The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  * The Northern Line itself was planned in the 1890s and finally opened in 1907. It was originally envisaged that the line would stop in Kentish Town, but it was later decided to extend it to Archway. (Further extension to Finchley and Barnet came a generation later.) South Kentish Town, between Camden Town and Kentish Town, was closed between the wars. It was considered too close to the stations on either side for it to earn its keep. It had been originally intended to name it ‘Castle Road’. Had this name persisted, the whole of southern Kentish Town would now, no doubt, be known as ‘the Castle Road area’. Such is the power of transport.

  † A huddle of ‘poor cottages’ at the fork by the Castle had been removed in the 1890s, but this was part of a road-widening scheme. They were replaced by blocks of the ‘model dwellings’ variety.

  ‡ Printed at the end of this book on page 237.

  § It has other literary associations. The writer V.S. Pritchett’s parents met while working there. [G.T.]

  ¶ A celebrated double-murder of 1890. Mrs Pearcey’s (actually Piercey) effigy, with accessories, including a stick of toffee allegedly sucked by the murdered baby, may still be seen at Madame Tussaud’s. The main protagonists of this drama all lived in the Kentish Town area.

  11

  As far as we have got

  (1977)

  There seems to be an unspoken agreement among local historians that the time after, say, 1900, or 1914 at the very latest, does not count as history and therefore cannot be worth serious interest. This, allied to the other widespread antiquarian fallacy – that once a district becomes part of an urban conurbation it ceases to have an identity of its own – has resulted in a gulf in the middle distance of the historical vista, roughly corresponding to that period when the old inner London suburbs became invisible to the educated middle classes except as Lowryesque landscapes seen from behind the windows of a moving vehicle.

  It is true that, except for some suburban-style residential development in the northern end of the district (much of Brookfield Estate, the Holly Lodge Estate) Kentish Town probably changed less between 1920 and 1940 than it had done at any time in the previous hundred years. It had assumed – for the time being – its definitive urban form. What changed was the countryside further north, as fields receded from Archway to Highgate, from Highgate to Finchley, from Finchley to Southgate and Barnet, and this new ocean of neo-London, though unseen from Kentish Town, had the effect of making Kentish Town itself greyer and shabbier, more congested with commuter trains, buses and cars passing through, less and less favoured by those who could afford to live anywhere else. This is one reason – though only one – why the geographical undiscovered country of that era is now an undiscovered country in chronological terms. The middle classes, who had once cared about the district enough to document its existence on paper and to collect the ephemera of its day-to-day events, were simply no longer there to do so.

  But the upheavals of the post-1945 era have in any case played strange tricks with people’s perceptions of the years between the wars, that time which is not quite yet the past, picturesquely framed, but is certainly not the present either, and which confusingly has the characteristics of both then and now. Some of those middle-aged to elderly people to whom I have talked in Kentish Town solve the problem of putting their own memories into some sort of perspective by treating the past of forty or fifty years ago ‘as if it was yesterday’, and criticising the present accordingly, ignoring the massive social changes that the 1940s and 1950s brought. These are the people who are convinced that ‘the area has gone down dreadfully’; they miss the signs of a homogeneous working- and lower-middle-class culture (scrubbed doorsteps, net curtains, polished knockers, hatted, all-white people in the street) which characterised their childhood and youth. They cannot interpret the much more fragmented and socially diverse appearance of the district today. Other people of similar age adopt the opposition approach, treating their youth as if it had taken place not c. 1930 but about 1870 or even earlier: a long-vanished Dickensian world of contrasting plenty and want, typified by the opulent displays of geese and hams outside the shops and the children they knew who ‘couldn’t come to school because they had no boots to come in’. It is true that a pre-1914 way of life (boot-clubs, open shop-fronts, gaslights, cobbles, horse-drawn carts) did persist for longer in London’s invisible regions than it did in, say, Kensington or the Home Counties, but one senses that the antique features of the inter-war period are exaggerated by some informants as a way of distancing the whole period and thus rendering it powerless to provoke either regret or fear in the present. While their more pessimistic and past-bound neighbours are muttering about immigrants moving in and the district going down, they themselves incline to the belief that the place is going up – ‘look at the prices houses are fetching now’ they say wonderingly, with reason. ‘And we’ve got a television writer living in our street now. It isn’t like the old days, you see.’

  It isn’t indeed like the old days, but the flat discrepancies in people’s perception of the social movement of the district relate not just to their subjective standpoints but to a genuine social dislocation in the area over the last fifteen years or so. The place is now more socially mixed than it has been, probably, for the last hundred years, and not only in overall terms, taking one street with another, but perceptibly, street by street and house by house. Near-poverty lives side by side with near-affluence. Ironically, the one social element which, today, is under-represented in Kentish Town is the very one which dominated it in the days of clerks and pianoforte makers: the Registrar General’s Class 3 – the lower-middle-class white-collar worker or skilled artisan, with a wife and young family.

  It would be interesting to chart in detail the social development of Kentish Town in the twentieth century, through the grey years, through the Second World War and the artificial depression of property values that followed it when the thousands of terraced streets that ringed central London were supposedly hardly worth the bricks of which they were built – and on to the unforeseen, gradually swelling property boom of the late 1950s and 1960s, which took everyone by surprise, most of all town planners, and whose reverberations are still continuing. But, apart from the fact that such a description, using an inner London district as a microcosm for an era of profound social change, would be a book in itself, we are still too near to the period to perceive it clearly. We can see what happened, sometimes in superabundant detail, but not always what those happenings meant. Moreover the major issues of the century – the traffic problem, the housing problem, the perpetual tussle between the forces of private enterprise and the forces of municipalisation, all of which are very much in evidence in Kentish Town – are still continuing. There are no firm conclusions yet to be drawn, and any progress report to date can be only that: ephemeral stuff, full of partisan attitudes that are themselves material for the local historian of the future. Those who, halfway through this period, notably in 1944, made sweeping assumptions about the district and about the future nature of urban society in general turned out to be not just wrong, but profoundly and even disastrously wrong. If we have learnt little else from those mistakes, we can at least learn the folly of making premature judgements on the nature of our own times.

  What I am offering in this chapter, then, is not local history so much as the stuff of future local history. If, by the year 2000 (where the arbitrary frontier of the future seems to be fixed at the moment) Kentish and Camden Towns, Islington, Kilburn and Kennington, Hackney and Lewisham, have declined (as some people think they will) into urban ‘jungles’ on the American model, dangerous to cross after dark and full of racial tensions, then I shall have been wrong in my particular set of assumptions and deductions. But no more wrong than the band-waggoners of the late 1960s property boom, who painted a radiant if daunting picture of the streets of these inner suburbs soon to be as uniform as Chelsea or Belgravia with white stucco, Thames Green front doors, flower boxes, reproduction Georgian railings,
and Minis, Volvos and Mercedes lining the pavements.

  The ‘menacing jungle’ theory of urban areas has had a long run. In 1924, John Buchan was writing ‘London is like the tropical bush – if you don’t exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of slums, will break in.’ The general implication here is of social mobility and flux – families moving out, others moving in, moonlighting – an erratic, febrile existence. Yet a very different writer, Montagu Slater, wrote of exactly the same sub-district (Gospel Oak) at the same period in very different terms: he was born and brought up there and to him it was as stable as a country village: ‘There are about twenty streets on the side of the hill ending in a little circus with trees. Nobody left the place much except to go to work, and there were plenty of the women who knew less about London than people do in Manchester. The local pubs and the flea-pits, the pubs, the billiards-hall, the open-air market gave them all they wanted’ (Once a Jolly Swagman).

  This subjective impression is borne out by facts. Still today in Kentish Town there are substantial numbers of people who were born in the area and have lived there all their lives, though usually at a number of different addresses. Frequently their parents and sometimes their grandparents lived there also, like the boot-maker quoted in the last chapter, or like the elderly proprietor of a chemist’s shop who, in 1975, fought an unsuccessful rearguard action to try to stop his late-eighteenth-century house – 109 Highgate Road – from being demolished. (He stood on the pavement opposite for several days watching it come down.) The ancestors of most arrived with the houses and the railways in the middle of the last century, but I came across one family who claimed descent from much further back: a Kentish Town builder called Morgan who died at ninety-five in 1973 used to trace his family back to the Morgans of eighteenth-century days. Again and again I found exemplified the importance people attach to their roots and to their physical habitat actual or remembered – an aspect of the human psyche which, in the past thirty years, has been treated with the most cavalier disregard by those who believed themselves in possession of a moral brief for altering the urban landscape. I do not say that these authorities have been worse in this respect than the power-holders of the previous century, but they have not been better.

  Three different overlapping but conflicting images of urban landscape have been jostling one another for public acceptance for much of this century – the city district as a shapeless near-slum, as a tightly-knit village community, and as the raw-material for the creation of a new, purpose-built habitat to replace the worn-out one. Each has a certain validity, but each is capable of being over-emphasised regardless of the others. The concept of ‘slum clearance’ began in the nineteenth century, and the original motive was not even altruism or a passion for social equality so much as concern for public health: the ‘dens and courts’ of places like Somers Town were felt to be breeding grounds for disease which might then spread to more salubrious areas. The Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, which was founded in 1842 and erected its first ‘Model Buildings’ in St Pancras had, it is true, something of the spirit of all subsequent rehousing enterprises, but its critics were quick to point out that in fact it was not catering for the neediest classes. As John Hollinshead wrote in Ragged London (1861),

  At St Pancras they have done nothing for the worst class in Somers Town and Agars Town, and they have wasted their means on a class who are well able to help themselves … The costermongers, the street hawkers – the industrious poor – are still rotting up their filthy, ill-drained, ill-ventilated courts, while well-paid mechanics, clerks and porters, willing to sacrifice a certain portion of their self-respect, are the constant tenants of all these model dwellings.

  That, in essence, has been one of the standard complaints about subsidised housing ever since, and it is one that modern councils seem to be as far from solving as ever. The only fundamental difference today is that, whereas in previous generations ‘filthy, ill-drained, ill-ventilated courts’ at least did exist to house those not eligible for model housing, council ambitions since the Second World War have become so sweeping that many of the traditional alternative forms of accommodation have simply disappeared. With hindsight, it is hard now to understand why municipal authorities all over England failed to realise that if they pulled down ‘slum property’ – which, almost by definition, means crowded, unregulated property – and replaced it with dwellings built to more rigorous specifications and designed for a higher standard of living, inevitably the result would be a net loss in the amount of accommodation actually available, and a rise in rents. Moreover there is always a gap, sometimes a long one, between the time when old houses are emptied of their inhabitants and the time when these inhabitants can be moved back into new accommodation in the same district – always provided that they have not, in the meantime, been irretrievably dispersed elsewhere. The statement, endlessly reiterated in the post-war years, that such-and-such a borough council had produced X hundred new homes in the previous year, has been all too frequently a pious fraud, though a fraud usually believed in implicitly by council officers. The aura of moral rectitude which surrounded the concept of slum-clearance was so pervasive and so attractive to people of almost every political shade of opinion but particularly to those with doctrinaire concepts of the Brave New World they should be helping to build, that it took decades before the moral imperative began to be seriously questioned.

  Of course some genuine slum-clearance was needed. Photographs of Somers Town taken in 1924, the year the St Pancras House Improvement Society was formed largely to get rid of it, show fetid courts which would indeed have been difficult to improve. The same applies to the Litcham Street area (see previous chapter), demolished c. 1930. Four years later new blocks were announced for part of Harmood and Ferdinand Streets, and Leighton Road on the other side of Kentish Town was getting its first block – Kennistoun House, on the old courtyard-and-gallery pattern which has proved a good deal more serviceable than many subsequent designs. (The rents at Kennistoun House were at first 13s. 4d. per week for two rooms, 16s. 1d. for three and 18s. 2d. for four: this was still the era of the culture of poverty when a penny more or less counted. Twenty-six years later the same block was to achieve a brief fame when it was the scene of some noisy rent riots, including a siege with the main protagonists barricaded in their rooms.)

  Kennistoun House at least was not true slum-clearance, and nor was the block further up the same road on the opposite side, which opened in 1939 replacing much of Peckwater Street. They were simply a general confirmation of the area’s social levelling-down.* Other pre-war blocks that went up in those years represented a genuine housing gain, in that they were built on land not previously used for housing: e.g. Montague Tibbles (now, with 1960s refinement, renamed ‘Penshurst’) on the site of the old Tailors Almshouses, and the York Rise Estate on land adjacent to, and previously owned by, the railway.

  It was not till the Second World War was on the way to being won that the Brave New World machine really got into gear, and, in doing so, gradually altered and expanded the concept of ‘slum clearance’ far beyond anything that early improvers could have foreseen or intended. By then, highly permissive legislation existed to enable councils to acquire properties by compulsory purchase in order to carry out ‘improvements’. What the legislators did not realise, what indeed no one realised, was the extent to which this power would presently be abused by councils to carry out grandiose schemes that owed more indeed to the visions of le Corbusier than to the real needs and wants of the population of urban areas.

  Among the generation of town planners who entered the profession after the War, ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ was considered, for ideological reasons, the only proper approach. Many of these planners are still with us, disillusioned and nervous men in middle age who are yet – as one of them said to me – ‘too old dogs to learn new tricks’. A moral prejudice is the hardest thing to replace, and highly moral was what th
e planners of the 1950s and 1960s did indeed believe they were being when they destroyed the very street patterns in the name of progress, unnecessarily jettisoning the architecture of the past wholesale as if only by that method could they jettison the social evils of the past as well. It was a classic example of throwing the baby out with the bath-water, or of a ritualised gesture disguised in a gloss of rationalisation.

  What no one admitted till well into the 1960s, when whole communities had already been destroyed in London and elsewhere and large tracts of once-living urban landscape had been turned into deserts of windy concrete towers set on useless doylies of ownerless grass, was that ‘slum’ is almost entirely a relative concept, and that much so-called ‘slum clearance’ has been no more than a form of conspicuous consumption and political self-advertisement. Most of the true, irredeemable slums of London had already gone by the mid-1950s, but by then the machinery of slum clearance was so well established as a part of the local authority apparat that, like a blind monster, it went nosing round for more. And of course it found them, for there is nothing like announcing that a certain street or district will be demolished under some future slum-clearance scheme to ensure that its fabric and social status have indeed deteriorated by the time the bulldozers arrive, perhaps years later. Private tenants will have sold up and left, landlords will have ceased to do repairs, no grants will have been forthcoming for improvements. A once self-respecting and thriving community will have become an area of sheet iron screens, vandalised windows, squatters, refuse and scrawled slogans. Lo, a slum has been created, a prophecy has fulfilled itself. Planning-blight has been to the mid-twentieth century what bad speculative building was to the nineteenth, but at least the Councillor Agars of that time did not make sanctimonious remarks about the virtue of their activities.