54 HAMPSTEAD HEATH. 
the public, not unnaturally directed public attention 
before long to the expediency of enlarging its area. 
The immense growth of population at Hampstead, and 
still more in the neighbouring London suburbs of St. 
Pancras and Paddington, and the continually increas- 
ing popularity of the Heath as a place of recreation 
on holidays to people from every part of London, 
made it clear that the area of the Heath was quite 
insufficient. The Common was a straggling one, inter- 
sected at more than one point by private property, 
-and was in danger of being seriously injured by the 
extension of building on the fields adjoining it. It 
owed much of its beauty and value to the fact that a 
property to the north-east of it, known as Parliament 
Hill and Ken Wood,* belonging to the Earl of Mans- 
field, and a small intervening property of Sir Spencer 
Wilson, were still unbuilt on. 
The Hampstead people, and to a less degree only, 
the whole of London, looked with the greatest alarm 
at the rapid approach of building operations to these 
fields so necessary to their Common. Were these two 
estates to be covered with houses, there could be no 
doubt the value of the Heath would be seriously 
diminished, and the beauty of the prospect in one 
direction entirely destroyed. 
* It was to Ken Wood that the poet Keats alluded in his 
beautiful poem, “1 stood tiptoe upon a little Hill.” Keats spent 
the two happiest years of bis brief life at Hampstead, and wrote 
there the greater part of ‘‘ Endymion” and others of his best 
works. It is said that these were inspired while wandering over 
the Heath, which was then more secluded than now. 
