The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  The surface vegetation the houses currently wear is equally varied. In one run of near-identical houses, the blistered chocolate and margarine paint of pre-war days, endlessly proving how ‘serviceable’ it is, may be flanked on one side by fresh white rendering and a stripped pine front door and on the other by a neighbour done up like a doll’s house, each individual brick picked out in mauvish-pink by its Greek Cypriot owners. The house at the end of the run, slightly bigger than its neighbours, its path squared in black and white tiles of long-ago elegance, presents a sorrier sight than any of the others. Its area railings, taken during the war supposedly to make armaments but actually to rust in a field in Lincolnshire, have been replaced by a sagging cat’s cradle of stakes and wire, the steps where maids once lingered are covered with green slime and blown chip papers; ragged Robin grows at the bottom. In tribute to a respectable past, all its windows are occluded with dirty net curtains, but in one of them a pane of glass has been blocked for years by a cornflakes packet. In another stands a little Sacred Heart, facing the street: perhaps He enjoys watching the goings-on in the new adventure playground opposite. From His vantage point He cannot see that the house next door has been sanded all over and now presents the pristine, bright yellow appearance it must have presented around 1840, before a hundred years of London grime had come to darken it. Actually this startling new façade is a façade in every sense, for, in currently approved fashion, the occupants have restored the outside to a perfect simulacrum of what it must once have been, new eight-paned windows and all, but have transformed the small-roomed interior into a barn-like Paradise of rolled steel joists, spotlights and a spiral staircase leading to a studio in the roof-space. Their bleak good taste is not much admired by the neighbours who have seen inside, particularly not by the ones further up the street whose own identical house is completely smothered in Virginia creeper and whose front patch is a riot of sunflowers, roses, geraniums and garden gnomes.

  The Indians arrive in their shining car, full of wives and large-eyed children. They run the small grocers in the next street (open till nine at night seven days a week) which they bought three years ago from the Greeks.

  An alsatian pads past, very busy. A woman with a pram and eye-shadow eyes it suspiciously.

  In the pub at the corner someone is washing the cut-glass windows. Posters advertise ‘Disco’ and ‘Topless Go-go dancers’, but most of the time the place wears an air of intense respectability.

  An old man dodders past with woollen gloves and a shopping bag. His wife has sent him to Sainsburys to get him out from under her feet.

  A rather angry-looking young woman in a long, crumpled cotton skirt goes by, pushing a double push-chair vigorously in front of her containing two small children of disparate colours. Relic of a high-minded commune of squatters, she has now, as an unsupported mother, been rehoused by the council.

  A colony of Irish workmen arrive and prepare to dig up the pavement. The accents of the young ones are just as strong as those of the older men. Ireland itself must be half empty these days, but the Catholic churches in North West London are well filled.

  A man in a dark suit with a briefcase passes on his way to the tube and County Hall. His wife is just getting the car out to take the children to school (a state primary school, but not the nearest one).

  Two blowsy women, mother and daughter, with cigarettes in their mouths at the same angle, are taking huge bundles in the direction of the launderette. A brisk young husband in jeans, bound on the same errand, overtakes them.

  In an upstairs room of a house opposite someone is typing.

  * Mr Pike’s house was by now a doctor’s surgery, and one of the few in the road not in multi-occupation.

  Parliament Hill Fields

  SIR JOHN BETJEMAN

  Rumbling under blackened girders, Midland, bound for Cricklewood,

  Puffed its sulphur to the sunset where that Land of Laundries stood.

  Rumble under, thunder over, train and tram alternate go,

  Shake the floor and smudge the ledger, Charrington, Sells, Dale and Co.,

  Nuts and nuggets in the window, trucks along the lines below.

  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’s, and the terrace blackish brown,

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

  Till the tram went over thirty, sighting terminus again,

  Past municipal lawn tennis and the bobble-hanging plane;

  Soft the light suburban evening caught our ashlar-speckled spire,

  Eighteen-sixty Early English, as the mighty elms retire

  Either side of Brookfields Mansions flashing fine French-window fire.

  Oh the after-tram-ride quiet, when we heard a mile beyond,

  Silver music from the bandstand, barking dogs by Highgate Pond;

  Up the hill where stucco houses in Virginia creeper drown –

  And my childish wave of pity, seeing children carrying down

  Sheaves of drooping dandelions to the courts of Kentish Town.

  A Note on Sources

  originally compiled 1977, revised 2010.

  Apart from the published works listed in the Bibliography and the files of defunct local newspapers in the Camden Archives and Local History Centre, I have drawn on a variety of unpublished sources of material. The most important of these is the Heal Collection, a large and valuable accumulation of documents, transcriptions of manuscripts, newspaper cuttings, prints, water-colours, maps, site-plans, posters and other historical ephemera, amassed over two successive generations by members of the Heal family – the owners of the furniture shop in Tottenham Court Road. All the material relates, broadly, to St Pancras parish and its environs. This Collection was presented to the local borough council in 1913, and forms an important core to the Camden Archives, which are in any case extensive and excellent. The Heal contribution is a goldmine for the researcher; in the 1970s it had been little exploited, and its existence was one of the reasons for my decision to write this book.

  Camden Archives also possesses several manuscripts relating to the parish of St Pancras at various dates. When I was writing this book, and for many years afterwards, the manuscript regarded by all concerned as the most important and interesting was the one I refer to in the text as ‘Woodehouse’s book’. I wrote then ‘It has occasionally been called a “journal”, but in fact it is more in the nature of an historical and contemporary account of the district. It was compiled shortly after 1700 by one William Woodehouse (Wodehouse, Woodhouse etc. – his own spelling varies), who was almost certainly the occupant of the house that nearly three centuries earlier had been occupied by William Bruges the Garter King at Arms. His book also includes transcripts of Court hearings over which he presided as a JP, and a printed pamphlet on witches of an earlier date.’ Readers of this book will see that I refer to Woodehouse and the information he supplies a number of times.

  No doubt was ever cast on Woodehouse’s authenticity when I was writing: there was merely a slight surprise expressed by the then chief archivist of Camden that he had not actually found Woodehouse’s name in any register of Justices of the Peace. I was not till 2002 that an article by Patrick Nother, a journalist and researcher, appeared in Camden History Society Review No. 26 (see Bibliography). In the course of work for a book of his own on Kings Cross, Nother had found incontrovertible evidence that ‘Woodehouse’ had patched together for his observations on St Pancras a number of reports, belonging roughly to the same period, lifted from other districts and contained in various other fairly recondite works. Moreover, upon analysis, all the various authentic-looking bits of paper which made up ‘Woodehouse’s Book’ turned out to be of nineteenth century origin. In other words, the work is a forgery.

  Interested re
aders may study Nother’s trenchant and closely argued article for themselves. But the fact remains that, though Woodehouse himself probably never existed, the concoction that bears his name is a skilful and well-informed one, generally appropriate to a district such as St Pancras in the early eighteenth century. It contains no anachronisms, no improbabilities; it has cut and pasted real-life evidence from elsewhere. Most likely (Nother has concluded) it was not originally intended to deceive, but was more in the nature of parlour-game between two or more skilled antiquarians. So, although if I were writing my book today I would not of course quote Woodehouse, I do not think any new reader will have their overall picture of old St Pancras hopelessly perverted by the Woodehouse references I have had to leave in the text.

  Another fragmentary manuscript of some sixty years later (genuine, this time) is also in the Camden Archives. This is the memorandum book on his house in Kentish Town compiled by the Rev. Dr Stukeley, the one-time rector of St George’s, Bloomsbury. Another is the account of Kentish Town dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, but taking a retrospective look, compiled by one William Elliott and subsequently (according to the inscription) copied and enlarged by Samuel Wiswould (the author of Charities of St Pancras, 1963). At least one commentator (C. H. Denyer, a Mayor of St Pancras in the 1930s and editor of a useful short history of the borough) has confused Mr Elliott’s book with that written and published by J Bennett earlier in the century (Some Account of Kentish Town, 1821), but this is an error. A third, but less informative manuscript compiled in the nineteenth century was the work of one Edwin Roffe; he (like Bennett, but a generation later) was the owner of a printing business in the area.

  A fourth manuscript, anonymous this time, will be found not with Camden but in the Museum of London archive. This is a journal, the work of a school-teacher in a British (ie. Congregationalist) School in some unspecified district, who visited London and London schools in the summer of 1853 by way of a busman’s holiday.

  The originals of the Cantelowes Manor Court Rolls and the St Pancras Parish registers are deposited in the London Metropolitan Archive. This Archive also holds some pictorial material, once in the Library of the Greater London Council, and a file of the work of A. Crosby, the watercolourist who made detailed drawings of the Fleet River and Morgan’s Farm. This was, till recently, in the Print Room of the Guildhall Library.

  A large series of photographs of Camden and Kentish Town High Streets, taken by the promoters of what became the Northern Line underground circa 1900 when the line was being planned, and once the property of London Transport, is now in the possession of the Camden Archives. They also have the original of J. F. King’s ‘Rolls’ or ‘Panorama’ of Kentish Town, as described in the text, a valuable and beautiful document and an important source both pictorially and factually. It has been reproduced by the London Topographical Society, with notes by John Richardson, in association with the London Borough of Camden.

  In the Camden Archives, too, will be found the archives of St Pancras Almshouses to the year 2000. Also the Archives of St Pancras Housing Association, including their estates at York Rise and at Athlone Street, and a report of housing conditions in the latter area made in 1933.

  The original Census forms are lodged in the National Archives, erstwhile Public Record Office, now at Kew. They make microfilm copies available for consultation – as do Camden Archives for their own district. The researcher of today will find many more documents transcribed or microfilmed and indexed than was the case a generation ago, but he or she is correspondingly less likely to enjoy the privilege and pleasure of browsing original documents in the way that I once did.

  I am most grateful to Malcolm Holmes, long-time archivist of Camden, now retired, for his help in bringing the Sources and Bibliography up to date. Also to Paul Barker, journalist, writer, expert on things urban and, like myself, an inhabitant of Kentish Town for many decades, for his interest and acumen.

  Revised Bibliography

  Altick, Richard, Victorian People and Ideas, 1974.

  Arnold, Matthew, Friendship’s Garland, 1866.

  Ashton, J., The Fleet, 1888.

  Baker, Alan R. H., and Harley, J. B. (editors) Man Made the Land: Essays in English Historical Geography, 1973.

  Barnes, E. G., The Rise of the Midland Railway, 1966.

  Barnes, William, A Century of Camden Housing, 1971 (pamphlet published by Camden Borough Council).

  Barker, T. C. and Robbins, M., A History of London Transport, 2007.

  Barton, Nicholas, The Lost Rivers of London, 1992.

  Bebbington, Gillian, London Street Names, 1972.

  Bennett, J., Some Account of Kentish Town, 1821.

  Bernstein, Henry T., ‘The Mysterious Disappearance of Edwardian London Fog’, in The London Journal Vol. I, No. 2, 1975.

  Birch, J. B., Brown’s Dairy, 1910 (privately printed pamphlet).

  Booth, General William, In Darkest London, 1890.

  Briggs, Asa, Victorian Cities, 1963.

  Brown, Walter E., St Pancras Book of Dates, 1904, St Pancras: Open Spaces and Disused Burial Grounds, 1902, The St Pancras Poor: a brief record of their treatment etc from 1718 to 1904, 1905, From Open Vestry to Borough Council 1718–1900, 1900 (all privately printed for St Pancras Borough Council).

  Buchan, John, The Three Hostages, 1924.

  Burchell, Doris, Miss Buss’s Other School, 1971 (Published by the Frances Mary Buss Foundation).

  Cansick, Frederick Teague, Cansick’s Epitaphs of Middlesex, 1872.

  Cooke, M. E., A Geographical Study of St Pancras, 1932.

  Coppock, J. T. and Prince, H.C. (editors) Greater London, 1964.

  Denyer, C. H. (editor) St Pancras Through the Ages, 1935 (Borough Council publication).

  Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841.

  Dickens, Charles, Dombey and Son, 1848.

  Dyos, H. J., The Study of Urban History, 1976.

  Dyos, H. J., Victorian Suburb: a study in the growth of Camberwell, 1973.

  Dyos, H. J. and Wolff, Michael (editors) Victorian City: Images and Realities, 1999.

  Girouard, Mark, Victorian Pubs, 1984.

  Godfrey, Walter H. and Marcham, W. McB, Survey of London, Vol. XVII, 1936, XIX, 1938 and XXIV, 1952 (published by the LCC).

  Goldsmith, Oliver, A Citizen of the World, 1760.

  Gomme, Sir George Laurence, London in the Reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1897), 1898.

  Gordon, W. J., The Horse World of London, 1893.

  Grosch, Alfred, St Pancras Pavements, 1947.

  Grossmith, George and Weedon, Diary of a Nobody, 1892.

  Guizot, Francois P. G., An Embassy at the Court of St James, 1840.

  Harrison, A History of London, 1775.

  Hole, James, The Homes of the Working Classes, with Suggestions for their Improvement, 1866.

  Hollinshead, John, Ragged London, 1861.

  Hoskins, W. G., English Landscapes, 1977.

  Howitt, William, The Northern Heights of London, 1869.

  Hughson, David, London, 1809.

  Ilive, Survey of London, 1742.

  Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 2002.

  Jenkins, Simon, Landlords to London; the story of a capital and its growth, 1975.

  Jeffcot, Eric, ‘Old Roads’ (article in St Pancras Journal Vol. 8, No. 1).

  Kellet, John R., Railways and Victorian Cities, 1979.

  Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost, 1968.

  Lee, Charles E., St Pancras Church and Parish, 1955 (published by the Parochial Church Council).

  Lee, Charles E., The Northern Line, 1973 (published by London Transport).

  London, Hugh Stanford, The Life of William Bruges, 1960 (published by the Harleyian Society).

  Lysons, Daniel, The Environs of London, 1796.

  Mackenzie, Compton, Sinister Street, 1913.

  Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861.

  Miller, Frederick, St Pancras Past and Presen
t, 1874.

  Mitchell, R. J. and Leys, M. D. R., A History of London Life, 1958.

  Morell, R.C., The Story of Agar Town, 1935 (privately printed).

  Morris, William, The Earthly Paradise, 1870.

  Morris, William, Hopes and Fears for Art: Five lectures, 1882.

  Murray, J. F., The World of London, 1843.

  Norden, John, Speculum Britanniae, 1549.

  Olsen, Donald J., Town Planning in London, 1982.

  Palmer, Samuel, St Pancras, 1870.

  Parker, Rowland, The Common Stream, 1975.

  Pepys, Samuel, Diaries, 1659–69 (first published 1841).

  Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Buildings of England: London, 1952; revised edition by Cherry, Bridget, 1998.

  Pike, E. Royston, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age, 1974.

  Platt, Colin, The English Medieval Town, 1976.

  Priestley, Harold, London, the Years of Change, 1966.

  Rasmussen, Steen Eller, London, the Unique City, 1934.

  Richardson, John, The Local Historian’s Encyclopedia, 1993 (published by Historical Publications).