I slightly prefer the second of these alternatives, for several reasons. Firstly, it follows the course of the river and hence the valley, the most logical place for an early road to be. Secondly, it starts from a point much nearer the City than Tottenham Court Road: it is a little hard to see why, in very distant times, the main road to the midlands should have been located so far to the west of the small settlement that was London. Thirdly, the route up Gray’s Inn Road passes at least two very ancient sites, Battle Bridge and St Pancras church itself. There have been Roman finds near Gray’s Inn Road: two cremation urns. By contrast, the other route up Tottenham Court and Hampstead Road is not known to pass by any ancient settlement (Camden Town is modern – 1791, to be exact); the only significant building recorded there is the one from which the present day Tottenham Court Road takes its name, the manor house of Totenhale near the present Euston Road underpass, sometimes misleadingly called St John’s Palace, the earliest parts of which seem to have been mediaeval.
In addition, two other roads concern us. One is the eastern fork from Gray’s Inn Road leading up York Way (anciently Maiden Lane), across Copenhagen Fields to Holloway, Hornsey and Muswell Hill. The Maiden Lane section was the eastern boundary of the ancient parish of St Pancras and of the manor of Cantelowes (of which much more later); it is still the eastern boundary of the modern metropolitan borough of Camden, and is also the farthest possible eastern limit of Kentish Town. The dual and contradictory nature of a road – a means of connection to those who travel it, a social demarcation line and barrier to those who live around it – is no new thing.
The other road, a latecomer dating only from 1386, is the by-pass road for the above, built through Holloway and up Highgate Hill by the Bishop of London, who charged tolls for its use (hence High-gate).
There is yet another road which ultimately became important in shaping the whole northern inner-suburb area. It determined the position of the three big stations, Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross, and thus had a profound effect on the later development of Kentish Town. But it was constructed so many centuries after even the Bishop of London’s road that it hardly seems relevant to this chapter. This was the New Road, deliberately built as a by-pass through uninhabited fields in the mid-eighteenth century, and one of the few far-sighted road schemes for London which did become reality. Today, it is called the Marylebone Road, Euston Road and Pentonville Road. It was in 1800, and still is today, the demarcation line where central London gives way to more outlying parts. We shall return to it.
When the area north of London was surveyed at the time of the Norman Conquest, it consisted mainly of forest, infested by outlaws, robbers and beasts of prey. Trees and scrub are the natural vegetation of a large part of England. The first mention of St Pancras church as such occurs at the period of the Conquest, but there seems to have been some form of clearing and settlement in the vicinity of the church – or a church – hundreds of years before this, probably since about AD 400. At any rate St Pancras was made a prebendal manor by King Ethelbert and granted by him to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral in 603.
Slowly over the centuries we now call ‘dark’, a few changes took place. By the time of the Domesday Survey (1086) four manors are recorded, though one is not called a manor, plus some other land, covering roughly the area that was to become the Borough of St Pancras (merged into Camden in 1965 when the LCC became the GLC). The named manors were St Pancras itself, Totehele (Totenhale) and Rugmere. Each manor had a plough or two (Totenhale had three and ‘another half can be made’), each had its handful of villeins, some pastureland, and ‘wood for hedges and for pigs’.
Almost exactly a hundred years after the Domesday Survey, the propagandist FitzStephen wrote in his ‘Survey of the Metropolis’ that the St Pancras district had ‘cornfields, pastures and delightful meadows, intermixed with pleasant streams, on which stands many a mill whose clack is grateful to the ear.’ The number of mills (typical service industries) suggests that the area had already embarked on the beginnings of its long-time special role as country-by-the-town. FitzStephen added that the cornfields were not of a hungry, sandy mould but ‘as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn’. He continued: ‘Beyond them, a forest extends, full of the lairs and coverts of beasts and game, stags, bucks, boars and wild bulls.’ Clearly, the frontiers of the great Forest of Middlesex, for so it was, had by now been pushed back, outlaws and all no doubt, to more manageable proportions: it formed the main hunting grounds for the citizens of London.
The hamlet centred on St Pancras grew. According to a Visitation of the Churches made in 1251, there were by then thirty ordinary houses in the parish, four manor houses, and two moated, stone-built ones – the vicarage and the rectory.
London was also growing, however slowly, and its needs were growing – for food and fodder and fuel. In 1218, the second year of the reign of Henry III, an edict went out that the forest lands should be cleared. As trees were cut down they went to build new timber houses in the city, or to replenish the hearths of those already built, and gradually more and more of the land came under the plough and had its rough contours smoothed into those rounded slopes which, in western Europe, we regard as natural landscape but which are really nothing of the kind. At first considerable portions of the forest were preserved, being now reserved hunting grounds for royalty: no doubt it was the presence of their hunting lodges in the area which have given rise to persistent tales of ‘King John’s Palace’ and the like. But time, and the ever-present needs of the nearby town, gradually eroded these preserves. Today the only remaining scraps of the once enormous Forest of Middlesex are Highgate Woods, and Ken Wood within Hampstead Heath, just on the edge of Kentish Town.
Those familiar with the area may possibly, by now, be asking themselves when I am going to stop discussing the general history of St Pancras and home-in on Kentish Town proper. After all, St Pancras church and the early settlement round it is one thing, but Kentish Town, a mile or so up-river, is surely quite another?
As a matter of fact it isn’t. Or rather, it is now, but as far as one can tell, it wasn’t in the Dark Ages, nor yet at the Norman Conquest nor yet in 1400. Until about the middle of the fifteenth century the names ‘Kentish Town’ and ‘St Pancras’ appear to have been synonymous, and either name could be used for the hamlet. Frequently on documents relating to property the place is styled ‘St Pancras alias Kentish Town’. In fact in Kentish Town we have an interesting example of a village that was apparently established in one place for a considerable period – perhaps a thousand years – and then drifted off to another locale.
In an often-quoted passage, the late-sixteenth-century Norden wrote:
Pancras-church standeth all alone, as utterly forsaken, old and wether-beaten, which, for the antiquitie thereof, it is thought not to yeeld to Paules in London. About this church have been many buildings now decayed, leaving poor Pancras without companie or comfort, yet it is now and then visited with Kentishtowne and Highgate, which are members thereof; but they seldome come there, for they have chapels of ease within themselves; but when there is a corpse to be interred, they are forced to leave the same within this forsaken church or church-yard, where (no doubt) it resteth as secure against the day of resurrection as if it lay in stately Paules.
So, by the Elizabethan period, Kentish Town, with its new chapel of ease ‘within itself’ was being regarded as a separate entity. The chapel had been built some hundred years earlier, in 1449, on land given by a local landlord, Robert Warner, after some parishioners had made representations to him on the subject: evidently there was local feeling by then that the old church was now too remote from most of the currently inhabited buildings. The plot of land chosen was in the heart of the present-day Kentish Town, in the high road, the site to be occupied in the early twentieth century by part of Daniels’s department store and, today, by Sainsbury’s supermarket. The raising of this chapel was both an indi
cation of the shift of habitation which had already taken place and a confirmation of it: once the chapel was there the tendency would be to group any new houses near it and to abandon still further the old site down the King’s Road. When another hundred odd years had passed since Norden’s description of ‘poor Pancras, without companie or comfort’, a William Woodehouse, JP, amateur antiquarian and local freeholder (c. 1700), wrote in the manuscript book he inscribed for his own pleasure and interest:
Ah, Pancras, deserted, timeworn, decayed, Pancras, why Pancras, thy village answers to the cognomen Kentish Towne, thy population are there congregated, thy whole tide of fame and life are there, and in its neighbour Hamlet of Highgate, while around the old time-honoured Church is naught but fields, ditches, its ruined and moated vicarage-house, and its old elms, the only sign of true life there, the clear and running Fleete, that noted river of Wells, which still skips and meanders on its way as it did a thousand years gone by. [But see ‘A Note on Sources’, pages 239–40.]
Why did the village move? The best explanation lies, in fact, in the ‘only sign of true life there’ – the persistent Fleet. This was hinted at by Robert Warner himself, declaring that his new chapel would be a boon for those who could not get to the church itself ‘when foul ways is and great waters’. We know that flooding was a perpetual hazard of the lowlying land around it: already, when the church was substantially rebuilt in 1331 and a new vicarage and rectory built near it, reference was made to the ‘overflowings of the River Fleet’, which had presumably become worse as the stream got silted up lower down its course. An Inquisition taken of Totenhale manor, lying west of the Fleet, in 1350, paints a picture of dilapidation – a half-ruined house, unkempt woods, one hundred acres of fairly decent land worth 4d. an acre ‘and 100 acres worth 2d. an acre and no more because the land is marshy’. Also ‘ten acres of Marsh Meadow worth 5 shillings by the year and no more, because they were overflowed and could not be mowed, except in a dry time.’ The general neglect could have other causes besides the flood menace – two years earlier, the Black Death had first visited England – but a map of the same manor seventy-two years later in 1422 shows, as well as a water-mill just above St Pancras church, extensive marshy reed beds lining the stream on its western side. So it was quite logical for the inhabitants of Kentish Town, especially those that could afford decent houses, to take themselves by degrees to the higher, drier land about a mile up the Fleet, where by now another road (Tottenham Court – Hampstead Road) joined the King’s highway. Just north of this junction, where the Castle Inn was and is today, the new Kentish Town established itself, and there it has remained – except that a slight drift further northwards becomes apparent in the nineteenth century, and was confirmed by the siting of railway and Underground stations.
In archaeological terms, then, the area round St Pancras church is a deserted mediaeval village. This has to be understood if early documentation on Kentish Town is to make sense; and when it is not, much confusion results. Admittedly the fact does not spring to the eye, mainly because the phrase itself conjures up something quite different: a bare field on which, from a low-flying aircraft or the slope of an adjacent hill, faint lumps, circles and shadows can be picked out. But this, in fact, is what you would probably have seen in the area round the old church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had you been able to achieve the right vantage point. (A balloon, perhaps?)
Dr Stukeley, the mid-eighteenth-century divine, and Kentish Town house-owner, was convinced that the area was the site of an extensive Roman camp. But Roman remains, representing classical civilisation, were more fashionable in his era than they are today, and the many centuries that separated the hypothetical Roman construction workers from the eighteenth-century antiquarians were lightly passed over. Today, were archaeologists able to trek with Dr Stukeley over the lumpy fields of St Pancras, they would no doubt be able to diagnose there a rise and fall of pre-Conquest and mediaeval buildings which the Doctor does not even seem to have suspected.
But those lumpy fields are, unfortunately, no longer there, even in concealed form, for modern archaeologists to excavate. A fundamental problem of research into the past in an overcrowded area like the south of England is that field archaeology, which is used to reveal ancient road and field patterns, strip farming patterns, house-sites and the like, can only be done over a fairly wide area at once. The chances, in any built-up area, of an archaeologist having at his disposal any more than a small fragment of a field or village site, are slight. But urban excavation, which takes a small area such as the site of one demolished building and combs it intensively, is only appropriate to centre-city sites that have been built upon for centuries and are therefore, with any luck, a rich layer-cake of successive building deposits. Forced, as an archaeologist would be in St Pancras, to use urban techniques on what was until the nineteenth century a field site, he would not discover much. Moreover the foundations, post-holes and fragments of paving which it is tempting to imagine somewhere down below the surface of the modern streets, would not even be there any longer to find. In an area that has been open country since, such remains are never more than a few feet down because there has been nothing much to pile on top of them. Virtually all the old house remains of the original Kentish Town would therefore have been scooped out and cast aside, together with the compressed evidence of former crops, when the basements of the nineteenth-century terrace houses that came to cover the area were constructed. Our deserted mediaeval village was finally dispersed into dust, and the dust scattered far and wide, when the Russell family laid out what was first optimistically known as ‘Bedford New Town’ and is now more commonly called, after its tube station, ‘the Mornington Crescent area’, or ‘that bit between Camden Town and Euston’.
This brings me to a fundamental problem for a writer who picks a particular area: not only its aspect but its very demarcation lines change as fields disappear under streets. When a place – Kentish Town or any other – is a small settlement, whether compact or straggling, and is surrounded by open country, even a quite distant field, being ancillary to the village, may be regarded as part of it. But once that field has been put to more intensive use and sown with houses instead of wheat, perception of it changes. The new ‘place’ will be given a new name, and will develop as an entity quite separate from the original hamlet. When Lord Camden was empowered, by special Act of Parliament in 1788, to grant building leases on his lands near St Pancras church, the bill was called ‘The Kentish Town Act’. Yet the new town he built there was, of course, Camden Town.
Thus the parish of St Pancras alias Kentish Town, which in the middle ages stretched from the top of Tottenham Court Road in the south up to Highgate in the north, is today many districts: Euston, King’s Cross, Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, part of Chalk Farm, Gospel Oak; Parliament Hill, the Dartmouth Park area and the Holly Lodge Estate – as well as the modern, reduced Kentish Town proper. What I mean by ‘Kentish Town’ must therefore, of necessity, be variable also; references are determined by what the inhabitants of any particular era thought of as Kentish Town – a large tract of land in the middle ages, a more concentrated centre with some outlying districts in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an increasingly sharply defined area in the nineteenth and twentieth.
Not only as it was built over did Kentish Town reduce in area; the reduction, in terms of the inhabitants’ own perceptions, continued as social decline set in, after the coming of the railways in the 1860s. An inhabitant writing to the historical column of a local paper c. 1900 pointed out: ‘“Kentish Town” has ceased to be “genteel” and it has therefore become smaller and smaller.’ The various neologisms – or euphemisms – for the out-lying parts of Kentish Town, in the hundred years after about 1860, become familiar to anyone who consults local archives and local memories: Parliament Hill, Highgate Rise, Dartmouth Park, Brookfield, North St Pancras, Holloway, Camden New Town – all these were employed to avoid the use of those
despoiled and shaming words ‘Kentish Town’.
Students of present-day inverse snobbery, however, may care to note that, since about the mid-1960s, the trend has been reversed. There has been a slight but distinct influx of the professional middle class into Kentish Town proper and also into the outlying quarters of Parliament Hill, Camden Square etc. The result is many of these newer inhabitants of the once euphemistically-named outlying districts now claim, stretching a point, to live in Kentish Town. Evidently Kentish Town, as well as becoming properly visible again for the first time in a century, is also growing larger. The day has not quite come when Millfield Lane, a charming example of pickled rurality leading from Highgate West Hill past Parliament Hill Ponds to the secluded and woody Fitzroy Estate, calls itself Kentish Town again, but it cannot, I feel, be far off.
However, those who live indisputably within present-day Kentish Town show a considerable unanimity on the subject of its boundaries. ‘Real’ Kentish Town is contained, north and south, by two railway bridges, visual barriers like the gates of a mediaeval city. The northern one crosses Highgate Road at the level of Gordon House Road, shortly before the apparent open country of Parliament Hill on the west is deceptively reached – though there is a good case for Kentish Town continuing, on the eastern side of the main road, as far as Swain’s Lane. The southern one crosses Kentish Town Road and Camden Street; the viaduct whose arches collapsed spectacularly during building in 1849 because the Fleet had been insufficiently considered. Below that, and over the sizeable barrier of the Regent’s Park Canal, one is abruptly in Camden Town.
The Fields Beneath Page 4
