The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  While it is, of course, impossible to tell where the rights and wrongs of the matter lay, there are several details in the saga which suggest that rather more may have been involved than ever came out: in particular, the gibes – real or imagined – about the Pike children being uneducated, ill-clothed and half-starved, and the curious slogan about a pike being ‘a voracious fish’, suggest some monetary issue. Pike was no doubt in direly straitened circumstances, living as he and his family did without visible means of support, and it is possible that he may have been attempting to use whatever capital he possessed to practise a little money-lending in the neighbourhood – hardly the way to endear himself to his neighbours. However it is clear that, whatever others thought, he considered himself a person of the utmost rectitude. In 1870, we find him writing to the local paper, the Kentish and Camden Towns Gazette, on the ‘height’ of the service held at the new St Luke’s church in Oseney Crescent on the Christ Church Estate: ‘Sir: As a parishioner, I neither like the outside of this building nor what is going on within it. To my mind both appear to me un-English and foreign to its church …’ He also objected to the innovation of gaslight in a church. He signed himself ‘Formerly barrister-at-law’. The letter was answered the following week by an extremely snappish one from ‘A Churchman’, who claimed that until Mr Pike’s style improved ‘he may fairly be deemed to be outside the pale of gentlemanly controversy’. Another reader wrote in to point out that, living as he did on the north side of Leighton Road, Pike was not in St Luke’s parish anyway. The argument about the services, however, continued for weeks.

  In pursuing Pike, I have moved ahead in the tale of Kentish Town, into its railway age, and will have to return. But, to conclude the saga and to underline its implications, I will add that 1871 finds Pike and his wife still living in their house (now mortgaged, and also entirely surrounded by others) with their unmarried and uneducated daughters and their son. Pike, incidentally, was styling himself ‘solicitor’ in 1871! Nine years later the mortgage was foreclosed: the debt, because of unpaid interest, now amounted to £400. When the house was resold in 1880, although its big garden was still intact and it had been improved with an upstairs drawing room, it fetched only £500, as against the £900 Pike had paid for it forty years earlier. These figures are a graphic illustration of the decline of Kentish Town during that period.

  Mr Pike’s garden is once again growing potatoes and lettuces as well as flowers, and one or two of his fruit trees are still standing, though past bearing fruit. The one which provided the rotten plums that were thrown at Mrs West, fell during a storm a few years ago. The Wests’ house still stands, still ‘unimproved’ (i.e. bathroomless), as does the garden wall on which he and his cronies gathered to drink and smoke. But the house adjoining on the other side has long been empty air, the space serving as a driveway to a residential local authority nursery. Bower Cottage, where the Crane clan lived, was by the 1870s a soup kitchen and Outdoor Relieving Station, and today is embedded like a fossil in later buildings belonging to the nursery.

  What makes Pike irresistible as a subject is the combination of eccentricity, vague loucheness and intense external respectability which seem in retrospect to have typified the Victorian period. His house, with an embellished sitting room but no proper domestic help, no bathroom, and the only lavatory in the back yard; his daughters living at home in unschooled idleness – these things are eloquent of a whole system of values. Add to that the fact that, when further works were done on the long-enduring house in the 1960s, the space between the floors disgorged countless dust-embalmed pamphlets on religion and teetotalism, and you have a very model for Matthew Arnold’s famous strictures on the Victorian suburban middle classes, which were published the same year as Pike’s unfortunate law-suit:

  … Drugged with business, your middle class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except religion; it has a religion narrow, unintelligent, repulsive … What other enjoyments have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or semireligious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere, but which your middle class consumes, they say, by the hundred thousand; in their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on teetotalism or nunneries … Your middle-class man thinks it is the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks that it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there. (Friendship’s Garland, 1866)

  The coming of the trains, running indeed to Islington and back again among many other places, and in doing so transforming Kentish Town finally and irrevocably into an urban area, is the subject of the next chapter.

  * ‘Gloucester’ in a street name denotes a date after 1816, when the Duke of Gloucester married Princess Mary.

  9

  ‘Railway trains run to and fro’

  It must not be thought, however, that Kentish Town in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was inhabited exclusively by people leading ‘a dismal, illiberal life’. The northern part of the area, at any rate, was still a good address. T. J. Barrett, later an inhabitant of Hampstead and celebrated for his local history of that place, lived at the foot of Highgate West Hill as a young man, near the Howitts (see page 25). The Holly Lodge Estate on the east side of Highgate Hill passed around the mid-century to Angela Burdett-Coutts, Thomas Coutts the banker’s granddaughter and heiress and a close friend of Dickens; through him, she met Hans Andersen, who visited her there and admired her rhododendrons – then a foreign novelty. She gave big garden parties in the summers; the local paper for June 1867 gives an account of hundreds of coaches going up there for a ‘conversazione’, and all through the year friends and acquaintances received presents of fruit and flowers from her greenhouses. Even today, when Holly Lodge Estate, a twentieth-century suburban development, covers the site, some of her rhododendrons and other, still uncommon, foreign plants are to be found in many of the gardens. Later, when she had acquired the Kentish Town House Estate further down the hill, she ran a stud farm there, where Sultan, one of the most famous steeplechasers of all time, was bred. The main stable block is still there in St Alban’s Road, disguised as Brookfields Garages. A little further north is Holly Village, a collection of spacious gothic cottages, with much ornate woodwork, which she built for her servants. They are grouped round communal green lawns, like a vision of Oxbridge rebuilt by Ruskin or William Morris.

  Moving down towards Kentish Town proper, we have the poet Coventry Patmore living in The Grove (now Grove Terrace) in early married life during the 1850s. His best-known work, The Angel in the House, is a distillation of the Victorian idealisation of the Home, and was very much to the taste of the period. Ford Madox Brown, the pre-Raphaelite painter of the same generation, was Patmore’s neighbour for a while in The Grove and then moved to a nearby house in Fortess Terrace. Dr Southwood-Smith, the eminent public-health authority, also lived in Fortess Road; he was a friend of Angela Burdett-Coutts (slum-improvement was one of her chief interests) and the grandfather of Octavia Hill of housing-trust fame. The family was also connected with the Lewes family, from which came George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s companion, and it was George Henry’s son by a previous marriage who, later in the century, joined with the Southwood-Smiths, Miss Coutts and other like-minded people to secure Parliament Hill as part of Hampstead Heath. Had it not been for the presence of people like this in the district, those fields would certainly have been built upon and Kentish Town would have lost its green lung.

  Nearer the centre of Kentish Town, in Lower Craven Place (immortalised by Betjeman as ‘the terrace blackish-brown’ and not demolished till the 1960s), lived Douglas Jerrold, a well-known cont
ributor to Punch at the period and the author of ‘Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lecture’. This was a comic monologue very popular as a turn at the amateur concerts which brightened Victorian life in places like Kentish Town: it sometimes used to be delivered (as a sweetener, no doubt) at the improving ‘penny-readings’ that were regularly held through the 1860s at Milton Hall, which stood on the edge of Hawley Road where a cricket ground had formerly been. Less famous than Jerrold then, but far more now, was another local inhabitant – Karl Marx. Marx first came to London in 1849, and moved to Kentish Town eight years later. With his family, he lived in bourgeois but somewhat disorganised poverty, first in Malden Road in west Kentish Town and later – with a slight upturn in his fortunes – at the more airy and bosky Medina Villas off Haverstock Hill (subsequently called Maitland Park Road and now expunged by a housing estate). Picnics on the Heath were one of the brighter features of their family life. It is nice to think that even in death Marx remained faithful to the unpretentious area of north London that had sheltered him in life, but in fact his presence in Highgate Cemetery is simply due to the fact that this was the general, non-denominational burial ground of north London. By an ingenious twist of fate, present-day Marxists are still a feature of Kentish Town’s borders: the Russian Trade (sic) Delegation occupies premises in a large house near the top of Highgate West Hill, and the Holly Lodge Estate, mentioned above, is the home of a number of their families. They are reported, however, to keep themselves very much to themselves.

  During the 1840s, when the Southampton Estate (see previous chapter) was in process of building, the Hawley-Bucks Estate, a smaller parcel which adjoined it on the south running down towards the canal and Camden Town, was also laid out with streets. This was the 40-acre property next to the Castle, on part of which J. F. King’s father had made his garden; but gardens were at a discount by then (the Castle’s gardens disappeared at the same period) and the estate was quickly developed, mostly with rather horrid little houses, probably because of its proximity to the Chalk Farm railway yards.

  In the 1850s the segment of land between Southampton Estate and the older development around Holmes Road and Spring Place was filled in with a vest-pocket development of very small houses. The names of its streets – Inkerman, Alma, Raglan etc – date it precisely and the local pub bears the name Crimea. It soon filled up with pianoforte makers, wood engravers, dressmakers and railway workers, all helping to swell Kentish Town’s industrial proletariat, which was now threatening to swamp the middle-class inhabitants. Brief as they are, some of the entries for the first Census after its building – that of 1861 – speak volumes. What, for instance, is one to surmise of the failed life of a ‘retired grocer’ and his wife, both aged only 49, he born in Islington and she in Kentish Town itself, who were living in Alma Street with their unmarried daughter, a governess of 23, and another daughter aged 10? Did that one governess’s scant wage support the entire household? And what of Clara Brooker, a widow in the same street, herself a governess, living with one son of 15 apprenticed to a printer, two daughters of 17 and 13 who were down as ‘dressmakers’, two more of 8 and 3 and another son of 10? The proliferating back streets of the period received these people, who had fallen through the inadequate security nets then erected, just as they received Henry Pike and Karl Marx and many thousands of others who might once have hoped for better things, but it is doubtful if they assured them a life worth living.

  But attempts to create a substantial amount of upper-middle-class housing in Kentish Town were still continuing. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, first the Christ Church Estate and then St Bartholomew’s Estate, adjoining it, laid out their land as streets (see page 58), thus transforming the eastern side of the district and creating an area known – at any rate for a while – as ‘New Kentish Town’, presumably to mark the social divide between it and the already tarnished Southampton Estate developments on the other side of the main road. The roads were wide, the houses mostly spacious and officially described as ‘superior class’. Here, it was envisaged, would live the sort of people who would counterbalance the less desirable elements that had invaded west Kentish Town, people who would shop not at street stalls or obscure general stores in converted front rooms but at Daniel’s in the High Street – a chain of shops which Mr Daniel the draper had recently unified into a department store. This was the forward, prosperous image of Kentish Town which was being invoked by the anonymous writer to the Gazette (1867) on the prevalent nineteenth-century theme of change: typical is his evidently ambivalent attitude to all this improvement:

  A stranger passing through Camden and Kentish Towns at the present time, and observing the vista of large and magnificent shops, the busy appearance of the principle streets – well paved and well lighted – and the miles of superior Villas, Crescents, Squares and Avenues, could not fail to be attracted by the appearance of prosperity and health presented … The changes have been so swift, the progress so rapid and sudden … Still, a feeling of regret will arise when the pleasing pictures are destroyed, and the regret at the uprooting of an old tree or the destruction of a field by its conversion into bricks, plainly shews an inherent love of nature which is implanted in the human breast …

  The writer went on to draw a comparison between the sweet innocence of rurality and the ‘vice’ which flourished, according to him, like weeds, in the city. Here, in a nutshell, you have the Victorian moral dilemma: the concept of progress, with all that implied, coming into direct conflict with the growing awareness of the evils which urbanisation was bringing in its train, and the consequent sentimentalisation of rural life even as the last shreds of it were retreating towards Highgate, Highbury, Fulham or Kennington.

  Yet despite the hopes and expectations of the builders of ‘New Kentish Town’, there are signs from the first of its having been an insufficiently-considered venture, ‘speculative building’ in the worst sense of the term. Indeed one is irresistibly reminded of Cruikshank’s cartoon ‘The March of Bricks’ (see illustrations), with its terraces cracking and subsiding even before they are finished, when one reads in contemporary newspaper reports that a run of houses in Gaisford Street collapsed before they were up:

  … the stacks of chimneys were so far completed as to have the ceremony performed of hoisting the flags, made by workmen’s handkerchiefs, … so as to entitle the men to the usual regalement of beer on such occasions. The stack of the third house from the corner is stated to have been much higher than those of the adjoining houses, and whilst one man was fixing the last chimney-pot thereon, the entire stack fell, dragging with it a great proportion of the upper part of the party wall, together with the whole of the scaffolding and their occupants. Many of the poor fellows, who had fallen from a height of between fifty and sixty feet, were got out, and the worst cases were conveyed to the University College Hospital … (1859).

  A further report the following week states that ‘Mr Temple Elliott, the ground landlord and owner of that portion of the estate … caused a rigid investigation to be instituted, in order to ascertain the circumstances which led to the occurrence.’ In point of fact Elliott was not the ground landlord but, presumably, the person who had taken a building lease on that parcel of land from Christ Church. He also seems to have been the person who, a few years earlier, had written an unpublished book on the area (see page 110) lamenting its decline from a country village to a suburb. Ambivalence, as I say, was a characteristic of the times.

  But a further hazard awaited the Christ Church Estate, and that was the coming of the Midland Railway, whose main line into Euston (constructed in the early 1860s) passed right through the centre of the estate. It seems extraordinary that the developers did not foresee this imminent eruption into the area, but the complete absence of planning permission in those days, in the modern sense of the term, no doubt made such short-sighted construction easy. It is also possible that the laying out of Islip, Caversham and Gaisford Streets was less short-sighted than wily: perhaps the administrator
s of the Estate did indeed realise that the railway was coming, and reckoned that there was more money to be made out of the Midland if the Company had to purchase houses for demolition than if they purchased open fields. But in that case it was not sensible to plan such a superior class of estate, for the fact that the line came through, cutting off corner houses, almost before the plaster on the walls was dry, could only have a deleterious effect on the area. True, the line there was slotted discreetly through a cutting, with a tunnel under the grander houses across Camden Road, in Camden Square; it was not allowed to become a barrier and eyesore as the North London line (see below) had in west Kentish Town ten years earlier. But the coming of the main-line railway does indeed seem to have spelt the end – though not in any sudden or dramatic way – of aspirations for Kentish Town as a distinguished address, and when the remainder of Bartholomew Estate was developed alongside the Christ Church one the streets on it were narrower and the houses mostly smaller. By 1871 over 50 per cent of all the houses on the two estates were shared – that is to say, they were lived in by an extended family rather than by a nuclear family with servants, or the owners took in lodgers. There was also a falling off in the number of people from Class I, judging by occupation.

  Another part of the Kentish Town district, which, from its nearness to Hampstead and the Heath one might have expected to become favoured, seems to have been blighted by the railway before it was even built. This was the Gospel Oak district and the area immediately to the south of it, where several small landowners had interests besides Lord Southampton and Lord Mansfield, whose lands adjoined there. By 1851 the street pattern around what became Lismore Circus was laid down (at any rate on maps) but not yet built with houses. By 1853 there were still only ‘some 12 or 13 houses with a beershop at the corner’ – apparently ‘the favourite resort of navvies and quarrelsome shoemakers’. This same year an enquiry was held concerning the designs on the area entertained by the Hampstead Junction Railway. This was an offshoot of the company which had built a line from Bow to Camden Town (Camden Road Station) three years earlier, intending it as a freight line to carry goods from Regent’s Canal to the London Docks. It was quickly realised, however, that the line had a potential for passenger traffic, and it was with this in mind that it was envisaged extending it up through the west side of Kentish Town, through Gospel Oak to Hampstead. William Tite, the architect retained by the railway, gave evidence to the effect that west Kentish Town (particularly the Hawley-Bucks Estate) was already a third-class area and therefore could not be much further damaged by the railway (‘I should not like it myself, but there is a great difference between abuse in Lowndes Square and this class of house’). He went on to summarise the few properties already standing at Gospel Oak as ‘humble’, adding, rather speciously one may feel, ‘I do not mean to say they are to be disregarded because they are humble, but they are very humble … some of them are very inferior, very ill-built and wretched.’ Was this fair comment, or special pleading?