Farming in Hampstead

The demesne (land attached to a manor and retained for the owner’s own use) occupied the heart of Hampstead manor and parish. It was originally owned by Westminster Abbey. By 1539 the whole estate was leased to William Wrench.

There were 296 acres of demesne farmland in 1646, little changed since 1312, but the acreage increased as the woodland was cleared, probably in the 1650s or 1660s.  Whitebirch, an area of woodland, presumably of silver birches, on the east side of the heath, had begun to be cleared by 1663 and parcels of it, described as ‘late wood’, were leased in the 1680s. By 1762 it formed 81 acres of demesne farmland, later called East Park.

During the 17th century St. John’s Wood was finally cleared for farmland. By 1762 almost all the Hampstead section formed a single farm, of 151 acres, subleased to John Pye and it continued as a single estate, probably combined with land in Marylebone, where the farmhouse lay. In 1834 it was combined with Abbey Farm, the 32 acre estate of Kilburn priory.

In 1704 the demesne farmland was said to total 481 acres. The demesne estate described in the tithe award of 1841 totalled 416 acres, the reduction caused by the area taken for the demesne houses, by the pieces sold off in the late 18th and early 19th century, and by land lost to the Finchley Road. More land was taken for railways in the 1860s and farmland shrank as building on the demesne spread after 1860 and East Park was incorporated in the heath in 1889. Even before the loss to building, parts of farmland had been leased for other purposes, like brickfields, and the value fell from £5 an acre in 1819 to less than £3 in 1870.

Nearly three quarters of the working population of Hampstead was engaged in agriculture c. 1614. Agriculture employed 199 persons in 1801 and 191 families in 1811, less than 17 per cent of the population. There were 161 such families (11 per cent) in 1821 and 80 (5 per cent) in 1831.

The principal farm was presumably always centred on the manor house, by 1729 called Hall Oak Farm. The main Hall Oak farm and Belsize Farm were leased from 1757 to 1784 to William Bovingdon.

A second farm, 60 acres in the south-west, was leased to Edward Snoxell in 1687 and was to remain with the Snoxell family until 1766.

To the southeast was the 63 acre Belsize Farm, so called by 1729 presumably because of its proximity to the Belsize Estate. There were farm buildings fronting Belsize Lane by c. 1732 and a cottage by 1842, but usually the farm was combined with Hall Oak Farm and in the 1830s it was held with 64 acres of the Belsize Estate.

The principal farmer in the late 18th century was Thomas Pool, in the 1770s a grocer who had stables, a warehouse, and a small piece of land in Hampstead town and the lease, since 1774, of Jack Straw’s Castle. In 1785 he took the lease of Hall Oak and Belsize farms. Snoxell’s Farm was formally leased to him in 1798. Although Pool (d. 1813) described himself in his will as ‘farmer’, he appears to have devoted his time from the 1780s to building and selling houses at Frognal and Littleworth. The East Heath estate, previously leased to the bricklayer Isaiah Buckhurst, with leave to dig sand and gravel on the heath, seems to have been valued as a source of bricks and was usually leased to those interested in building.

The lessees of Belsize were resident and retained a personal estate around the mansion house until 1683. The Belsize House estate, no longer occupied by the lessee, had shrunk to 25 acres by 1714 when the whole estate was divided. By 1800 the northern block of the Belsize Estate formed a 40 acres farm called after its occupiers, Holyland (John Holyland, c. 1800-26), Pickett (Joseph Pickett, c. 1851-93), and South End Farm. The southern block, 46 acres and a barn, was by 1800 leased to William Rothery but with the split-up of the estate in 1808 it became the parkland of Haverstock Lodge.

Farm boundaries in the western part of Belsize were less constant and most of the land served as parks and gardens for the country houses which were built there from an early period. The only farm to survive in 1808 was represented in 1650 by 20 acres in the south subleased to Benjamin Rutland who farmed from a house at the corner of the London road and England’s Lane. It was the first part of the Belsize estate to be systematically built up after 1808.

From 1556 or earlier the Chalcots estate was underleased and by 1720 the estate was divided into two farms, of roughly equal size, called Upper and Lower Chalcots, farmed from farmhouses to the west and south respectively of England’s Lane, until they were reunited c. 1797. Thomas Rhodes, from 1797 until the 1840s farmed both Upper and Lower Chalcots as a large-scale stock and dairy farmer.

Shoot Up Hill Farm, 110 acres in 1762, was leased from 1546, mostly to single lessees: John Barne in 1546, Robert North from 1565 to 1595, John Haley from 1762 to 1773, and the Froggart family from 1786 to 1850. Thereafter the farmland was broken up, the farmhouse and most of the remaining farmland being occupied by George Verey until the 1860s.

The Kilburn Woods estate was combined with the Liddell copyhold to form a single 60 acre farm from the late 17th century, which was probably at first occupied by its owners but from the mid 18th century was leased and was sometimes farmed with the Snoxells’ demesne farm.

After the 16th century farms did not remain long in a single family. A branch of the Marsh family had the lease of Gilberts by 1646 and in 1686 and 1700. It moved to the nearby Kilburn priory estate, lessees by 1762 and owners from 1773 to 1818. Three members of the Snoxell family, Edward, a grazier, and his presumed sons William (d. 1748) and Edward (d. 1766) were lessees at various times of three of the demesne farms and of farms on the St. John’s Wood and Chalcots estates. One of the Edward Snoxells acquired a copyhold close and house in Pond Street in 1740 which he pulled down and replaced with a handsome new one. Before the death of William Snoxell, the family occupied over 400 acres of farmland in Hampstead.

William Baker, lessee of the combined Kilburn woods and Liddell copyhold farm since 1810, acquired Snoxell’s Farm, in 1813 and in 1819 obtained a lease of 268 acres of demesne land, the combined farmland of Hall Oak south of Frognal Lane and of Belsize and Snoxell’s farms, run from Manor Lodge and the farm buildings to the south, which had been the farmhouse at least since 1810. Baker ran Manor Farm as an undertenant from 1848 to 1852. Belsize Farm had been detached from Manor Farm in 1834, leased to John Wright of Belsize House until 1841, and in 1848 to John Culverhouse. Culverhouse, who described himself as farmer of New End, took out yearly tenancies of Belsize Farm and Manor Farm in 1865 and the Culverhouses continued to take leases of the diminishing demesne farmland into the 1890s. They were also contractors and made bricks on demesne land west of Finchley Road and in East Park.

In 1772 James Baker, stablekeeper of New Bond Street, took the lease of Snoxell’s Farm and Samuel Carr, coachmaster of Oxford Street, applied for land in Hampstead, for hay and grazing. He held c. 10 acres of demesne by 1777 and he, and later Henry Carr, leased the combined Kilburn Woods and Liddell farm from 1786 to 1807. Another stablekeeper, Robert Stone, of Marylebone, leased Manor farm from 1834 to 1848.

The needs of London were important in determining what the farms grew. The general trend, as throughout Middlesex, was away from the mixed farming of the Middle Ages to grassland. The holdings around Pond Street were entirely meadow or pasture, except where wood remained, by 1593. The core of Hall Oak Farm was, at least from the late 17th century, grassland, while the more recently reclaimed woodland on the edge of the heath was arable before it too became grassland.

The grassland was partly used to pasture animals. Copyholders believed they had the right to depasture cattle on the waste without stint but the numbers were limited by the amount their own lands would support during the winter.

There was a cowhouse in Brewhouse Lane in 1791, a dairy in Perrin’s Court in 1807, and a newly erected cowhouse for 22 cows at North End in 1820. Among the best of the 19th-century dairy farms was South End Farm; in other parts, notably Kilburn, cows were kept in bad conditions.

Main source: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol9/pp111-130

 

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