A dead man's will helped save Hampstead Heath from London's builders
When Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson inherited the Manor of Hampstead in 1821, a new road promised fortunes from housing. But his father's will barred him from selling the land or leasing it for more than 21 years. He spent most of his remaining life fighting that clause, and lost, leaving London one of its wildest open spaces.
The heath's written history reaches back to 986, when Ethelred the Unready granted land at Hemstede to the Abbot of Westminster; the Domesday Book of 1086 lists it as the Manor of Hampstead. Long before that, Mesolithic tools and charred stones suggest hunter-gatherers camped here around 7000 BC. Today it covers 320 hectares along a sandy ridge among London's highest ground, with ponds that once served as drinking-water reservoirs fed by the River Fleet, three of them now open-air swimming spots.
Wilson's first attempt, an 1829 bill allowing 99-year leases, would normally have sailed through, but it included building on the heath itself. Copyholders with ancient rights and influential admirers of the landscape rallied against it, and the Commons threw it out after the Lords had passed it. A second bill in 1830, sparing the heath but not the adjacent East Park Estate, also failed. In the 1840s he tried building 28 villas himself, but landslips and waterlogging defeated the viaduct for his access road, and the scheme was abandoned.
After his death in 1869, the Commons Preservation Society pushed for public ownership. The Metropolitan Board of Works paid 45,000 pounds in 1870, and an 1871 act promised the heath would stay unenclosed and unbuilt on. Campaigns led by Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Octavia Hill raised 300,000 pounds to add Parliament Hill Fields and the East Park Estate, and Golders Hill Park, Wyldes Farm, part of Kenwood and finally Kenwood House, bequeathed by the Earl of Iveagh in 1928, followed.
The heath has had odd roles. From 1808 to 1814 it held a shutter telegraph station linking the Admiralty to ships at Great Yarmouth. The view from Parliament Hill across London is now protected by law.
Source: Hampstead Heath
