Not on ancestry: London parish registers #1 St Anne Brookfield
In Highgate days that gap was yawning wide,
But awe and mystery were everywhere,
Most in the purple dark of thin St. Anne’s
John Betjeman
St Anne Brookfield is a parish in the north of the modern borough of Camden, and formally in the civil parish of St Pancras, and the old Pancras registration district. Originally stretching into Kentish Town, the estate of Brookfield bordered Hampstead Heath and Highgate, where its heights and rural air refreshed those emerging from the miasma of inner London.
The site of the church on the steep hill of Highgate Rise (now Highgate West Hill) was originally home to the Cow and Hare. This was conveyed to Richard Barnett Esq. by Harry Chester and his wife in 1838. After Richard’s death in 1851, his sister, Anne Barnett, erected the church of St Anne, Brookfield. The church was built in the Early English style and dedicated in 1853, just a few years before Annes own death in 1858.
St Anne’s peal of bells was given by the parishs most famous resident, of the enormously rich Angela Burdett Coutts (1814-1906). Believed to be the richest woman in England, Baroness Burdett Coutts (as she later became) was a close friend of Charles Dickens and the inheritress of the fortune of bank owner, Thomas Coutts (her grandfather). On the death of her grandfathers wife, she inherited all the land between Swains Lane and Highgate West Hill (except the Cow and Hare) in 1837, and bought the remaining land in the parish from the Chester Trustees in 1856. Her rural home, The Holly Lodge, lay just behind the church, but was demolished in the 1920s when it was replaced with the current Holly Lodge Estate.
Other notable features of the area are Highgate Cemetery and Holly Village (featured on the gothic episode of Grand Designs).
Transcriptions of monumental inscriptions for other churches in St Pancras, compiled Frederick Teague Cansick (1889), can be consulted at Camden Local Studies and Archives. LMA hold Bishops Transcripts for the church in reference DL/T/064, and London diocesan visitation returns for 1858 and 1862 are held at Lambeth Palace Library in references Tait 440/128 and Tait 441/237. Latter-Day Saints information on this parish can be found at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Brookfield_St_Anne,_Middlesex
Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906-84), who was baptised at the church on 25 November 1906, lived for the first three years of his life at nearby Parliament Hill Mansions. The former John Betjemann (his family changed their name in the Great War) referred to the church in his poem, NW5 & N6.
Whilst Betjeman was educated at the prestigious Highgate School, poorer parish children attended the National School of St Ann(e) Brookfield, built in 1870. Some pupils of this school lived in the parish of St Mary Brookfield – the next parish in the Not on ancestry blog series.
Sources: ‘Additional Churches’, Survey of London: volume 24: The parish of St Pancras part 4: Kings Cross Neighbourhood (1952), pp. 140-146; ‘Nos 45 and 46 West Hill’, Survey of London: volume 17: The parish of St Pancras part 1: The village of Highgate (1936), pp. 67-68; John Betjeman, Summoned By Bells (1960)
Gate of Highgate East Cemetery, Chester Road
