A Good Parcel of English Soil

by Richard Mabey

  Going back now, on a midsummer afternoon, I can’t find any trace of the fern. My meadow looks dried out and overgrazed. But true to Metro-edge form, it’s ablaze with interlopers and chancers, even in 2012’s notoriously appalling summer. Somehow a garden variety of Veronica has become the dominant plant, and the whole meadow is lit up by its brilliant blue spikes. It’s keeping company with a host of other garden escapees – Jacob’s ladder and the gaudy pink everlasting pea, both from the Mediterranean, and two species of American golden rod about to flower – and a fair scatter of native species too. The whole site looks like a floral carnival float and is dancing with butterflies.

  I’m thinking that if I’m going to revisit nostalgic old haunts along the Met, maybe I ought to go by train, finally take that commute to and from Baker Street that I’ve never had a real reason to experience. But (my slight tube phobia rising inside me) I reject the idea. The Metropolitan Line was never intended to indulge the joy of travelling. Even though it lies mostly overground, it has always been a mole run, a corridor for getting places, not a viewing platform for what lay by the route. Man is Born Free, and is Everywhere in Trains runs the subtitle of Tiresias’s quirky railway traveller’s journal Notes from Overground. (‘Commuter. Commuter. Commuter. Say it over and over again … Strange verbal resemblance to another automaton, the computer.’) I decide to follow the edges instead, as I’ve always done, north and then west, from Uxbridge via Wembley to Amersham, the modern end of the line.

  So on a cold and windy July day I drive north-east to Neasden, the scene of my next entanglement with Metroland. In 1973 I wrote a book about my rummagings in the Middlesex badlands called The Unofficial Countryside, which the following year became the basis for a BBC television film of the same name. We worked a lot around the railway tracks here, filming feral foxes and line-side flora. We got permission to go on to the embankments and discovered some bizarre horticultural relics. During the war, in the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, many householders whose gardens backed on to the railway extended their plots on to the embankment, which became, in effect, a linear allotment. When the war ended, and the idea of line-side safety overcame wartime necessity, the beds were mostly abandoned. But the fruit and veg lived on. Nervously exploring the Neasden and Brent embankments (no high-visibility jackets then), I found plots with sprawling loganberry bushes, forests of perpetual spinach and one vast and still-sprouting asparagus crown over a yard wide, good parcels of English soil migrating the other way, back into the city.

  A few months later I got mud-bound in the Welsh Harp, the big Brent reservoir that is only six miles west of Baker Street station. The reservoir had been temporarily drained and I’d walked out over the seemingly sun-baked floor with a journalist who was writing a piece about the film. We chatted about wetland plants, spotted a few migrant wading birds (and should have taken notice that they were submerged up to their knees) and then realized that we were slowly sinking. I’ve been half stuck in Norfolk mudflats many times, but never had the terrifying sensation of not being able to lift my feet at all. And worse, of realizing that in trying to, we were making ourselves sink even deeper. I truly believe that we might have become London’s first quicksand fatalities if we hadn’t spotted a gang of kids nearer the bank, having fun with the mud, but sensibly equipped with long wooden planks. We yelled to them and tried to stay very still. They were no more than ten or eleven years old, but they came out to us like a professional rescue team, laying the planks down one after the other as they edged towards us, urging us to lie flat if we could, until we were able to slither our bodies and then our mud-caked city shoes on to the blessedly supportive wood. I got to Wembley Park station reeking of decaying weed and as claggy as a frog, and hid at the back of a carriage until I got to Watford, and the less embarrassingly crowded coaches of the main-line home. It was, as I had always believed, a jungle out there on the fringes of Metroland.

  But at Neasden it was impossible to ignore the presence of another shadowy traveller, shifting through the edge-lands as I was. I’d only known John Betjeman through his verses when I first made the acquaintance of Metroland. But later I discovered that the Poet Laureate of suburbia had made an exquisite, elegiac and, under Edward Mirzoeff’s inspired direction, eccentrically funny film called Metro-land in 1973, and in it Neasden is one of the portals: ‘Home of the gnome and the average citizen/ Sketchley and Unigate, Dolcis and Walpamur’ (Betjeman wrote much of his commentary in blank verse).

  The film in fact begins at Baker Street station, with Betjeman sitting in the smart dining rooms of Chiltern Court. This was an upmarket development finally completed just after the First World War, with luxury flats and a restaurant where 250 people could dine as an orchestra played from the balcony, and whose name linked the urbanity of the capital with the green hills to which the Met Line would post-prandially transport them. Betjeman’s accompanying words perfectly capture his ambivalence (and mine) about Metroland – the fondness for the security of the just-past, the love of ritual and the loathing of regimentation (and who cares about the inconsistency of this?): ‘Here the wives from Pinner and Ruislip, after a day’s shopping at Liberty’s or Whiteley’s, would sit waiting for their husbands to come up from Cheapside and Mincing Lane. While they waited, they could listen to the strains of the band playing for the thé dansant before the train took them home.’

  I tracked back to new Northwood, the archetype of Metroland planning, to get a sense of how comprehensively it had changed the landscape. This was mostly open country in the early twentieth century. Now it was so entangled with a dense grid of houses that even my satnav couldn’t make sense of it. But somewhere, on the road to Pinner, I passed under a Met Line bridge curved like a rainbow and painted a gorgeous Provençal blue. I watched one of the Union-flag-coloured trains slide over it, its blue stripes a more sombre shade than that of the bridge. Northwood was where the writer Julian Barnes lived in the 1950s, doing the hour-long commute to City of London School (near Blackfriars, change at Liverpool Street for the Circle Line). His first novel, Metroland, is a wryly funny and evocative account of what it felt like to be a self-styled existentialist teenager living in this suburban motherlode. (To épater la bourgeoisie was his favourite sport.) He also gives an exact description of how the 1960s trains still echoed, in their ornamentation, the fixtures and fittings of the rural dreamland they were bound for:

  The carriages were high and square, with broad wooden running boards; the compartments were luxuriously wide by modern standards, and the breadth of the seats made one marvel at Edwardian femural development. The backs of the seats were raked at an angle which implied that in the old days the trains had stopped for longer at the stations … Above the seats were sepia photographs of the line’s beauty spots – Sandy Lodge Golf Course, Pinner Hill, Moor Park, Chorleywood. Most of the original fittings remained: wide, loosely strung luggage racks with coat-hooks curving down from their support struts; broad leather window straps, and broad leather straps to stop the doors swinging all the way back to their hinges; a chunky, gilded figure on the door, 1 or 3; a brass fingerplate backing the brass door handle; and, engraved on the plate, in a tone of either command or seductive invitation, the slogan ‘Live in Metroland’.

  All that was missing from this mobile manorial drawing room was an on-board butler.

  In doing my homework, I’d read about Eastcote station, opened on the Uxbridge branch between Rayners Lane and Ruislip in 1912. It was scarcely more than a halt to start with, the kind of place where a few milk churns might have been thrown off the train. There was no road access, only a rough footpath on the north side leading back to Ruislip station. A photograph taken more than six years later shows wooden platforms still lit by paraffin lamps and not a house in sight. But they were soon to arrive. Eastcote was destined to be the site of Metroland’s equivalent of a ‘model village’. A major landowner in the area was King’s College, Cambridge, which, in collaboration with Ruislip Council, had drawn up plans
for the development of 5,750 acres of land. The plan was liberal and idealistic. It set out building design requirements, housing densities (12 per acre at a maximum), the location of shopping and industrial areas, even the permitted degree of outdoor advertising. For the development of the College’s own 1,300-acre estate, a new company, Ruislip Manor Ltd, was formed, to create what was now looking more like a Garden City than a model village.

  But then things began to proceed in a more disorderly fashion than anticipated by Ruislip’s utopian planners. In the early years Eastcote Halt proved most popular not with disciples of William Morris, but with trippers from inner London. Boisterous family parties (sometimes amounting to more than 3,000 adults and kids in a day) arrived to romp in the neighbouring countryside. They especially enjoyed the delights of the Pavilion Gardens, a 16-acre site south of the railway owned and managed by a local Salvation Army bandmaster. The Metropolitan Railway Company didn’t exactly help to elevate the area’s image when it described Eastcote as ‘a dainty little old hamlet wandering back among the centuries … pervaded with a farm-yard atmosphere, which the jaded town-dwellers inhales with a sigh of gratitude’. Then, in 1914, the Great War began and all building work ceased. After the war ended, there were sporadic attempts to carry the grand scheme forward, but they stuttered, and in the end most of the land was sold off to private developers.

  It sounded like the possible site of another time warp. I find Eastcote station in the middle of a typical mid-twentieth-century high street – chain stores, burger bars, estate agents. Behind it is a warren of bungalows and unexceptional semis. I wander off through them, trying to get a glimpse of the line, and maybe discover the remains of that primeval footpath that carried the first commuters to the station. The network of narrow roads echoes an earlier sylvan history: Elm Avenue, Beech Avenue, Linden Avenue. Crossing them all is Oak Grove, heading in a southerly direction towards Ruislip and maybe lying over the old trackway. It crosses the Met Line by a high bridge that I can only just get my nose above. And there, soaring skywards in a cutting, is a linear forest of 100-year-old self-sown ash, oak and sycamore. The old woodiness is reasserting itself, and with typical Met-edge contrariness, doing so within acorn-drop distance of the line.

  Metroland development becomes smarter the further you move away from London. As I follow the line between Pinner and Northwood, the more the roads approximate to the rus in urbe ideal. The houses are Metroland archetypes. They have front gardens, strips of grass on the pavement, and trim ornamental trees set at regular intervals in the grass. (There are even some old almonds, the tree of choice in our own estate in 1950s Berkhamsted, where our gang used to scrump the bitter nuts.) C. A. Wilkinson’s cover illustration for the 1921 issue of Metro-land is a Helen Allingham-style image of a typical middle-class homestead in this zone, which would be quite at home on a bijou tablemat. It has all the classic ingredients of a Metroland dwelling: gables, leaded windows, exterior timbers, steep red tiling. There is crazy paving leading from the front porch to a cottage-garden flower border edged with delphiniums and polyanthus.

  Betjeman’s film (full, needless to say, of fits of giggles and mute, bemused glances back at the camera: ‘What on earth am I supposed to say about this?’) didn’t shrink from the 1970s variations on these themes of comfortable occupation. One sequence shows the good people of Pinner on a Sunday, the men mowing their lawns, the women out in the avenues cleaning cars, while the Osmonds’ track ‘Down the Lazy River’ blares from transistor radios perched on the bonnets.

  But the section of line between Pinner, Northwood and Rickmansworth marks a crucial frontier in Metroland. Just half a mile to the west is a large patch of real countryside, full of ancient woods and narrow lanes, that stretches all the way to the River Colne and the M25. I remember exploring this in the 1970s, especially the mysterious Mad Bess Wood. According to a hoary local legend, the wood owes its name to the wife of an eighteenth-century gamekeeper, a demented old woman who prowled the woods at night looking for poachers. This is where the line passes from Middlesex into Hertfordshire, where the chalk hills of the Chilterns really begin, and where Metroland’s most infamous lyricist, known simply as ‘F.’, reached his floweriest epiphany. It is worth quoting his essay from 1923 at some length:

  What is the peculiar charm of Metro-land? It is not ‘violently lovely’, as Byron said of one of his early loves, but, like her, it ‘steals upon the spirit like a May-day breaking’. Its charms are many and varied. Middlesex, where it still contrives to escape the fast-spreading tide of London, wears a pleasant homely face. The elms grow tall in its fields and pastures and in the broad plain that stretches below Harrow’s airy ridge towards Uxbridge … But for many the best of Metro-land begins where the iron road starts to climb in among the Chilterns, which are at the very heart of Metro-land – the flinty Chilterns with their tangled ridges, their stony yet fruitful fields, their noble beech woods and shy coppices, their alluring footpaths, their timbered cottages, scattered hamlets and pretty Georgian townships strung out along the high roads … Only a narrow tongue of ‘homely, hearty, loving Hertfordshire’ lies in Metro-land, but within its pale are Rickmansworth and its lovely parks, and here is the waters-meet of Chess, Gade and Colne. Rickmansworth is a delightful old town, and Chorley Wood Common flames into yellow gold when the gorse is in flower … Metro-land falls short in nothing which the heart of man can desire.

  Heading west towards this promised landscape – and back in a sense towards my own beginnings – I remembered how earlier generations of visionaries had created their pocket New Jerusalems among the tangled ridges and stony fields. The Levellers had cells here during the English Revolution. In 1846 the Chartists created a settlement of thirty-five smallholdings at Heronsgate, a mile beyond what would become the large holdings of the Cedars Estate. Jordans, a few miles further west, began in 1910 as a Quaker-inspired village for craftspeople. These days the Met’s shrines are less ideological: the Southfork-style gates to the new estate at Breakspear House; the extravagant Gothic portico to Moor Park Golf Club, which is housed in a 1732 mansion. There was a ‘golf halt’ (Betjeman called it ‘goff’) here as early as 1910, and in 1919 Lord Ebury’s 2,935-acre estate straddling the line was bought by the philanthropist Viscount Leverhulme, who promptly sold it on to Moor Park Ltd, a company created specifically to develop two more golf courses and a superior residential estate to the west. In 1923 the name of the station was officially changed to Moor Park & Sandy Lodge – adding yet another golf club to the Met’s destinations. Moor Park’s clubhouse is still located in Lord Ebury’s palatial mansion, and must be the only nineteenth hole to be decorated with eighteenth-century trompe-l’oeil murals.

  But move just a little to the south-west and you’re on top of a low hill, with a view over fields right down into the Colne valley. And just on the far side of Harefield’s heart hospital there’s a hamlet on a rise called providentially ‘Mount Pleasant’. I’ve not approached the Colne from the east before, but down in the valley it’s the same feisty hinterland that I knew from my earlier explorations: angling-lake security fences, bad puns on pub signs (‘The Coy Carp’), a white-water canoe slalom improvised by the edge of an industrial weir.

  The river runs parallel with, and feeds into, the Grand Union Canal (the same canal that, twelve miles east, flows through Berkhamsted, underlining the magnetism that exists between railway and waterway) and I walk north along the towpath between them. The very first time I followed this track had been in the late summer of 1972, when I was struggling to find a shape for the introductory chapter to The Unofficial Countryside. I’d left a traffic jam on the Uxbridge–Rickmansworth road on impulse, and had found myself in this unclassifiable breathing space, with a huge industrial sewage works to the west and sheep-grazed chalk hills rising up towards Moor Park to my east. There were swallows looping under the giant pipes that carried the sewage across the canal and spikes of purple loosestrife (Lysimachia – the deliverer from strife!) along the w
ater’s edge. I knew straight away that this was an epitome of the book’s theme, and, taking a writer’s liberty, conjured up George Orwell as my companion, mainly to rebuke him for being a pessimist. In fact it was a very small liberty. In 1932 Orwell began teaching at the Hawthorns boys’ prep school in Hayes, about six miles south of this stretch of the canal and only three from Uxbridge station. Hayes had been the location of HMV’s original factory (I learned later that, like the factories my dad had visited in Germany in the 1930s, it too had been converted to munitions manufacture, in this case in the First World War) and Orwell had been sufficiently moved by the conjunction of industry and blighted countryside to write a poem called ‘On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory’.

  The acid smoke has soured the fields,

  And browned the few and windworn flowers;

  But there, where steel and concrete soar

  In dizzy, geometric towers –