Once again, the planners had some good ideas. They made much use of the term ‘penetration’ and the text accompanying the plan explained it in terms of vistas and through-walks, with the North London Railway viaduct retained and exploited as a landscape feature. There was the preoccupation with communal leisure activities which seems to have been a permanent feature of all town planning pipe-dreams from Hampstead Garden Suburb on, and there was also provision for a ‘quarter … of studios, workshops, clubs and secondhand shops’ – without any awareness that such things never flourish in new, custom built property which is by definition too expensive for them. The artificially created open spaces of the County of London Plan were also revived.
Bits of this plan eventually came to pass, to the accompaniment of furious protests, arguments, counter-arguments and public meetings. But really 1964 was too late – by just a year or two – to introduce anything quite so high-handed. Two years earlier, similarly sweeping plans for the area north of Queen’s Crescent (Grafton Ward and Gospel Oak) were set in motion, and were to take – except in Oak Village itself, which had become an enclave of battling, wealthy owner-occupiers – their relentless course. Over the next fourteen years much of the area that had been ‘home’ to Grosch before 1914 and to Montagu Slater between the wars was reduced to a wasteland of one kind or another – emptied, boarded houses, churned earth, blocks that the local people christened ‘Colditz’. It was partly because of this that, by the mid-sixties, public opinion, in the form of Civic Societies and local residents’ associations, was at last becoming mobilised to fight municipal domination. Much to their own surprise, the Council, the fairy-godfather giver of new homes, found that they had a fight on their hands.
It was unfortunate, but inevitable, that the people who first took up the battle were the articulate middle-class newcomers to the district rather than the long-term working-class residents. For a while, the whole issue threatened to degenerate into a political battle across class divisions – a view of the matter fostered by some councillors, who found it convenient to cast the people who opposed redevelopment in the role of capitalist baddies which enabled the goodies to be the traditional deserving poor whom the Council was only trying to help. The baddies, it was suggested, were decadent in their obsession with conserving the old, and were thereby depriving the working classes of their right to have bathrooms. Yet in fact the working classes had, if anything, more to lose than the middle classes if their streets were destroyed. They would have less chance of moving elsewhere and would have to accept what they were given in the way of a council flat. But for so long the idea had been promulgated that only by knocking everything down and starting all over again could you achieve watertight roofs and indoor lavatories, that many ordinary people began to believe this was indeed the only way and to look askance on ‘Save Our Street’ campaigns. Once again, as centuries before, a middle-class presence in Kentish Town was having its effect, and no one, at first, knew quite how to take this.
A woman I visited in 1975 in her new flat south of Queen’s Crescent (a fragment of the 1964 plan that did finally get itself built) had been the founder and leader of a tenants’ association which had set itself to oppose the local Civic Society over their opposition to the Council’s plans:
We were sick of sharing the toilets, that was the main thing really. We never stopped to think that the Council could have put us in new baths and toilets like they’re doing in some of these streets now instead of pulling the whole lot down … People didn’t think much about these things then – they’ve changed a lot since. Personally I could never see why they pulled Maitland Park down [a piece of 1950s redevelopment]. It was beautiful there … and Prince of Wales Crescent used to be a really nice place too. It was all small shops and a little post office. I lived in two rooms there when I was first married. Now everyone’s been moved out and its all horrible, full of squatters … It shouldn’t have happened really.
The social problem was in fact much more complex than it was made to seem, either by the Council or by the new middle-class owner-occupiers. The latter claimed, with truth, that they were saving a large part of Kentish Town from turning into the sort of desert which great tracts of south and east London had become, and thereby benefitting their working-class neighbours as much as themselves. However it was also indisputable that many of them, however innocent and well-intentioned in themselves, were only there occupying those particular houses at all because working-class tenants had been displaced from them. ‘Gentrification’ began to be used as a ready-made sneer on the lips of those who were, inevitably, articulate and middle class themselves but did not want to see themselves that way. They pointed out – again, with some truth – that the fabric of nineteenth-century housing was being preserved and restored at the expense of the teeming life it had previously sheltered. Notoriously, houses in multi-occupation were emptied of their numerous tenants, by house agents not always over-scrupulous in their methods, in order that each might be sold to just one middle-class family.
What these critics did not admit, however, was that this evil in the private sector was paralleled by their own shortcomings in the public sector. For the old houses had provided a pool of cheap, rented accommodation, sub-standard perhaps but flexible – and this was just what council housing did not provide. If you were a short-term tenant without security of tenure, between being displaced by a comparatively wealthy family and being displaced by a redevelopment scheme there was not much to choose. Worse, even if those occupying parts of terrace houses when the moment came for redevelopment did get allotted council flats, it still meant that the stock of easily rentable accommodation was steadily being eroded.
One group affected were the hard-up newcomers to London who had traditionally always found their first shelter in little-regarded places like Kentish Town. Paradoxically, this student and sub-student world was, by the late 1960s, bigger than it had ever been before. All over west Kentish Town houses that would once have provided the accommodation wanted were being emptied by the council in preparation for redevelopment, but many of them remained empty for years before the bulldozers arrived. The solution was obvious, and people took the law into their own hands, all the more so since this coincided with the radical chic of the period. The early squatters in Kentish Town, around 1970, were mostly organised through relatively respectable bodies such as Student Community Housing. They came to some agreement with the council, who were themselves inclined to take a tolerant, fashionably liberal attitude towards them, and paid a minimal rent and rates. For a brief period the condemned houses lived again, as ‘community shops’ were opened with varying degrees of success, people made and sold yogurt (that accepted sign of pure ideals), handbags, African drums. But these authorised squatters were followed by others, less benign. At first even these tended to be people with some kind of ideological axe to grind, real or bogus, but they were soon followed by people without even such moral pretensions, who squatted merely for convenience – semi-criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, runaway teenagers, the human flotsam which has always floated to the slums, in every century, and now readily invaded the slums which the council, in its unwisdom, had created with planning blight. Council attitudes to squatting were forced to harden. Meanwhile other local residents, infuriated by the litter left around, by the way the milk was stolen from their doorsteps every morning, by the shouts and loud music in the night, and by (I quote) ‘the naked copulation in the gardens’, decided to take the law into their own hands in their turn. One night the police in Holmes Road were telephoned and told that if they didn’t ‘do something’ about the squatters in Marsden Street (off Malden Road) someone else would. Someone else did, and a battle followed in which a nest of squatters were routed, it is said, with pitchforks, and several of them ended up in hospital.
I do not believe the pitchforks. I think they are an imaginative touch put in to indicate the (literally) grass roots nature of local feeling over the issue. But they are none the less
significant for all that.
The disappearance of cheap flats and rooms to let brought other evils in its train besides squatting by outsiders. Young local people, sometimes from families that had been in Kentish Town for generations, could no longer find ‘two rooms in Prince of Wales Crescent’ when they got married. This particularly affected the sort of couple with ambitions and a certain standard of living, who had no intention of instantly starting a large family to qualify for priority on Camden’s long housing lists, or yet of bringing up a couple of children for years in Mother’s front room. These were the Class 3, the lower middle class, actual or potential, who moved out to remote suburbs, a loss to the district. Blandly, in self-congratulation, Camden’s Director of Housing remarked in a pamphlet published in 1971 that ‘steadily the proportion of privately rented flats must be expected to fall and, with a vigorous housing programme the number of Council dwellings must be expected to increase’. Yet well before this point it had become obvious that the community was becoming socially polarized in an undesirable way between council tenancy and owner occupation. It was glumly predicted that by the year 1984 (or whatever arbitrary date was chosen) the whole of the Kentish and Camden Town areas and indeed the ring of comparable districts right round London would be parcelled out into expensively gentrified streets and, in utter physical and social contrast to them, one-class ghetto estates of council flats.
For the supreme irony of council estate construction is that it has ultimately proved socially divisive and anti-egalitarian. Partly this is due to the physical nature of most estate architecture – the way it turns its back on prevailing street patterns and, in discouraging through-traffic, inevitably discourages outsiders from entering on foot also. Many estates, indeed, are as much unknown territory to people living in the adjacent streets as if they were in another neighbourhood altogether. But another important divisive factor is the constraints placed upon council tenants, the petty regulations about door-painting and petkeeping, the general lack of real privacy despite the much vaunted ‘selfcontainment’. Few people would be council tenants, at least not in a flat, if they had any financially feasible alternative, and it is significant that vandalism is far worse on estates than it is in the more mixed social communities of the streets. If you live in a house in a street then you are of the community of that street and, by extension, the whole area, whether you occupy a whole house or a self-contained basement flat or two rooms and a shared bath on the landing. If you live on a Council estate, however, you live ‘in Lenham’ or ‘in Baxton’ and you are instantly labelled.
Some of these drawbacks in the council housing system are, of course, the product of several factors beyond the control of individual councils. It is hard to see how, today, under any system, a good supply of cheap rented accommodation could be maintained in London, given that people will no longer tolerate the overcrowding they put up with in the past. It is a moot point whether, had public authorities not attempted to control the situation so heavily since 1945, but had allowed the traditional laissez faire system of private landlordism to continue, the result today would on balance be better or worse. It would certainly be different.
One change of council policy in the last few years in Camden is, however, doing much to bridge the widening gulf between council tenant and owner-occupier. Many of the houses originally acquired in the early 1960s with a view to demolition are now being done up and re-let to council tenants, which pleases both the prospective tenants and the middle-class conservationists. It may be that time will expose certain follies in this policy too, and certainly it has its critics (‘Throwing good money after old bricks’). But for the time being it seems a good idea – and, what is more important, a modest, piecemeal, flexible idea which does not involve taking long-term expensive decisions that cannot easily be revoked. Indeed it is a measure of the success of this policy that its results do not jump to the eye. The numbers of nineteenth-century houses now in council ownership in Kentish Town, including the whole of the Christ Church Estate and much of the Bartholomew Estate which were acquired at an auction in the 1950s, is far greater than a casual observer would suppose walking round the streets. Such an observer, seeing a pleasant house, restored in appropriate style without the alarming picture windows and glass and iron front-doors that characterise some private conversions, is more apt to assume that its owners are ‘another middle-class family that has moved in’. Hence the idea that Kentish Town is steadily going up and can only continue to rise, gains further currency.
The fact is, however, that after the social and physical upheavals of the 1960s, the district has probably reached another period of near stability. Including modern estates, the Council now owns more than half the housing in the area, and this has effectively put a stop to any lingering property developer’s dream of it even becoming another Chelsea or Hampstead. At the same time, its dangers seem to be, for the moment, past. No Motorway Box will mutilate its southern area. No more vainglorious schemes will attempt to transform it out of all recognition: for the moment local authorities have run out of both steam and money. The slums of the future – and the near future at that – will not be found in ‘inchoate communities … peppered with small industries’ like Kentish Town, but in the bleakly coherent wastelands of places like the Pepys Estate in south London or the Ben Johnson estate in Stepney, or Woodberry Down in north London.
Paradoxically, the various threats to Kentish Town’s very existence that have been posed since 1945 may have played an important part in sharpening people’s ideas about what life in an urban area is or ought to be. Between the wars, when districts like this stagnated, no one took much interest in them except those who wished to change them. Not until they seemed to be trembling on the brink of extinction, their rows of terraces apparently doomed to pass into history like the open fields and the timbered farmhouses before them, did people of all classes stop and ask themselves what, in fact, was still good about these places, or whether they really wanted them knocked down. The prolonged wrangles over demolition which at first had threatened to divide the articulate newcomers from the resigned long-term inhabitants, in the end united them, albeit temporarily. The final saving of Harmood Street by public outcry, and the final defeat and loss of the elegant curve of Prince of Wales Crescent, which received coverage in the national press, were topics of interest shared by everyone. Here, as in other comparable areas all over London but perhaps particularly here, local enterprises began to flourish in the late 1960s: local news-sheets were published, street festivals were held, organisations for helping people with commodities ranging from legal advice to psychodrama, appeared in every street. A Neighbourhood Advice Centre, financed by the Camden Council for Social Services was set up. Some eighteen residents’ and tenants’ associations came into being within a square mile of streets – significantly, the level of all this communal activity was far higher in west Kentish Town, where there had been so much trouble and strife, than in the relatively calmer district to the east of the high road which no one had tried to pull down. A free-floating and at first slightly mysterious organisation called Inter Action settled in Kentish Town, in the misguided belief that here was a forgotten district no one was doing anything about. Having discovered their mistake they nevertheless stayed, occupying a derelict medicine factory where the director’s office was still panelled in mock-Jacobean, and busied themselves with a variety of causes such as open spaces (that King Charles’s Head of reformers) and street games for children, always referred to in an approved radical style as ‘the kids’. Some people thought they were Maoists and others that, on the contrary, they were not all that different in their basic attitudes from the Mission Hall clergymen of a hundred years ago. But nearly everyone was pleased when, in 1974, they succeeded in opening a riding stable, allotments and a miniature ‘farm’ (goats, chickens, a donkey, a calf) on a segment of railway land with old stabling and stock sheds.
It was an inspired idea. As a symbol of the new urban peasantry,
as a focus for the idea of the village that lurks disguised in city streets and as a means of creating a sense of the revival of the lost past, it could not be bettered. Look, it seemed to be saying, the fields are not only sleeping underneath: they are here, exposed once again, with people working in them, tending animals, learning about real things, doing things instead of gazing into shop windows and television sets. The ‘farm’ soon became, and is still, the focus for all sorts of myths: people were eager to believe that it was an actual fragment of farmland overlooked for a hundred years and miraculously rediscovered like the Sleeping Beauty’s domain, that the ‘farm buildings’ (in reality Midland Railway stabling) were the remains of the eighteenth-century Mortimer’s Farm.
The earth itself is indestructible – the tough, sticky London clay studded like a currant cake with the fragments of other lives. But what stands on the earth seems more like a geological formation. A hundred years ago this image was already used by a foreign observer (Karl Capek) to describe the amazing agglomeration of terraced housing that met his eye, but today, when the terraces are broken and interspersed with so many more recent deposits, the metaphor seems still more appropriate. The buildings of different periods, themselves converted or modified in different ways, are mixed together like stratified rocks that have been churned up not once but several times by changes in the social climate. Temperate, sunny eras have deposited elaborate fanlights, stucco mouldings, cornices and parapets; colder eras have peeled stucco and rotted trimmings, making facings porous. Successive ice ages have left piles of masonry like great rocks standing out above the more delicate roofscape of slates – piano factories, engine sheds, model dwellings, greyly serviceable blocks with stone dressings, post-War follies in roughcast concrete. In the ‘urban sprawl’ the petrified tide-marks of earlier building waves are still clearly visible: here the airy stuccoed facades give way to heavier, mid-Victorian ones with porticoes, here these in turn lie alongside late-Victorian debased Scottish baronial style. Here is an untouched segment of Edwardian red-brick and hung tile, here a slice is missing and in its place (brought hither by a glacier from a distant suburb?) is a piece of 1930s by-pass architecture. Here traffic sweeps noisily round a new traffic island, there children play in a pot-holed, ancient unmade lane under flowering trees.
The Fields Beneath Page 27
