Patrick Wakely, aka Tapy Lekaw, author of the novel, Tufnell

HOW fields and farm tracks became houses and roads is at the heart of a new novel by retired architect and professor Patrick Wakely.

Patrick’s new book, Tufnell, is a charming and informative work, shining a light on the development of Tufnell Park – including the street Patrick lives in – through the stories of four characters that played a role in the neighbourhood’s growth.

We meet Sir Henry Tufnell, who inherited a manor house and agricultural land on the fringes of London and would play a key role in laying out the streets we know today. We are told the story of his wife, Anne Wilmot, who was crucial in the growth of Tufnell Park: her husband dissolved their marriage after he had an affair – he had to leave Anne to safeguard his political ambitions – and she took on the mantle of creating streets of the area, including St George’s church and Holloway Prison.

Bricklayer Tom Murphy, originally from Ireland, came to London under the shadow of the Great Famine and would become a successful contractor, and his wife, Kathleen Kean, who found employment as a domestic servant and followed Tom from the west of Ireland to north London.

Patrick – who writes under the pen-name Tapy Lekaw – not only tells a story that stands up under historical scrutiny, he takes the reader into the intertwined lives of the four

“I recall a Ford Madox Ford sentence: ‘A novel should be the biography of a man or of an affair and a biography whether of a man or an affair should be a novel,’” he says.

He is a fan of this genre, citing Marion Lee’s A Quiet Tide, a story about a marine botanist Elle Hutchins, who lived on the west coast of Ireland; Zadie Smith’s Victorian-set The Fraud, about a real life attempt to impersonate a dead aristo and inherit and Baronetcy; and Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, about the film-maker Sergio Cabrera were other influences.

“I invented a story about Tufnell Park land owned by Lady Margaret, Countess of Ascham, and her three children.

“But when I looked into the history, it just wasn’t true. Then the character of Henry Tufnell appeared and it gave me a framework which is much more plausible than my invention.”

That he should be interested in how the streets he has known for more than five decades is linked to his career as an architect and urban planner.

Patrick studied at the Architectural Association in the 1950s and has spent a career working around the globe as an architect, academic and teacher.

In his third year as an undergraduate he joined the newly formed tropical architecture department – led by key Modernist Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and with architect Otto Koenigsberger, who worked extensively in India, at its head.

It had a focus on what now is called sustainable and green architecture, as well as looking at how urban planning could react to different environmental conditions.

“It sounded interesting,” he recalls. “The AA had a link with a university in Ghana so I travelled to west Africa and taught there.”

He came home to work at the AA before heading west to Colombia in 1972: he worked in Bogota for four years and then spent a further two years in Sri Lanka working for the UN.

The story includes relating how the young Sir Henry Tufnell worked in development as a civil servant: in 1829, he was appointed secretary to Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, Governor of Ceylon. Henry’s father was an MP and owned farmland in Holloway.

It was while in Sri Lanka Henry worked on the development of an area called Havelock Town – where Patrick would live 150 years later. Henry would then return to London and fulfil his father’s ambition of turning their agricultural manor into a new suburb.

“I got to know Havelock Town,” he said. “I lived at No 1, Horton Place – named after Sir Robert.”

He would become a professor at the Bartlett School and stayed there until retiring in 2005.

Writing the book saw Patrick use his professional eye to uncover what Anne, Tom, Henry and Kathleen would recognise.

“The main gate into Tufnell Park was on the Holloway Road – that was where you could find the main entrance to the manor house. The first road laid came into the manor at the Holloway Odeon,” he observes.

“It came along what is Tufnell Park Road, and took a sharp left up to Kentish Town – along what is now Lady Margaret Road. You can still see the gates to the estate on, both with a ball on top.

“Then there was a track that came up to the back of what was called Home Farm – around where Whittington Park stands today.”

Patrick bought a house in Tufnell Park in the early 1970s and as his book reveals, it was part of the estate that bricklayer Tom Murphy suggested to Anne Tufnell should be used as a plot for builders to stay on.

At first, they built temporary wattle and daub shacks. The land would eventually provide permanent homes for working-class artisans – terraces that remain today.

Quirky touches can be found everywhere, if you know what to look for, he adds.

The terrace of homes he lives in have back extensions, and he points out how each is slightly different.

“If you look along the backs of the houses, they are all two or three bricks longer or shorter than their neighbours,” he says.

“The brickies would stop for the day when they fancied knocking off to the pub, or had run out of a pile of handy bricks and didn’t want to carry more. It means each home has slightly different proportions.”

• Tufnell. By Tapy Lekaw. Austin Macauley Publishers, £7.99