ABSTRACT
These three perceptions of the local setting of Fleet Road School, written in the 1890s by invited journalists travelling up from central London, tacitly connect it with the social prestige accruing to Hampstead proper. They were the views of outsiders. The image of Fleet Road from Hampstead itself was, as we have seen, very different. The social fringe location of Fleet Road was strikingly evident from whatever the vantage point. Two are shown on Plates 7 and 8. Though a relatively recent photograph, Plate 7 offers a reasonably representative picture of the urban fabric on the southern edge of Hampstead Heath in the late nineteenth century. It does not, however, convey an accurate representation of what was a sea of terraced housing and small factory development in West Kentish Town, in the right background of the photograph. Most of this has been cleared in late twentieth-century urban renewal schemes. But the Fleet Road area, in the centre of the photograph, has altered less, apart from the monolithic intrusion of the Royal Free Hospital block on the right. Plate 8, which predates Plate 7, looks up the hill towards Hampstead, and was taken before the buildings of the old fever hospital were cleared to provide part of the site of the Royal Free Hospital. In the bottom left a patch of the working-class housing extending from West Kentish Town (between Dunboyne Street and Fleet Road on Map 8) remains. The rest of the foreground comprises the late-nineteenth-century lower-middleclass residences of the Agincourt Road area. The school buildings are shown in their entirety, just prior to
the demolition of two of them in the 1960s. Industrial development also remains, including the old tram sheds, the last vestige of high intensity urban land-use
before the more spacious layout of Hampstead proper, in thebackground of the photograph.
