A Good Parcel of English Soil

by Richard Mabey

  Richard Mabey

  A GOOD PARCEL OF ENGLISH SOIL

  Contents

  A Good Parcel of English Soil

  Further Reading

  Penguin Lines

  Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company Mind the Child

  The Victoria Line

  Danny Dorling The 32 Stops

  The Central Line

  Fantastic Man Buttoned-Up

  The East London Line

  John Lanchester What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube

  The District Line

  William Leith A Northern Line Minute

  The Northern Line

  Richard Mabey A Good Parcel of English Soil

  The Metropolitan Line

  Paul Morley Earthbound

  The Bakerloo Line

  John O’Farrell A History of Capitalism According to the Jubilee Line

  The Jubilee Line

  Philippe Parreno Drift

  The Hammersmith & City Line

  Leanne Shapton Waterloo–City City–Waterloo

  The Waterloo & City Line

  Lucy Wadham Heads and Straights

  The Circle Line

  Peter York The Blue Riband

  The Piccadilly Line

  If you’re trying to make sense of the landscapes that shaped you as a young person it helps to have a hot spot, some metaphorical junction which connects that old space with the world you inhabit now. I’d lived for the first half of my life in the dappled shadows of the Metropolitan Line, and went on the road as a nature writer in my thirties, and I had a hunch where one such crossover might be. Somewhere west of Watford, the old straight track had to intersect with the new London Orbital. I guessed it might be in a pylon field, with scraggy horses tethered under the flyover. Then I found the exact spot on the map. The Department of Transport, maybe trying to make a point, had laid the M25 (tape cut by Margaret Thatcher in 1986) over the Metropolitan Line (opened in 1863) plumb in the middle of Chorleywood, the frontier town between suburbs and open countryside that John Betjeman had called ‘essential Metro-land’. To the west lay the expanse of Chorleywood Common, a patch of real heathland, unfenced, long-grassed, with its own ancestral cricket pitch. To the east – beginning almost exactly at the flyover – was the even vaster Cedars Estate, a 500-acre borough of smart 1930s mock-Tudor villas discreetly shrouded with evergreens, that swept all the way to Rickmansworth. If there was such a thing as a commuters’ ley line, this would have been its nodal point.

  I couldn’t tell if one could get to this axis mundi by road. On the map there was a bottom layer to the palimpsest of routeways, a tangle of byroads (presumably one-time footpaths across the common) which seemed to braid with the railway, vanish, reappear, dip under the motorway and emerge in the Cedars. But they were easy to follow. I drove slowly along the road that edges the common. On one side lay the original village, a pleasant jumble of cottages which could have come from any part of the pre-industrial South-East. On the other side were ponds full of gigantic aquatic buttercups, and groups of rangy teenagers from the local day-schools, dawdling home through the grass like latter-day Romantics. The lane switchbacked over and under the Met Line, then crept through a natural cutting directly beneath the M25.

  The junction is awesome, but weirdly quiet. The motorway rides on gigantic concrete pillars, fifty feet high by the road and dwindling to six or nine by the line. I watch as a Met train slides past, with only a few inches of headroom. Done up in London Transport’s livery of red, white and blue, it looks like something out of Toytown. You would need to be very fanciful to see this site as some kind of industrial henge. It’s more like a brutalist tube station. But the real Chorleywood station (non-brutalist, and still with its handsome Victorian clock) is a mile to the west, and there are no slip roads or even the slightest conceptual links between these two transport systems. A Chorleywood Metropolitan Line halt on the M25 would need a sign on the platform saying: ‘Alight here for another space–time continuum.’

  In 1950, A. J. Deutsch wrote a classic science fiction story called A Subway Named Mobius, set in a Boston tube network that has reached an almost infinite level of spatial complexity. On 4 March, the number 86 train, including more than 400 passengers, vanishes, only to rematerialize in May with the commuters still reading their ten-week-old newspapers. A mathematician brought in to advise the tube company believes the subway has become a four-dimensional version of a Möbius strip, the mathematical device in which a length of material is given a single twist and its ends are then joined, so that it has only a single surface, leading to all kinds of mysterious space–time anomalies.

  The London Orbital, it seems to me, is more Möbius than the most convoluted underground system. People have been lost on it (for hours, admittedly, not weeks), circling aimlessly to find the right exit. In its early days there were coach outings devoted to its circumnavigation. For all its convenience, it is a route to nowhere, a road which simply connects with other roads. The Metropolitan Line does at least have a destination, and a mission. It exists to take people out of a working city to live in a greener place. The irony is that in doing so it has succeeded in wiping out, or at least dramatically changing, many of the green places that it used as bait for its customers. So it’s also ironic, I guess, that as a boy naturalist and then a would-be Romantic scribbler, I’ve been endlessly enthralled by the strange and not always pretty negotiations between human and natural life that it brought into being.

  The most famous of these was Metroland, a seductive term invented by the Railway Company’s publicity team to describe the area – chiefly inside the Chiltern hills’ mosaic of beechwoods and commons – where it had had the nous to buy up parcels of land on which to build houses for its potential customers, thus cannily providing both the honeytrap and the beeline. Metroland was a grandiose and sometimes cynical concept designed to encapsulate the urban worker’s dream of a country retreat, wreathed by wild flowers and birdsong but not too far from the office. Its inventors planned to create a suburban Arcadia for commercial profit.

  It certainly became classic suburbia. Whether it was ever Arcadian, or even faux-rural, is debatable. But it has obstinately survived, and is a candidate for that fashionable new category of landscape, ‘edge-land’. Victor Hugo in Les Misérables called this kind of undefined, hybrid habitat terrain vague, a landscape ‘somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, which surrounds certain great cities’. ‘To observe the city edge,’ Hugo wrote, ‘is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of passions, the end of the murmur of things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankind.’ Except that the original vision of Metroland was not one of such sharp ends and beginnings, but one where trees, pavements, fields, moments of rhapsody and trips to the shops would be seamlessly interleaved. Such a harmonious marriage did materialize in a few places, until the noise of humankind became too overpowering. But something else also began to take shape around Metroland, a fraying of its neat edges, a wayward outgrowth that seemed to me, scavenging for ideas in it for much of my life, more interestingly mutable, and more inspiringly upstart than any part of its sedate interior.

  There’s a concept in ecology which may be useful here. An ‘ecotone’ is a zone where one habitat merges with another, creating something with a character more than the sum of its parts. A salt marsh is an ecotone. There is sea on one side and dry land on the other, but between them a hinterland that is, in a more than metaphorical sense, a world of shifting sands. The scrubby zone between a wood and open fields is an ecotone. There are mature trees
and the tabula rasa of grassland, but, squabbling between them, a mobile strand of brambles and thorn. Ecotones have no real edges and are inherently unstable. The habitats on either side of them continually advance and retreat. Their inhabitants, microclimates, topographies are constantly being shuffled. Modern Metroland is too settled these days to be a pure ecotone. But it lies in the broad margin between city and open countryside, and through it and round it ecotonic muddles and relics proliferate. And ecotones are where things happen.

  Down in the cutting under the M25/Met Line synapse, I can see the funereal canopy of the Cedars Estate’s shrubberies directly ahead and glimpse the mock-Tudor villas they shelter. I grub about among the pillars instead, peering at the weeds. They’re an unexceptional waste-ground mix: thistles, purple toadflax, tall sprays of hemlock with liver-spotted stems, busy clumps of that ancestral midden species fat hen. I climb gingerly up towards the line, wondering if debris from the passing road traffic has contributed to the delectation of passing rail passengers, peering through their sealed windows at the beginning of the green belt. Tomato bushes and holly trees have appeared in places like this, sprung from the seeds in thrown-out burgers or the berries from crash-site votive wreaths. But there are no such floral parables. Then I spot the ivy, one of Metroland’s signature species, restored to rustic respectability when the young Queen Victoria began wearing diamond-studded ivy wreaths in her hair. It’s snaking its erratic way up at least four of the concrete pillars and has already reached more than six feet high. On one of the columns nearest the road, I can just make out a maze of faint reticulations where an earlier generation of tendrils has been scraped off. That first invasion of ivy can’t have begun much more than thirty years ago, yet these fossil traces already look like prehistoric graffiti. The ivy’s story is typical of the constantly changing fortunes of nature in edge-lands. A species that is a natural climber of trees in the wild (not a parasite, incidentally; it simply uses the trunk as scaffolding) finds a man-made artefact, in this case a concrete motorway pillar twenty-five years old, and scales it exactly as it would an immemorial English oak. It even has the louring shadow of the motorway to act as a simulacrum of woodland shade. Then humans notice the impertinent intruder and eradicate it from their modernist monument. The ivy, of course, still lurks, in buried seeds and root fragments, and soon begins a new ascent. Nothing short of a scorched-earth policy (not Chorleywood’s style) would exterminate it altogether.

  But it occurs to me that this ivy is an emblem not just of the opportunist liveliness that dogs the edges of Metro country, but of my own clingy attachments to it. For much of my life I’ve been rooted elsewhere, but seem to have repeatedly sent out compulsive suckers towards these perverse, ambivalent, occasionally downright weird but always inspiring backlands. I was born on the fringe of Metroland in the 1940s and spent my childhood running wild in its leftover patches. I came to work in another stretch in my twenties and ever since have been drawn, either literally or in my imagination, by its provocative contrariness. Looking back at the line’s history as I write, I’m intrigued by the way its development, its marriage of pastoral and technological dreams, mirrors my own.

  The opening of the Metropolitan Line – the world’s first urban railway to burrow underground – occurred in the same year (1863) as Professor Lidenbrock’s subterranean adventures in Jules Verne’s fantasy Voyage to the Centre of the Earth, and one way of looking at the London underground is as an expression of nineteenth-century futurism. It grew out of a brew of pastoral dreams, utopian social engineering and sheer technological daredevilry. And out of classic Victorian contradiction. It was a railway to get you away from the railway system.

  The development of London railways in the nineteenth century was always bound to be a vicious circle. The more the city’s businesses expanded, the greater the number of workers they needed and the less space there was available for them to live in. Moving home-space ever further away from work-space became inevitable, and as the infrastructure of travel itself began to occupy an increasing area of inner-city land, the centrifugal migration of London’s population became inexorable. The pioneering main-line termini which were built in London in the 1830s, at London Bridge, Euston and Paddington, were all intrusions into poor working-class areas, where property prices were low and the displaced population unlikely to kick up a fuss. The clearance of entire neighbourhoods was carried out on a scale that would only be matched a century later in the Blitz. In Dombey and Son, Dickens describes the mayhem caused by bulldozing the London to Birmingham line through Camden:

  Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up … There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream … In short, the yet unfinished and unopened railway was in progress.

  The painter John Martin, doyen of what was called ‘the apocalyptic sublime’, echoed this vision of what might be either the beginning or the end of the world. His epic canvas The Last Judgement (1853) features the moment of Revelation in full swing under a blood-red sunset. But approaching from the background is a train. Whether it is on a rescue mission or carrying the Devil isn’t clear, but its presence catches the ambivalence of the first railways, simultaneously destroyers and liberators of London’s warrens.

  Where it wasn’t bound, it hardly needs saying, was the wealthy estates of the West End. The London and Birmingham line stopped abruptly north of the Euston Road, just as the City of London Corporation had only permitted one small penetration, at Fenchurch Street. Getting between London’s centre and the railway stations, for gadabouts and workers alike, meant going by hackney carriage or horse-drawn omnibus (there were more than 200,000 horses in London, some housed in multi-storey stables). By the 1840s, adding to the misery caused by slum clearance and railway construction, there was something close to gridlock on the London streets, especially in the labyrinthine lanes of the City.

  Enter Charles Pearson, who was in the powerfully incongruous position of being both a radical and Solicitor to the Corporation of London. Pearson believed in the potential social benefits of the railways, but had seen first-hand the social havoc they were causing. And he had a possible solution, which he began to advocate to the Corporation. He’d noticed that the London poor were keen on weekend outings to the countryside around London, and that the better-off were moving out to the same regions and travelling back during the week. The word commuting hadn’t yet been invented, and he described these movements as ‘oscillations’, a term which sounds oddly mechanical now but was at least inclusive of both varieties of back-and-forth migration. Why not, Pearson reasoned, deliberately plan a railway to provide for such regular human tides, and, to avoid the socially unfair devastation caused by the main lines, build it under the ground ?

  His first plan, set out in 1839, was for a wide, covered cutting that would connect a huge, half-underground station at Farringdon with the national main-line system. It would also (and the dream of Metroland begins to emerge here) connect up with new estates for poorer city workers, which, he argued, should be built six miles to the north. But his vision was too far into the realms of science fiction ever to become a reality – ‘more Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’, Andrew Martin suggests, ‘than metropolitan railway’. Pearson’s dream train would be drawn by atmospheric power, a ‘rope of air’. Trains would be attached to pistons set in a pipe between the rails, which were in their turn then sucked along by pumping engines. This idea of an ethereal source of transport energy – smokeless, whisperingly quiet, a metaphorical zephyr blowing beneath the smog-ridden streets – was faddish in the mid-nineteenth century, and echoed the contemporary fantasy of piping wholesome air from Hampstead Heath down into the Great Wen’s miasmic centre. Joseph Paxton, who had designed the Crystal Palace, went so far as to publish pla
ns for an air-powered ‘Great Victorian Way’, a 72-foot-wide glass arcade around the whole of central London that resembled a gigantic circular shopping mall – or perhaps a prophetic vision of the M25.

  A few atmospheric-powered railways were built in remote places, but none on the scale or with the underlying sense of mission of Pearson’s scheme. The outline he put to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Termini was full of philanthropic zeal and belief in the redemptive power of the rural experience:

  The passion for a country residence is increasing to an extent that it would be impossible to persons who do not mix much with the poor to know. You cannot find a place where they do not get a broken teapot in which to stuff, as soon as spring comes, some flower or something to give them an idea of green fields and the country.

  Pearson’s plans ran up repeatedly against vested interests, but eventually the Metropolitan Line opened on 10 January 1863. The Illustrated London News’s report likened the atmosphere on opening day to a show-biz premiere, but with hindsight it reads like a vision of the rush-hours of the future:

  … it was calculated that more than 30,000 persons were carried over the line in the course of the day. Indeed, the desire to travel by this line on the opening day was more than the directors had provided for; and from nine o’clock in the morning till past midnight it was impossible to obtain a place in the up or City-ward line at any of the mid stations. In the evening the tide turned, and the crush at the Farringdon-street station was as great as at the doors of a theatre on the first night of some popular performer.

  When it got down to serious business the Metropolitan Railway company agreed to Pearson’s pressure for cheap workmen’s fares on the Met (something that was later made a legal condition for the company extending its lines). In an 1865 pamphlet, Henry Mayhew, the great champion of the London poor, interviewed workmen who were making use of the line and its cheap fares. His vivid description of an early morning at Paddington hints at how close the countryside – and a recognizably rural ‘style’ – was to the centre of London. The platform was ‘a bustle with men, a large number of whom had bass [i.e. wicker] baskets in their hands, or tin flagons, or basins done up in red handkerchiefs. Some few carried large saws under their arms.’ One of his interviewees explained that he lived in Notting Hill – then ‘almost in open country’ – and that he was able to afford two rooms for what one cost in the centre of London. The Metropolitan Line was beginning to drive the border between town and country further west from its very inception, decades before the invention of Metroland.