Wyldes Farm

Wyldes Farm is a Grade II* listed former farmhouse in the hamlet of North End, Hampstead, in the London Borough of Barnet (right on the boundary with Camden), NW11. Early history of the estate Built in about 1600, it was the farmhouse for one of two estates acquired by Eton College in 1449, soon after its foundation. The estate includes what is now the Hampstead Heath Extension. The other estate was Chalcotts, better known today as Chalk Farm. The Eton College estate originated in grants of land by Bela, widow of Austin the mercer, in 1259 and by William de Pavely and Millicent his wife in 1273 to the hospital of St James, Westminster, which in 1321 held 124 acres of land and wood in the parish. After 1449, when custody of the hospital was granted to Eton College (in order to provide accommodation for officers of the college on business trips to London), the college took possession of the Hendon estate, which was called "the Wylde" in 1480–1. Eton surrendered St. James's Hospital to the Crown in 1531, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but retained the Wyldes estate until 1907, when it was sold to the Hampstead Garden Suburb trust, which had acquired some property from the college in 1906, and to the trustees of the Hampstead Heath Extension. The farmhouse is a rare survival of a timber-framed building in London. It was weatherboarded externally, probably in the 18th century when a large barn was added to the east. Major alterations were made in the late 19th and 20th centuries, including the full conversion of the barn. In the late 1960s the farmhouse and barn were divided, and today are two separate properties known as Old Wyldes and Wyldes respectively.