Track 14 · Village · 1:50
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Stop thirteen. The Spaniards Inn, and the toll house that is still in the way.
Look at the road before you look at the pub. The little building on the other side is an eighteenth-century toll house, and the gap between the two of them is why every bus, van and lorry on this road has to wait its turn. A tollgate that stopped collecting tolls generations ago is still, physically, taxing your journey.
The inn claims fifteen eighty five. What happened here that we can date exactly is the Gordon Riots, in June seventeen eighty. An anti-Catholic mob came up the hill intending to burn down Kenwood, which is ten minutes further along this road and belonged to Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, because he was thought to be too soft on Catholics. The landlord opened his cellars to them in the garden. Mansfield's steward, who had run down here in a panic, helped. By the time the cavalry arrived the mob had been drinking free for hours and was in no condition to burn anything. Kenwood is still standing because of a bar bill.
It has the literary traffic you would expect. Dickens sends Mrs Bardell and her friends up here in Pickwick Papers, Bram Stoker points at it in Dracula, and it has claimed Dick Turpin for two hundred years, which is romantic and almost certainly untrue.
Open as a pub, with a large garden, and it is the last chance for lunch before Kenwood.
Continue east along Hampstead Lane, past the toll house, for about five minutes. The gate into the Kenwood estate is on your right. Go in and follow the drive until the trees stop.
51.57023, -0.17372 · where this is on a map