The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  a terraced street of three-storied houses on both sides, mid-Victorian I should say, that had come down by 1900 to social degradation; a filthy street, the pavements defiled with rheum, the houses crowded with teeming families of uncouth and unlettered people, several families in one house – a hundred people living in accommodation intended for tens. Two houses were run as common doss houses at which vagrants could sleep for 2d. or 3d. a night; the sweep lived there, the rag and bone man lived there and from the windows not a few ravaged faces gloomed down upon you from between frowsty cobwebs of curtains; if no curtains a piece of newspaper would do.

  He was emphatic, in making the point that this ‘forbidden territory’ was only a slum pocket:

  Litcham street was the nadir of a small ganglion of streets consisting roughly of Weedington Road, Warden Road, Carleton Street (not Carleton Road) and a few others. This ganglion was surrounded by moderately healthy and clean streets … Although adjacent to it, almost contiguous in fact, Holmes Road was a model of cleanliness and quietitude perfectly untroubled by its unsavoury neighbour – a strange and constantly occurring phenomenon in London.

  This ‘ganglion’ has virtually all gone now. Most of Weedington and Warden Roads disappeared under some bland flats apparently made of breeze blocks c. 1960, and what was left of them went in the Grafton Ward town-planning holocaust of ten years later. Litcham Street went c. 1930, as part of the earliest† clearance scheme in the district: even its name was changed – to Athlone Street – and its rotting houses were replaced by solid tenement blocks which, in the manner of such housing, long served to perpetrate the street’s low-class character, but which are now finally acquiring a patina of age and respectability. Even the name of the large board school there was changed, in a determined effort to eradicate its reputation as the roughest in the district, but it never really thrived and is now an Evening Institute only. If you went looking for ‘slums’ there now you would not find them, merely the drabness of small industries; still less would you find slums in the adjacent Crimea area, where the small houses, once the resort of the shabby-genteel and the down-right poor, are now eagerly bought and renovated by those who can afford today’s property prices. The traditional social geography of the old inner suburbs has been turned back-to-front, with the back streets now the favoured oasis of peace, jealously protected by environmental traffic schemes, while social decay and disintegration have moved to the main streets. It is Kentish Town High Street, like many others, that is now a battered and fragmented travesty of its former self, a place of litter, noise, dust, ‘To Let’ boards and a solid mass of barely moving cars at each rush-hour tide. Many of the upper floors of the houses are accessible only through the shop and therefore, with the passing of the family-owned business, moulder – dead places of mice, old packing-cases and windows that will no longer open.

  Fossilised concepts of value in the minds of rating authorities and ground landlords have brought huge increases in rent and rates for High Street properties in recent years, and ironically this has itself been a big factor in the transformation of such streets from thriving business communities into semi-wildernesses. But in any case the problems of combining, in one and the same street, the role of major traffic artery and shopping place have, in the mid-twentieth century, become almost insuperable. Through the congested high road of Kentish Town, hemmed in by railway land and inflexible residential developments, was filtered, by the end of the nineteenth century, much of the combined London-bound traffic of Holloway, Highgate, Hornsey and Muswell Hill. A generation or so later had been added to this the traffic generated by a vast ring of new suburbs – the Finchley, Barnet, Totteridge belt. Commuting had become a way of life for millions. The obsession with living ‘further out’ than London’s heart, which had done much to shape Kentish Town in the eighteenth century, by the twentieth century was doing much to ruin it. The hamlet strung out along a travel route of mediaeval times had become by degrees a place whose whole nature was deformed by the needs of the masses travelling daily through it by road and rail.

  My Suffolk correspondent dated this modern transformation from about 1910, when ‘the village-like style came to an unnatural end under the wheel of the motor car and the electric tram…. After that there was inevitably a decline in general conditions. I remember it as getting progressively dustier, more noisy and untidy.’ Grosch too was unfavourably struck by the new trams when he returned after an absence. The horse trams whose advent had been hotly debated by the vestry c. 1870 were merely a logical variant on the horse omnibus, itself a direct descendant of the stage coach, but by the early 1900s ‘The horse trams had disappeared from Malden Road, and in place of them had come huge, noisy, clanking, electrically driven vehicles that roared up and down the road like monsters from the works of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.’ Not for nothing was the tram, during the relatively brief period of its prime, the novelist’s and poet’s favourite symbol for all that was prosaic and crushing in urban lower-class life. (Only now that it has become extinct does this monster, seen in memory, acquire romance and charm). The existence of tram routes was, in its day, a remarkably accurate pointer to the social status of an area, though whether a tram-line actually led to an area declining or merely confirmed a pre-existing decline is debatable. Thus Kentish Town High Street acquired a double set of tram-lines, even though it was so narrow at one point that the double line had to merge for a few yards into a single one, and these continued up Fortess and Junction Road to Archway. Up the Highgate Road, however, they only continued as far as Parliament Hill, at which point gentility took over in the shape of the St Alban’s-Brookfield Estate. The lines did not penetrate east Kentish Town at all, even in spacious Caversham Road, but in west Kentish Town they ran along Prince of Wales Road and Malden Road to narrow, depressing Fleet Road on the fringes of Hampstead, which had been acquired as a speculation by Joseph Salter (the surveyor mentioned in the last chapter) and was eventually covered with uncompromisingly low-grade houses, because there was a fever hospital nearby and the choosier residents of Hampstead proper shunned the place.

  It is no accident that Sir John Betjeman’s poem‡ on the Kentish Town he knew in his childhood describes a tram-ride – or yet that a tram figures prominently in the memories of an elderly Kentish Town bootmaker whose family history is so typical that it may perhaps stand for the history of the many. Fred Dorsey (as I will call him) was born in 1891, the second of the eighteen children of an engine driver. His grandfather had been a foreman platelayer, a countryman who was sent to London in 1866 to oversee the building of line-junctions on the Midland Railway land at Kentish Town: many of the next generation went into the railway. But Fred Dorsey has a leg deformity which made him unfit for manual work: his family planned that he should be a tailor, but ‘I always liked boots, I really wanted to make them.’ It wasn’t an exclusive trade – there are literally dozens listed for the district in the directories of the period – but young Dorsey had his way and was apprenticed. After working for a while for one master he lost his job but had £40 saved. A man who was not a bootmaker himself but was proprietor of such a business in Torriano Avenue, offered to sell him the lease cheap – workmen had left and set up nearby in competition to him and ‘trade had gone right down’. Fred Dorsey agreed to buy and together they went to the agent, but he maintained that the ground landlord would never agree to a single man having the lease. (Perhaps it was too easy for single men to disappear in the night without paying what they owed?) But Fred Dorsey was not to be deterred – ‘I thought a bit, and then I went to see my young lady, see, and I said “What say we get married? You can stop with your sister and I’ll stay where I am too.” Because I had no other money at all beyond that forty pound.’ It turned out that the girl’s sister disapproved of the idea of the marriage and it would have been awkward for her to stay there, but they got married anyway. It was 23 November 1914, when young men without lame legs were marching off to war.

  Coltman, the greengrocer
that used to be on the corner of Fortess Walk [an eighteenth-century house with a mansard roof, a last surviving fragment of Willow Walk] had promised to lend me a pound to get married on, but when I came for it on the wedding morning – that was the day before I got possession of the shop – Mrs Coltman said ‘I’m ever so sorry, Fred, but my husband says to tell you he’s had such a bad week he can’t lend it to you.’ … Well, I was walking up and down there, outside the Bull and Gate, wondering how to get the money – for I hadn’t a penny in the world – the time was getting on and I knew my missus-to-be would be waiting for me down at the Vestry Hall for the wedding at twelve o’clock. Well this tram come by, with the driver ringing his bell. It stopped at the stop. ‘Hallo Fred!’ the driver says to me. Well I hardly knew him and didn’t like to ask him for the money, but I was desperate, see. So I asked him, and explained, and he said ‘We’re on our way to the depot now. You go and stand over the other side of the road and wait till we come down again.’ So I did that, walking up and down again, and it was getting later and later. And after twenty minutes or so the tram came down, ringing its bell again, and he had the money for me. A bag of sixpences and shillings, ten bob’s worth, and another bag, all coppers, pennies and ha’pennies, because that was what they mostly took on the trams! And I got on the same tram down to the Town Hall – ‘Jump on,’ says Harry, ‘don’t worry about the ha’penny fare!’ So down I went, with the bags of money, and there was my missus-to-be already there and getting worried, with the witnesses. ‘Oh Fred,’ says she, ‘I was wondering where you were.’ ‘Ah, I went to the bank, love,’ I says, and she believed me, because of that bag of coppers….’ Course, I told her the truth afterwards.

  By the end of the day he had just 2½d. left. The young couple spent the first night of their married life on newspaper on the floor of the shop, with a penny rasher of bacon, a ha’penny worth of potatoes, a borrowed frying pan and a penny packet of Woodbines. In 1975 when I talked to him, Mr Dorsey was still smoking Woodbines, still wearing his own hand-made leather boots, and still living behind the same shop, now a hardware business run by one of his sons. His wife had been dead some years, but nine of his twelve children were still alive. He was just screwing up his courage – successfully, as it turned out – to go on an old people’s holiday to the Costa Brava organised by Camden Council.

  It might have been the same tram that bore Fred Dorsey down to St Pancras and fifty years of wedlock that, in the opposite direction, bore the young John Betjeman in the same year to the more rarified end of the borough ‘where stucco houses in Virginia creeper drown’ after an afternoon’s shopping in Kentish Town:

  When the Bon Marché was shuttered, when the feet were hot and tired,

  Outside Charrington’s we waited, by the ‘STOP HERE IF REQUIRED’,

  Launched aboard the shopping basket, sat precipitately down,

  Rocked past Zwanziger the baker, and the terrace blackish brown,

  And the curious Anglo-Norman parish church of Kentish Town.

  In reply to a letter from a member of Camden History Society in 1971, Sir John wrote:

  The tram was a number 7 and it was brown when it was LCC … Hampstead Heath then had buttercups and dandelions and daisies in the grass at the Parliament Hill Fields end. Daniels§ was a kind of Selfridges and it was on the corner of Prince of Wales Road, or very near that corner. There was a cinema higher up on the same side and there I saw my first film, very early animated pictures; it was called the ‘Electric Palace’ … The Bon Marché was an old fashioned draper’s shop … Opposite Kentish Town station was a Penny Bazaar and next to that was Zwanziger which always smelt of baking bread. Then there was an antique dealer and a picture framer and a public house … Then there was some late Georgian brick houses with steps up to their front doors, then the always-locked parish church of Kentish Town (that was the one I referred to in the poem. It was rebuilt in Norman style in 1843 by J. H. Hakewill and seems to have no dedication). It was very low. Then there was Maple’s warehouse, always rather grim, then some squalid shops and a grocer’s shop called Wailes which was very old-fashioned. Then came Highgate Road station with a smell of steam and very rare trains which ran, I think, to Southend from a terminus at Gospel Oak. Then there were some rather grander shops with a definite feeling of suburbia … I remember thinking how beautiful the new bits of Metroland Villas were in the newly built Glenhurst Avenue, and my father telling me they were awful. Then there was the red brick gloom of Lissenden Gardens and Parliament Hill Mansions …

  These later blocks were built in the Edwardian period, evidence of a passing conviction on the part of the British that the future for the middle classes lay in large family flats like those to be found in Continental capitals. The belief did not survive the First World War and the vast expansion of ‘Metroland’ into London’s countryside in the 1920s, but the blocks themselves remain, desirable homes because of their proximity to Parliament Hill, but contriving to turn a few acres of land there into a simulacrum of one of the duller districts of Paris, Vienna or Warsaw.

  From the blackened, train-shaken heart of Kentish Town to the airy pseudo-rural heights only a short tram-ride away – that theme of contrast and social juxtaposition crops up again and again in the reminiscences of men and women old enough now to remember the time when ‘the poor were different from us’. To the young John Betjeman, taken by his mother to visit a poor family in Falkland Place (‘I then thought it was a slum, but I now realise it was charming Middlesex cottages’), ‘the courts of Kentish Town’ must have seemed as mysterious as the circles of an unplumbed underworld. Indeed the Dante’s Inferno metaphor for such areas was extensively used by an adult writing at exactly the same time – Compton Mackenzie, whose Sinister Street was published in 1913.

  If Betjeman was essentially an outsider riding through on a tram to Highgate, Michael Fane, the hero of Sinister Street, is far more so. His view of our area is worth quoting at length because it is so entirely typical of the view the moneyed, leisured classes held of all inner city districts at that period and for the next forty years. In the upper-middle-class imagination they had become No Go areas, ‘impossible’ places where gruesome domestic slaughters occurred (see Crippen) and whose very names would bring a smile to sophisticated lips – ‘My dear, Kentish Town! You can’t go there … Where is it, anyway?’ Ten years later John Buchan, in The Three Hostages, was to settle on a fanciful version of Gospel Oak (‘shabby gentility on the very brink of squalor’) as a suitable locale for the heart of his mystery, in the person of a blind spinner speaking in verse, but it is Sinister Street which provided the archetype for all such writing:

  … Ever since Mrs Pearcey’s¶ blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had held for [Michael] a macabre significance: of the hellish portals mystery and gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy onwards …

  Presently upon an iron railway bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town behind a huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered through the murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the pavement, past a wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of humanity chalked upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was Kentish Town. It lay to the left of this bridge that was the colour of stale blood. Michael told the driver to stop for one moment, and he leaned forward over the apron of the cab to survey the cross-street of swarming feculent humanity that was presumably the entering highway. A train roared over the bridge; a piano organ gargled its tune; a wagon-load of iron girders drew near in a clanging tintamar of slow progress. Michael’s brief pause was enough to make such an impression of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his original conception of Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesome suburb. But just as the cab reached the beginning of the Camden Road, he c
aught sight of a slop-shop where old clothes smothered the entrance with their mucid heaps and, just beyond, of three houses from whose surface the stucco was peeling in great scabs and the damp was oozing in livid arabesques and scrawls of verdigris. This group restored to Kentish Town a putative disquiet, and the impression of mere dirt and the noise and the exhalations of fried fish were merged in the more definite character allotted by his prefiguration.

  Thus fortified in his fantasy by the smell of frying fish, Michael manages to find even the relatively banal and airy Camden Road sinister; the exhortations posted in front of a chapel he passes seem to him ‘spiritually malevolent’, and the oblongs of garden behind the houses ‘circumscribed secretive pleasure grounds in the amount of life they could conceal’. As a monument to the ferocious and unrealistic class-separations of the era, in which the everyday habitat of one class, by no means the poorest, is made to seem as exotic as Outer Mongolia, Sinister Street would be hard to equal. But its author was one jump ahead of his characters after all, for presently we realise Michael is being gently mocked. As his cab makes the return journey from the disappointingly ordinary Seven Sisters Road,

  when he began to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it became suddenly dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and the quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less surreptitious than those chatting nursemaids, and in one of the parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high into the air.

  Thus, to some a ‘lovely place’ or a ‘much-loved district’, to others at exactly the same period ‘a slum … where only a blackened elm, an ill-grown privet hedge and some stunted lilacs told of the more cheerful past’, to neo-romantics a world of gas-lit mystery, to others ‘one of those shabby prosaic monotonous residential quarters that could well be spared from the Metropolis’, Kentish Town continued its own life into the twentieth century as a small part of the largest city in the world. No one recorded it, few people took an interest in it: the people who would once have done so had almost all moved away. At long last, after hundreds of years, its upper-class connections seemed to be over. Was this the end, was its final destiny to be simply swept away in some future large-scale urban clearance project, its very identity as a submerged village lost, even perhaps to its name? Many people, in the first half of the twentieth century thought so – if they thought about such an area at all. But, as it turned out, they were wrong.