On the pastures lately set out for building you may see a double line of trenches with excavation either side … and a tavern of imposing elevation is standing alone and quite complete, waiting for the approaching row of houses. The propinquity of these palaces to each other in Camden and Kentish Towns is quite ridiculous. At a distance of two hundred paces in every direction, they glitter in sham splendour.
By a symmetrical twist of fate, this scene was briefly recreated in many streets in the 1960s, when whole sections of west Kentish Town and other similar parts of London were demolished for the then-fashionable ‘comprehensive redevelopment’, but the pubs – whose licence-holding demanded that they did not close – were allowed to remain standing, at any rate until a replacement was built. For the second time the ‘palaces’, now become rather faded and cavernous, found themselves standing in isolation amid acres of churned mud.
Perhaps one man may represent the many who, in the nineteenth century, moved from a rural setting and modest origins, via industry, to urban wealth, and whose lives thus paralleled the transformation of vast areas of what became London. John Brinsmead was born in north Devon in the year before Waterloo, the son of a farm-worker, but went into the cabinet-making trade. He came to London in 1836, when he was twenty-two, and presently set up a small piano-making business off Tottenham Court Road. By the time he died in 1908 he had been for half his lifetime proprietor of a huge company whose main workshops were in Grafton Road, Kentish Town. He owned a fine house near Regent’s Park and, in the phrase of the period, was ‘widely known for unobtrusive philanthropy’ as well as being for some years Chairman of the Board of Poor Law Guardians. He had been married for seventy years, and when his wife died a month before he did, the doleful news was successfully kept from him. Clearly, he was born under a lucky star, for his death more or less coincided with the end of the Great Piano Era. Pianolas and other early forms of the gramophone had begun clicking away in drawing rooms; no more fortunes would be made, and after the First World War the piano was swiftly relegated from being the universal prestige object to a symbol of all that was now despised and derided in the Victorian era. The ill-educated and under-employed daughters of clerks and tradesmen, who had thumped their way through five finger exercises in a million stuffy front rooms, now thumped typewriters instead. Keys yellowed, apricot silk panels faded, walnut veneers became cracked and dried. What happened to all the pianos in the end? It is almost impossible to believe that the twentieth century could simply have absorbed and dissolved the vast numbers of pianos produced in the nineteenth, and yet it has apparently done so, just as it has absorbed iron ranges and tin baths and countless gas-light fittings which were a similar essential feature of Victorian terrace housing.
Naturally the traditional rural occupations were not displaced by industrial ones overnight, or even over the course of a decade or two. Until well into the second half of the century Kentish Town retained its coachmen, its gardeners, its cow-keepers, its agricultural labourers. Nevertheless, between the years 1841 (the date of the first effective Census), 1851 and 1861, even in areas that were already built up by the earliest date, some interesting changes are apparent and serve as pointers to the way Kentish Town was going.
From the wealth of unprocessed material the Census returns contain, one can only select a few streets, a few factors, to indicate much. Let us, for example, take Harmood Street, which was at least there by 1841: most streets in Kentish Town post-date this. Harmood Street was one of the first side-developments of the Chalk Farm Road (‘Pancras Vale’) and thus on the south-western fringe of Kentish Town. John and Mary Harmood owned the field that was here c. 1800 on a lease from the manor of Tottenhall. When it was built during the 1830s, first one side and then the other, fields separated it from the Kentish Town Road and nursery gardens stretched towards Haverstock Hill on the north. The houses in it were – and are – extremely small, the two-up, two-down-and-a-wash-house variety, with tiny back gardens. The presence of quite a number of large old fruit trees in the gardens even today suggests that the land was in use as an orchard immediately before being built upon. They can never have been intended as true middle-class dwellings; nevertheless they must have been, originally, extremely pleasant places to live in.
In 1841, by which time Harmood Street had forty houses, it had 251 inhabitants. Among heads of households, the largest group of all was those of ‘independent means’ – some sixteen people and their families; clearly Kentish Town was still a place to which to retire and live out your days modestly on your modest savings. There were eight clerks; five people employed in various capacities on the railway, which had then newly arrived in Camden Town, just down the road; a surveyor and a builder. The rest of the population represented a fair cross-section of the skilled lower-middle, upper-working class of that date: there was a coach-builder, three printers, two binders, an engraver, a milliner, a carpenter, a gardener, two carver-gilders, a tailor, a schoolmaster, a surgeon and several shopkeepers. There was a ‘music student’, an engineer, a ‘merchant’, two governesses but only one laundress. In an adjacent cottage was a blacksmith.
By 1851 the picture had changed somewhat. The street was becoming surrounded by others, both on the Southampton Estate to the northeast and the Hawley-Bucks Estate to the south. There were now double the number of houses in Harmood Street itself – eighty-two to be exact, including a pub and a few shops – but the number of inhabitants had more than doubled, from 251 to 561. In other words the average number of people per house had gone up from six – already quite a lot in a four-roomed house – to seven. But the most noticeable thing is that many more professions are listed, since more of the wives were employed than had formerly been the case, and more of the houses were in multi-occupation. One house actually contained a ‘solicitor’s managing clerk’ (a frequent claim in Census records), his wife and five children (fortunately small), a railway messenger, a monthly nurse and – at any rate on the night of the Census – a casual lodger whose name was unknown. One must assume that the clerk and his family, having fallen on hard times, had let two rooms out of the four, and that the railway messenger and the ‘monthly nurse’ were their lodgers. I also suspect from the unnaturally frequent appearance of ‘monthly nurse’ on the Census records, here and elsewhere, that the term was in fact a common euphemism for an even older profession and that the nameless lodger was therefore one of her clients.
To be fair, not all households showed such signs of social decline. There were still twenty-four people variously described as being of independent means, though this represents, proportionally, a considerable drop on the previous decade. There was a sprinkling of artist-engravers (a genteel form of sweated labour at the period), governesses, a landscape artist, a ‘portrait painter in oil’ (his sisters went in for landscapes and modelling in clay), and a missionary. There was even a ‘ladies seminary’ run by the wife of a surveyor: it had four pupils. Out of eight laundresses, four were in the same household and three of these were teenage girls; there was also a ‘wife who takes in mangling’ (shades of the Punch writer’s ‘patent mangles to let’) and quite a few ‘dressmakers’ or ‘needleworkers’ with both husbands and children to occupy their time in addition. There was even an ‘artistic florist’ aged eleven. Few households kept a living-in servant. No less than thirty-two people were now employed in some way on the railway, either building it or running it, and there were half a dozen piano-makers. There was also a person exercising the new art of daguerrotypes.
By 1861, by which time west Kentish Town was largely covered in houses, the number of houses in Harmood Street was still eighty-two but the population had gone up again, not spectacularly but slightly, to 578. The number of persons of independent means had gone down to nine; two of these were pensioners and two were visitors not normally living in the street. In other ways also the composition of the street appears more working-class, not dramatically but significantly. There are proportionately fewer clerks, and rather more
people of unequivocally humble station in life, such as a coal porter, bootmakers, a dealer in earthenware toys and a widowed mother and daughter who made baby-linen. There were now four photographers, a typical living-by-your-wits trade. The artists, engravers and governesses seem largely to have abandoned the place, and indeed few of the tenants of ten years previously were still in occupation. Evidently Harmood Street was a place for people on the way up – or the way down. There are actually rather more children listed as ‘scholars’ than there had been in 1851, but presumably this reflects the general increase in school-going in all classes but the poorest at that period, rather than a local social fluctuation.
For comparison, let us look at Gloucester Place – the High Street end of what later came to be called Leighton Road. Older than Harmood Street, it participated in some of the piecemeal villa development that made Kentish Town attractive in the early years of the century. The map of 1796 shows a footpath following the line of it alongside the bowling green and paddock belonging to the Assembly House, to a stile and to a further path leading across the fields to Islington. There were no houses as yet. By 1804, however, the path had been widened and paved as far as the stile and was dignified with the name ‘Evans Place’. The ground landlord of this whole slice of land, running back from the Assembly House towards Maiden Lane, was a gentleman with the exotic name of Joshua Prole Torriano, who was nevertheless a descendant of a perfectly English soap-maker called Cox. He is remembered in Torriano Avenue up the road, built rather later in the century. The land on the north side – the public house land, that is – seems to have been early sold off in small freehold lots, whose purchasers built houses for their own occupation, and the houses on it are freehold to this day. Several of the houses were large enough to have stables, but those have disappeared, swept away either by the construction of Leverton Street on the north post-1850 or by the advent of the Midland Railway on the south in the 1860s. One substantial one remains, built as a large single family house, its porch graced by delicate ionic columns: later in the century it was divided into two houses and another, more ordinary porch was added at one side. But before this occurred the decent garden space between it and its original next-door neighbour had already been filled by a small double-fronted house standing on a plinth with the air of a doll’s house, needing only a brass hook on one side to complete the illusion.
During the 1820s and 1830s the street, now known as Gloucester Place,* gradually prolonged itself beyond the point where the stile had stood. Terraces appeared, containing houses of a more modest type than the original ones. In 1840 a six-roomed house which effectively became part of a terrace but stood on a single freehold plot, was sold by Mr Crowe, its ground landlord and builder, to one Henry Hugh Pike, who styled himself ‘barrister at law’ and claimed to be a member of Lincoln’s Inn, though in actual fact he was a former member of Gray’s Inn. The house, with a large garden whose length corresponded to the breadth of the erstwhile Assembly House grounds, was sold to Pike for £900, a then substantial sum of money which reflects the continuing desirability of the neighbourhood. Pike did not at first live in the house – 94 Gloucester Place – himself, for the Census the following year finds it occupied by a widow of independent means, a lodger who may have been a relation, and two servants. Ten years later, in 1851, the Pike family (of whom we shall be hearing more in a moment) were still absent, the rent of the house presumably providing them with some sort of an income, and the place was occupied by an architect, his wife, two children, a nurse and a servant. Among their immediate neighbours were two solicitors, an accountant, a landscape painter, a clerk in a fire insurance office, and a family called Edwards, clothiers who had bought a plot of land and built several houses some thirty years earlier. At Bower Cottage next door, one of the largest and oldest houses in the street, lived an auctioneer and his family. It was hardly a grand neighbourhood, but it was evidently still an agreeable one.
By 1861 the picture had changed somewhat. Although the gardens of the houses on the north side still backed onto fields, on the south side (the Christ Church lands) a substantial new estate was planned, and further up the road houses branched out to right and left in Torriano Avenue and Leighton Crescent. At the High Street end the Assembly House had been rebuilt as a town pub and had lost the remainder of its garden to Leverton Street, at that date still a cul-de-sac. These tiny houses, each with its scrap of garden and its pretentious stuccoed facade, could never have been intended to attract a middle-class ownership, and its general social level, from the first, was not much above that of Harmood Street. A goldsmith lived there, and a ‘water-colourist’, two governesses, a confectioner, a gardener, a piano-maker, and clerks both in and out of work. They were family houses – there were not the nameless lodgers and four-to-a-room railway workers who had appeared in Harmood Street by this date – but there were few servants.
In Gloucester Place itself, Bower Cottage was at this time lived in by the large Crane family, who were local builders responsible for many of the new constructions in the area including the National Schools in Islip Street (1849). Other people along that run were the Edwards, still present; a jeweller’s assistant with a wife, five small daughters and no servants; a solicitor’s managing clerk with two grown-up sons, clerks to the Western Railway and the Submarine Telegraph Company respectively; a professor of drawing with a wife, three small children, a lodger and one servant; a retired ironmonger with two servants; a commercial traveller called Thomas West with a wife, a seven-year-old son and one servant; and an elderly warehouseman living with his wife, assorted elderly relatives, his son and his son’s wife.
There was also Mr Pike, now in residence in No. 94. Things had happened to Pike in the intervening decades, although from the Census record, in which he still styled himself ‘barrister-at-law’, you would not have known it. In 1844, six years after being called to the bar, he had been disbarred for colluding with a solicitor to share the profits of cases with him. He appealed against the disbarment, but the order was confirmed. Where he went in the following decade I do not know – judging from the birthplaces of his children, to south London and Great Yarmouth – but his enforced retirement from his profession was presumably the reason why, by the age of fifty, he had retreated to his Kentish Town property to cultivate his garden. His household in 1861 comprised himself, his wife, daughters of twelve, eight, six and four and a son of two. He had no servant, though living in a house of a size where one would normally be kept and a road where most people did keep one, and the future cannot have looked bright to him. Five years later he was involved in an unseemly court case, the details of which were sufficiently piquant to find their way into the Daily Telegraph for 21 June 1866 under the heading ‘Neighbourly Relations’.
Against these three of his neighbours Mr Pyke [sic] brought the action for trespass and conspiracy, and the perpetration of numerous petty annoyances, which were described as follows: During five or six years he had been annoyed and sneered at by the defendants, who looked impudently at him and did other acts to cause him pain. Dead cats and defunct chickens were thrown into his garden. The flowers and vegetables there were destroyed by the defendants’ fowls. On the 5th November there was a bonfire in the adjoining garden; squibs and crackers were wantonly thrown over his wall. On one occasion a pole was erected, on which was tied a stale mackerel, and underneath it was put up the effigy of a pike with this inscription: Beware of the pike – he is a most voracious fish…. There were continual noises in the adjoining houses late at night, which prevented the plaintiff and his family from taking rest, and on the death of one of the plaintiff’s children the glass was broken, and a disturbance created. There were also hooting, yelling, and cock-crowing, West being so good an imitator that Mrs Pyke said he used to set all the cocks in the neighbourhood crowing. The children were unable to go into the garden without being subject to annoyances of this kind, and were told that they were starved, uneducated and ill-clothed. A stuffed owl was put up on on
e occasion. Dirty water was thrown over plaintiff’s children. On Sundays, some of the defendants and others used to sit upon the wall, drinking and smoking …
The defendants, on their part, deposed that they had not annoyed the plaintiff and his family, or given them provocation … Mr West said that his wife had been grossly insulted by the Pyke family, and the lady herself testified that they had constantly addressed her as ‘beast’ and ‘Old Scraggy’…. Mr Boyes confessed to having imitated the crowing of a cock, the grunting of a pig, and the mewing of a cat; but averred it was only to amuse himself and Mrs Crane’s children. The other assertions of the plaintiff were generally denied … After a conference of the learned counsel on both sides a juror was withdrawn, and an agreement entered into for abstention from all further annoyances.
The ludicrous details of this case captured the imagination of a feature writer for the same paper, who made it the subject of a long, facetious article, distilling all the lofty scorn which the upper-middle classes had by then developed for lower-middle-class suburbia – the theme which George Grossmith was to exploit with more skill a generation later in Diary of a Nobody. He concludes:
Had all these worthy people only managed to control their temper, they might have lived a happy and tranquil life. It is soothing to think that they may yet be reconciled, and our fancy dwells with pleasure upon a picture of their future existence. Let them fraternise; let Mr Pyke and Mr Crane exchange presents of vegetables; let Mrs West forgive the aspersion cast upon her form; let Mr Boyes invite them all, if not to a thé dansante, to a ventriloquial choclate, with imitations of animals interspersed; let them but do this, and Kentish Town will be Arcadia. At present, we confess, it is not.
Evidently the very idea that Kentish Town might ever have been considered Arcadia had, by the 1860s, become highly laughable. Alas for Dr Stukeley’s Eden of a hundred years earlier.
The Fields Beneath Page 18
