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Burford Lane is close to the town entrance to the Lower Flask Walk, on the right-hand side of the High Street, and close by the Bird in Hand, the coach-office where the modern omnibus deposits its passengers, as the old stage-coach did in the days of Richardson’s Clarissa.

High Street and Heath Street are the great arteries of Hampstead, out of which issue the crowded, confused ramifications which make the study of its groves, mounts, squares, streets, terraces, lanes, and courts a topographical puzzle to the uninitiated.

The ways leading to these intricacies all start from the two principal streets, so that a stranger beginning at the beginning soon learns to unravel the difficulties of the locality for all purposes of business or pleasure. How this complicated irregularity of position and outline came about, which makes the old town unlike any other, and how, from a hill village of five wattled huts, shut in by the great Forest of Middlesex, it grew to be a place of fashionable resort, and gradually enlarged to its present extent and settled respectability, with its tens of thousands of inhabitants, claiming municipal rights, will be set forth in the following chapters.