Jacquetta Hawkes

A Land

1951. David and Charles, 1978.

When I have been working late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on a patch of grass in our back garden... Not far below the topsoil is the London Clay which, as Primrose Hill, humps up conspicuously at the end of the road

The author - an archaeologist and historian - was living at 39 Fitzroy Road when she wrote this story of Britain from the geological shaping of the land to the development of its civilization. Summing up at the end of the book she writes:

I began to ponder these recollections lying in darkness on the empty tray of my garden. Now I have left a hollow for an eminence. On Primrose Hill I command the heart of London, a grey-blue morass of trees and houses, and, thrusting through it, many of the buildings whose creation I have recalled...