Beginning as a scattering of cottages along a pre-Roman pack-horse track going northwards, developing by degrees into a medieval parish and staging-post for travellers, then into a prosperous Tudor village favoured by gentlemen for their country seats, into an eighteenth-century resort of pleasure gardens, into a select residential suburb, and finally into a thickly-populated working-class district, Kentish Town has passed through every possible visual and social permutation, and is still developing and changing today. Far more than just a meticulously researched local history, The Fields Beneath illustrates the classic historical sequence of the village gradually being absorbed by the metropolis.