The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  There was also at that time, in the vicinity of the Brecknock Arms, a turnpike, a floor cloth factory, and a newly if belatedly built ‘gentleman’s country retreat’ named Montpelier House,† the property of a retired varnish manufacturer. Such was the hybrid nature of Kentish Town in the 1840s.

  The Topographical Dictionary of 1842 stated that Kentish Town was a ‘pleasant and populous village’ of 10,000 inhabitants some three miles from London. But this way of seeing such an area was already out of date. To clearer-eyed men from abroad, London, then unique among cities, seemed already almost impossibly enormous, a geological structure rather than a town.

  London conveys the idea of unlimited space, filled with men incessantly and silently displaying their activity and their power. And in the midst of this general greatness, the extreme neatness of the houses, the wide footpaths, the effect of large panes of glass, of the iron balustrades and of the knockers on the door, impart to the city an air of careful attention and an attractive appearance, which almost counterbalances the absence of good taste. (Guizot, 1840)

  What careful fairness, what damnation with faint praise.

  Another observer, J. F. Murray, in a book aptly titled The World of London (1843) described the suburbs of London as clinging to one another ‘like onions on a rope’ –

  [The houses] delight in a uniformity of ugliness, staring you out of countenance with three windows in front, and a little green hall door at one side, giving to each house the appearance of having had a paralytic stroke; they stand on their dignity at a distance from the road, and are carefully defended from intrusion by a body-guard of spikes bristling in a low wall. They delight in outlandish and ridiculous names: a lot of tenements looking out upon a dead wall in front, and a madhouse at the rear, club together, and introduce themselves to your notice as ‘Optic Terrace’: another regiment is baptised by the christian and surnames of ‘Paradise Prospect’ … [People] live here for the benefit of their health – and fortune. When you visit them, they are eloquent upon the merits of an atmosphere surcharged with dust, which they earnestly recommend for your inhalation, under the attractive title of ‘fresh air’ …

  This, incidentally, is all he says on London’s suburbs in a two-volume work, but it is enough: the damning image was clearly fixed. Henceforth, from being the delight of country-loving gentry, the suburbs were to be presented more and more as an aunt sally for those lucky enough not to live in them. Inconspicuously, individually, the suburbs of London went on providing homes, satisfying dreams, being themselves in intricate, private ways, loved for themselves. But no one realised this any more except for those actually living in them. As places in their own right, they became invisible.

  * As with the National Schools, these two localities were then grouped together; of the two, Kentish Town figured first, as the more established centre.

  † A contemporary map shows this apparently standing in one corner of a private ‘park’ spanning York Way/Maiden Lane and thus the borough boundary: Tufnell Park, which was later to give its name to the area. William Tufnell was an eighteenth-century builder who earned £30,000 working for the New River Company – the Islington equivalent of the Hampstead Water Board – but his ‘park’, apparently houseless, only figures on maps for a brief while in the mid-nineteenth century, and I cannot discover the history of it.

  8

  ‘Black Snow’

  No one in the middle decades of the nineteenth century depicted the ex-rural hinterlands of London at that period better than Dickens. Best known, perhaps, is the account in The Old Curiosity Shop of the flight of Little Nell and her grandfather north wards from the Tottenham Court Road area which has variously and wrongly been described as a journey ‘through Islington’ or ‘to Hampstead’ but which clearly passes through Camden and Kentish Towns, Dickens’s own boyhood haunts:

  These streets, becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the road, with many summer houses innocent of paint and built of old timbers, or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage stalks that grew about it, and grotted at the seams with toadstools and tight-sticking snails. To these succeeded pert cottages, two and two, with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds and stiff borders and narrow paths between, where footsteps never strayed to make the gravel rough. Then came the public house, freshly painted green and white, with tea gardens and a bowling green, spurning its old neighbour with the horse-trough where the waggons stopped; then fields and some houses, of goodly size, with lawns, some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his wife. Then came a turnpike, then fields with trees and haystacks, then a hill.

  This would be a fair description of Kentish Town in the 1830s or 40s, travelling up the Highgate Road till Parliament Hill was reached, and indeed Phiz’s engraving of Little Nell and her grandfather, resting under a bent hawthorn tree on a hill with a view of St Paul’s dome in the distance, could hardly be anywhere else: you can sit under just such a grown-out hedgerow today, and still the mass of London spread out below will seem close yet quite separate from the green hill – oddly foreshortened, as if viewed through a telescopic lens. But precise identifications of places miss the point: what is significant about the above description is not how exactly the public houses, turnpike, lodge gates etc. can be made to fit with the map, but that it is at the same time a description of everywhere. By the same token his description in Dombey and Son of Harriet Carker’s house seems to locate it somewhere up the Finchley Road (a new road built by the Turnpike Trust), but the location is less important than the general message of geographical and social change which it bears. It could equally relate to the Camden Road, another new turnpike laid across open fields in the 1820s and only gradually colonised, with its bizarre conjunction of Montpelier House and an oil-cloth manufactury:

  The neighbourhood … has as little of the country to recommend it as it has of the town. It is neither of the town nor country. The former, like the giant in his travelling boots, has made a stride and passed it, and has set his brick and mortar heel a long way in advance; but the intermediate space between the giant’s feet, as yet, is only blighted country, not town … here, among a few tall chimneys belching smoke all day and night, and among the brickfields and lanes where turf is cut, and where fences tumble down, and where the dusty nettles grow, and where a scrap or two of hedge may yet be seen … the bird catcher still comes occasionally, though he swears every time to come no more …

  Dombey and Son is also Dickens’s railway novel, and the descriptions in it of the devastation the coming of the London and Birmingham Railway caused to Camden Town in the 1830s and 40s are famous. But at that period Kentish Town’s railway trauma lay in the future, and if the still-green area was gradually becoming dirtier and less salubrious it was not then the trains that were to blame but merely the smoke from all those thousands of new brick chimneys rising in the fields near at hand.

  We traditionally associate smoke and its consequent grime with the Victorian era, as if the standard black garb of the Victorian clerk was simply a form of protective clothing and his ‘stove-pipe’ hat a symbol of the cause of it all. But in fact smoke was no new thing to London. John Evelyn in the seventeenth century was already complaining about it. The eighteenth century was preoccupied with escaping from it; indeed the burgeoning of tea-gardens and spas just beyond its reach was in part a reflection of the increasing dirt of the town and people’s consequent obsession with clean air. But as the nineteenth century went on these same tea-gardens and spas fell victim to the smutty blight of the encroaching town. It is hard today, when that particular type of pollution is a thing of the past, to imagine just how formidable the smoke nuisance had by that time become. As early as 1812, Louis Simond already felt a certain problem in conveying the idea to his foreign readers: ‘It is difficult to imagine the type of daylight which the town of London enjoys in the middle of winter. The smoke from coal fires creates above it an at
mosphere which is visible from several miles away, like a large round cloud attached to the earth … The air is positively loaded with small flakes of soot in suspension … This black snow attaches itself to clothes, to shirts, to one’s face.’ London at that time was using 1,200,000 tons of coal a year. Another Continental visitor a generation later, Max Schlesinger, contributed the memorable image that ‘the English houses are like chimneys turned inside out; on the outside all is soot and dirt, in the inside everything clean and bright.’ Doubtless the English middle-class preoccupation with a clean and comfortable interior was, in part, a reaction against the increasing dinginess of the streets beyond the carefully shut windows.

  Although throughout the nineteenth century the connection between smoke and fog was much discussed, many people refusing to believe ‘London particulars’ could really be just the result of the cheap, bituminous coal burned in all its open grates, the problem did indeed grow steadily along with the consumption of coal. Louis Simond’s million-odd tons per annum had developed, by 1880, into five million tons, fairly representing the enormous expansion of the town during that period. Over the same space of time the average number of days of fog per year went from 18.7 to 54.8, and it was within those years – about the span of one man’s life – that the image of London became fixed in the imagination of the world: the City of Dreadful Night, where the urban landscape had acquired a mystery and romance all its own, a place where caped policemen flitted in pairs between gas-lamps aureoled in a sulphurous haze, where men worked all day at counters and ledgers by artificial light and in winter never saw the sun, where riches unimaginable in most parts of the world produced for the masses smoke, fog, stench, dirt and a loss of contact with their origins. The population of London increased six-fold during the century and by the 1870s the great majority of adult Londoners had not been born in London. They had come there, and had changed it from a basically traditional city ringed with semi-rural suburbs into a vast metropolis stretching for mile after unchanging mile, a phenomenon then unique in the world. Only in the twentieth century have other countries emulated it.

  It seemed as if the creation of this new urban habitat, once started, could not be stopped, however much people might lament the loss of the landscapes of their youth. And people did lament. Typical of many was the florid complaint of one Edwin Roffe, who grew up among leaves and streams such as Crosby depicted, but in middle age found himself in a different world:

  Bricks! are becoming the bane of the Pancredgian being … In Oak Village there is not even a sapling of that sturdy representative of English hearts to be found. Maiden Lane has lost all virgin simplicity: – the grateful modesty of woman has departed from the face thereof, and the expression of that once green-tinted lane is now all but completely Brick-brazened. Highgate Rise has raised new rows of houses. Pancras Vale [the Chalk Farm Road] is now more like a Valley of Dismal-dumps than anything else: – coal shoots pollute its once fragrant air, and locomotives puff odours far away.

  But this is looking somewhat ahead. Although, no doubt, the telescoping memory of later life leads people like Roffe to feel that the changes in their parish had been effected almost overnight, like a transformation scene in some satanical version of a Victorian pantomime, the houses did not all grow up at the same time or at the same rate. There were periods of many years when, particularly in Kentish Town itself, development was almost at a standstill. After the great building burst noted by Bennett, which petered out about 1825, nothing much happened to the village for some fifteen years. Camden Town, to the south of it, was eviscerated with enormous railway workings, but Kentish Town managed to retain – and indeed confirm – its character as a Nicer Area. Not till the 1840s did the inexorable in-filling of the fields behind the main-road houses begin on any large scale, and this period also sees the beginning, in Kentish Town as elsewhere, of comprehensive suburban development rather than ribbon development and piecemeal erosion.

  In 1840 the Southampton family, evidently deciding that the time was auspicious for transforming west Kentish Town from a rural to an urban landscape, produced a brochure and plans. It was typical of many at that period, but whether it was ever seriously regarded as a practical scheme for the area is open to debate. All round London landlords were convincing themselves, and attempting to convince prospective buyers, that this or that area was just the place for spacious, elegant streets of detached or at worst semi-detached ‘villa residences’, all standing in their own ample gardens. Prospectuses showing land so divided were published in profusion, and survive today with some of the ‘lots’ already booked by inked-in names, but most of them still blank and hopeful. The fact was that, then as always, the demand for such a superior type of development was limited, and the fact that such a thing was successful in choice spots like St John’s Wood was no guarantee that it would succeed elsewhere too – rather the reverse. At the same time there had been much criticism of ‘third rate’ development such as had flourished in Camden Town. There was a generalised, if rather illogical, feeling that in providing houses for the masses rather than for the upper classes the great landowning families were letting down the side and ‘not acting in London’s best interests’, as if you could turn a field into a good class neighbourhood just by wishing to do so.

  At all events, whatever their declared intent, the Southampton family fairly speedily laid out their Kentish Town lands in quite another form from that on the original plans. Or rather, the form was much the same, in that the main skeleton of roads was constructed as planned but what was put along them and between them was different. Prince of Wales Road, Malden Road, Queen’s Crescent, Marsden Street – these wide streets sweep in generous curves across the neighbourhood, but their interstices were filled not with villas but with continuous terraces, and extra streets were slotted in between the lots in what should have been the villas’ large gardens, with cul-de-sacs and narrow alleys (see maps).

  Other plans of the same period were still more spectral. The Southampton Estate were also responsible for a tentative map showing the lower reaches of Parliament Hill Fields, with a row of detached houses and gardens on what are now the tennis courts alongside Highgate Road, and Salisbury Plain (the old name of the fields where the Hampstead Lido now lies) ‘proposed for making bricks’. There is a morbid charm about such never-executed designs, as if somewhere, in some other version of time, these things, so confidently depicted on paper, actually exist. Kentish Town and a thousand other places like it may now be buried fields, but so, by the same token, are areas like Parliament Hill Fields and indeed Hampstead Heath itself phantom townscape. They might very easily have disappeared under a covering of bricks and mortar had local conditions in the mid-nineteenth century been only a little different, and indeed Hampstead Heath still contains today the phantom carriageway for the landlord’s projected estate – the viaduct over a marsh called the Red Arches, isolated now and forever in scrub and woodland.

  Only in such individual and celebrated cases was the march of what was then and for long after called ‘progress’ turned aside. In most places, for most of the nineteenth century, ground landlords did exactly what they wished, just as factory and sweat-shop owners did what they wished too. (Indeed the ingrained belief, which is feasible in a rural environment but not in a densely urbanised one, that if you own a piece of land you should be allowed to do more or less what you like with it, long outlasted the nineteenth century and only finally ran out of steam in the 1930s, by which time ‘suburban sprawl’ had reached unimaginably far into Middlesex, Essex, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent.) In one generation, between roughly 1840 and 1870, Kentish Town was substantially altered from a suburban village, surrounded by fields, into the townscape we see today. To believe that change, and in particular the speed of change, is something peculiar to the twentieth century, is an error, at least where the physical environment is concerned. Except in a few specific places, like New Town sites, the changes seen by many people living toda
y are as nothing compared with the paroxysms of alteration and despoliation weathered by their great-grandparents. The old man who, in the 1890s, was wheeled in a bath-chair down grimy, walled Angler’s Lane and marvelled to think that he was passing over the spot where, as a boy, he had bathed naked from the deserted, grassy banks of the Fleet, was one of a legion.

  The new industrialisation, which was making England the richest country in the world, was also making this extraordinary building explosion possible. Bricks were still fired locally, but no longer did people stealthily cut down oaks on the common land to provide themselves with beams and bannisters: indeed most of the oaks had by then gone. Instead hard wood came from the other side of the world, chiefly from the West Indies, and fir for doors and window frames was shipped from the Baltic. The new canals and newer railways brought in brassware from Birmingham and iron grates and railings from the expanding industrial cities of the north. Marble for mantelpieces was imported from Italy, even for relatively ordinary houses, while the roofs of the new London were almost universally provided by the mountains of Wales. Lord Penrhyn had begun to export slate from his quarries in the late eighteenth century; by the end of the century twelve thousand tons a year was reaching London and there was much more to follow. It had become the cheap roofing material of the era, and even today after much rebuilding the view of London from a high place is a vista of slate roofs and innumerable disused chimney pots. Yet slate has become, like the York stone that once graced every pavement, a rare and expensive commodity. It may be, as is said, that the luxuries of one generation become the necessities of the next, but the converse is true also.