgerows and fields and gardens’ all the way up to Hampstead. About the time of the building of Camden Town, people who loved pure country air began to move further out, and toy villas and rustic residences dotted the Hampstead Road, some of them remaining there with their paled-in gardens and trellised porches and verandas, oddly wedged in between builders’ yards and other commercial premises, till long after I knew the neighbourhood.

As recently as 1859 the road to Hampstead was a charming one, especially if one drove there; for then you had the advantage of seeing beyond and above the pedestrian. No sooner did you cross the Canal Bridge than your pleasure in the prospects began. Leaving Chalk Farm on the left, where in some one or other of the effaced fields Tom Moore and Jeffrey (afterwards Lord Jeffrey) met to fight their intercepted duel, and Primrose or Barrow Hill, in a ditch on the south side of which (1678) the body of the murdered Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was found, ‘his sword thrust through him, but no blood upon his clothes or about him, his shoes clean, his money in his pocket, his rings upon his fingers, but with his breast all bruises, and his neck broken’;[38] and upon the summit of which, with sublimated vision, William Blake, pictor ignotus, saw the spiritual sun, ‘not like a golden disc the size of a guinea, but like an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying “Holy, holy, holy!”’