Giving us a flavour of BelSoc’s autumn guided walk, Averil Nottage writes:

When you see the stuccoed houses of Belsize Park, or St Peter’s Church, or the shops in England’s Lane, do you ever wonder who made the decisions that shaped our area?

From the end of the 15th century Belsize House and Park was a country estate for the gentry.  But in the early 1850s, when London was edging northwards, the leaseholder decided to pull Belsize House down and replace it with an exclusive estate within the old park walls.  The main builder was Daniel Tidey and, because he took the financial risks, he decided what houses to build and where.

When Tidey came to Belsize in 1856 he had already built Italianate houses in Chelsea and North Kensington.  Although by then Classical styles were out of fashion, Tidey was convinced that his large ornate stuccoed houses would still appeal to the wealthy middle classes.  He added his trademark curved rear bay windows using the latest glass technology.  The reception rooms were especially impressive with lavish plaster ceiling decorations and massive doors that could accommodate wide crinolines.

Tidey started building in Buckland Crescent and moved on to Belsize Park, Belsize Square and Belsize Terrace. He offered to build a public garden by Buckland Villas but as residents wouldn’t agree to maintain it, he decided against creating a public garden in Belsize Square.  When Tidey got approval to build on fields to the south-east of the park, he pulled down the old walls to create Belsize Park Gardens and Lambolle Road.  In total he built about 250 classical stuccoed houses.

No respectable estate was complete without a church.  St Peter’s Church was consecrated in 1859 and its first vicar, the Rev Francis Tremlett, made a significant contribution to its cost.  A man of strong convictions, he was a passionate supporter of the Confederates in the American Civil War, believing that slaves and their masters lived in harmony. He strongly opposed vivisection, Socialism, Atheism and all sorts of depravity.  He attracted such a large congregation that the church was extended in 1875.  He preached for the last time in 1913 aged 92.

The respectable middle classes didn’t want their estates sullied by lower class people, so shops and mews were confined to their boundaries.  From the mid-1860s Tidey built a pub and a row of shops on Belsize estate land on the north side of England’s Lane and Samuel Cuming built shops on Chalcots estate land opposite them.  At that time both estates were still quite separate, but as more houses were built, they merged together with the shops as a focal point.

Local shops were important because before refrigeration perishable goods had to be bought daily.  Middle-class customers could be very demanding as they expected high levels of service but sometimes used credit to live beyond their means.  The first shopkeepers appeared to flourish.  By the late 1880s Thomas Gurney Randall, the butcher, was a purveyor of meat to Her Majesty the Queen.  Barratts still trade from the butchers’ shop that Randall opened, although there is no longer an abattoir in the mews behind.  Tesco is in a shop that has been a grocer for over 150 years.

In the late 1860s Daniel Tidey struggled to sell his classical Italianate houses and went bankrupt.  Other builders stepped in, the most influential being William Willett and his son.  Already established in Kensington, in 1876 Willett started building houses in Belsize Crescent and shops in Belsize Terrace. He donated land to create a village green where the pedestrianised area is now.

From the early 1880s the Willetts built substantial red brick houses in Lyndhurst Gardens, Eton Avenue and Strathray Gardens.  With a reputation for comfort and elegance, each house was unique, drawing on an eclectic range of architectural styles.  By the late 1890s the Willetts were competing with developers in more spacious suburbs.  They responded by building houses that were wider and lower, with horizontal windows, large halls, fine timber staircases, elegant rooms, and separate and well-equipped domestic facilities.  They also had front gardens with privet hedges.  These houses can be seen in the middle of Eton Avenue and in Elsworthy Road and Wadhurst Gardens.

Two other significant local builders were Thomas Batterbury and W.F Huxley who identified a demand for artists’ studios.  The Mall Studios off Parkhill Road and Steele’s Studios off Haverstock Hill were single story workspaces for artists.  At 35-39 Steele’s Road they built grand houses with north facing studios for eminent painters.  We owe our local artistic heritage to them.     

If you are interested in finding out more about Victorians who shaped Belsize, Averil will be leading a local history walk on 29 September at 11.00 am and again at 2.30 pm.  Tickets are available from Eventbrite, links are on our website.

The Belsize Society and the  Belsize Conservation Area Advisory Committee recently presented an award to David S Percy FRSA ARPS for his contribution to local history at an event to launch his latest book, “Remarkable Homes of NW3”. We recently chatted with David.

BelSoc: We know you grew up in Belsize Park. Do you think the area has changed and what was it like growing up in the area?

DSP: The area has changed to a certain extent, but in some ways not so much. Many of the buildings in the Italianate part of Belsize appear to be rather the same externally and were originally built for single-family ownership. However, since the war, the vast majority have been divided up into flats.

I would say the key difference is that the streets were virtually empty with hardly any parked cars in the 1940s with the roads appearing much wider than they seem today. Now we have wall-to-wall parked cars almost everywhere as illustrated by the photo of Belsize Avenue from that time.

My family lived in the ground-floor corner flat in Manor Mansions on Belsize Park Gardens. The milkman used to stop outside the block. And I remember helping him offer up the nosebag to his horse just before he went on his rounds of the flats. And I recall walking to St Christopher’s school with my nanny to the Village through these virtually empty streets. Until the 1950s Christopher’s took boys and girls; now, of course, it’s just a girl’s school. 

BelSoc: Can you give us an outline of your career? How did you become involved in documenting the history of Belsize Park?

DSP: My first film assignment was in the 1960s: it was a documentary filmed in the Middle East that was followed by various other documentaries and fund-raising films that took me all over the world.  Some corporate jobs involved travelling to Australia many times. I’ve been a filmmaker for most of my life, although I’ve also had other businesses. I used to run the Classic Cinema on Pond Street in the late ’60s, where we premiered Easy Rider in Europe. This cinema, The Hampstead Playhouse, was one of the oldest cinemas in the UK and boasted a large fan that brought fresh air in from the Heath. Afternoon tea could be served in the balcony and during matinees.

And then in the 1970s, I had a display mannequin company with our factory at 98-100 Belsize Lane (where Ergotec is now). The spray booth exhaust chimney was located on the back wall of the building adjoining Daleham Mews – something that most certainly would not be allowed today!

Having been a filmmaker for most of my life, I thought that in my semi-retirement I would give something back to my beloved Belsize Park. I decided to document the history, people and architecture of Belsize in a broadcast-quality video production. It was to take three years to complete working full-time. I persuaded our neighbour Fiona Bruce to narrate the Belsize Story documentary – it’s free online for anyone to watch on the Belsize Village website. Inevitably, it led to other local history projects and exhibitions etc. My earliest documentary in the area was in 1975 when my film unit was commissioned to document Hampstead Garden Suburb, a production narrated by HGS resident Sir Donald Sinden.

BelSoc: How did you go about doing the research for ‘Remarkable Homes of NW3’?

DSP: I was asked by Michael McHale, a fellow resident also born in Belsize, if I would create a book on interesting houses in Belsize. This grew into a much larger project that incorporated remarkable homes throughout NW3. We sent out invitations to a selected number of homes that are still in single-family ownership and received a surprising number of replies. This local history coffee table book features around 100 houses. 

The most enjoyable aspect was meeting the homeowners, hearing their stories and linking them to the area’s history, in some cases to the famous people who lived in their homes or nearby. That led to seeing and photographing for the record what they have done to their homes to make them their own.

Several houses come to mind as being rather unusual. One is on FitzJohn’s Avenue and had previously been a 30-person bedsit hostel. The current owners set about gutting the entire house and rebuilding it inside from the basement up. They managed to create a most magnificent interior, with the upper and lower ground floor extensions served by one enormous set of sliding glass windows six and a half metres high! Everything, including the decor and the furniture, was designed by the owner. 

The entire book project was both enlightening and rewarding, for which I took over a thousand photographs. These are going to be added to my extensive library of local photographs, and when I finally put down my camera for the last time, I will ensure that the entire collection is lodged in the Camden Local History and Archives Centre.