First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  What a contrast is Liverpool Street! Here those extraordinary, cramped and uncomfortable Great Eastern carriages are drawn out above the East End housetops to wide acres of Essex suburb, two-storey houses, flat recreation grounds, strange chapels of strange sects, the well-trodden commons on the fringes of Epping Forest. Here workmen’s trains run early in the morning. Here the old London sulphur smell pervades and even red bricks receive a black coating. Dense streets of Tottenham, Wanstead, Leytonstone, Barking, Edmonton, you are the real London and you form a barrier between the town and the unspoiled country of East Anglia! So many trains carry your patient passengers in and out of the black cathedral of Liverpool Street that expresses to Harwich, Yarmouth and Norwich seem slow at starting and ending for fear, no doubt, of knocking into one of these hundreds of suburban steam trains. Fenchurch Street has the same quality as Liverpool Street and so has London Bridge.

  Charing Cross is the railway’s concession to the Continent. Though it is possible to leave Charing Cross for Kent, the impression travellers like to give when they use Charing Cross is that they are going abroad. Little Bureaux de Change at the entrance encourage the impression and Edward Middleton Barry’s elaborate Eleanor Cross, befouled by pigeons in the station yard, reminds us once more of one of Europe’s shining gifts to England, Eleanor of Castile.

  I do not know what to say of Cannon Street. Of all the stations of London it is my favourite, so echoing, so lofty and so sad. Whoever used it and who uses it now? Holborn Viaduct was the great station for hop-pickers on their journey to Kent. But Cannon Street is too stately for that sort of thing. It is much less important than London Bridge at which most of its trains stop. Perhaps the people of Bromley, that lonely high-class suburb in Kent, love Cannon Street as I do.

  There is one station, however, which hardly anyone uses at all—Broad Street, which is given over to ghosts of frock-coated citizens who once crowded the old North London trains from the steam suburbs of Highbury, Canonbury and Camden Town. Often do those sumptuous L.M.S. electric trains swing across the North London suburbs on that smooth, useless, beautiful journey to Richmond. At no time of day have I known it impossible to find a seat in their spacious carriages. And the frock-coated ones are dead and gone like the rolling stock which carried them, their houses have been turned into flats, their gardens built over by factories. The North London was the last line to use wooden-seated third-class carriages as it did on its Poplar branch (now closed), the last line in London to run no trains during church time on a Sunday morning, and within living memory the General Manager of the line refused to allow Smith’s bookstall on Broad Street to sell any vulgar-looking papers. Still the trains run, through haunted gas-lit stations, on the most revealing railway journey London can provide.

  The main line platforms of King’s Cross are all expresses and Civil Servants bagging the first-class sleepers to Scotland, their fares paid for them out of our taxes. I do not like it, despite its noble architecture. It is a station, like Euston, that those few of us who are not Civil Servants will associate with injustice. But these dim suburban platforms at King’s Cross to which trains come puffing up from the inner circle, are still Victorian London. Here runs much uncomfortable rolling stock to Barnet and Hatfield, climbing slowly to Finsbury Park. All the money is spent on streamlining those L.N.E.R. expresses in the main station.

  St. Pancras is a station apart, a Royal Station. The old idea that the Midland was the most comfortable railway in the world still holds good despite the strenuous efforts of the L.M.S. to kill it. There is a suburban service, but it is of no importance. I have the impression that St. Pancras is still the aristocratic route to Scotland. Gun-cases and fishing-rods go north with tweed-clad lairds, salmon and game returning in the guard’s van without them. I have little doubt that British Railways will do away with St. Pancras altogether. It is too beautiful and too romantic to survive. It is not of this age. Euston has stolen its trains but not its atmosphere. Except for that concealed platform where the Irish mail leaves of an evening, there is no personality left about the trains from Euston. To the Irish, Euston is the chief of English stations. Even lesser stations on the line are written on their minds for I know of an Irish Peer who woke up during a Wagner Opera at Covent Garden and exclaimed: “Just like Willesden Junction!”

  Except for Broad Street, Marylebone is the quietest station. Only two expresses leave it in a day, the “South Yorkshireman” and the “Master Cutler.” There is hardly room for more and the suburban service to Buckinghamshire seems like an after-thought. I have never met anyone who has used one of the Marylebone expresses, but lately I had the pleasure of coming into Marylebone on a semi-express which stopped at Brackley. We rushed through late Victorian cuttings and under bridges of glazed brick, nearly merging with the Metropolitan. When I reached London I found I was one of fifteen passengers.

  Paddington has the strongest personality of all the larger London stations. Its passengers are nearly all country people. There is the one exception, a large contingent of South Welsh who seem always to be travelling in trains. There is a lessening section of old-fashioned people, too poor now to travel first, who come up on the cheap day fares from Wiltshire and Gloucestershire to visit the Army and Navy Stores. Relations from further west stay a night or two at the Paddington Hotel. There are some Oxford dons and at holiday times more schoolboys than on any other line. Add to them a final section of commuters who have transformed Newbury and Maidenhead, Reading and Henley into suburbs of London.

  I am aware that this attempt at the atmosphere of London stations is sketchy. Sketchy and no doubt unfair, for there must be many to whom King’s Cross and Euston are charming places and others who detest Cannon Street, St. Pancras and Liverpool Street as I do not. To them I apologise, but if I have-caused them to think of these stations as places with the strong personalities that only those who use them can know, I will have achieved my object. To me they are people, and people have sides to their characters that they reveal to some and not to others.

  10

  NONCONFORMIST ARCHITECTURE

  THE church of the medieval village or town was the centre of life. Houses were squalid and uncomfortable and it would have been as odd for a villager to say his daily prayers at home with all the family crawling about the single room, as it would be odd to find a villager saying his prayers on a week-day in the village church today. Church was where one went for everything. Schooling and business in the porch, festivals and plays in the church and churchyard, games in the churchyard (headstones in a graveyard were almost unknown until the seventeenth century and the poor were buried one on top of another in the graveyard, without a coffin, so that the quick danced upon the dead), and only the chancel and guild private chapels and priest’s part were screened off from the noisy, much-used nave, the people’s part of the church.

  Nor were the guild chapels entirely apart from the people. The maltsters, let us say, of a district would erect an addition to their Church in honour of the patron saint of malting; they would subscribe for a window depicting the saint’s life, less rich guilds would subscribe to keeping the candles burning, to a panel of stained glass, or a carved figure, or to part of the priest’s stipend or the care or making of vestments. So it happened that the cottager of Catholic England looked on the church as his true home and took the same pride in his little bit of the church as he takes today in a new three-piece suite at home, or as his wife takes in the ornaments on her mantelpiece.

  Churches really were the architecture of the people.

  Since Elizabeth’s day the church has become more and more remote, in architecture, from the people. The private chapel of the squire’s family became the squire’s pew, and when the squire was sold up in the last century it was cleared away by a “restorer” and became an awkward corner of ill-placed seats filled only on harvest festival or at the British Legion service. The rest of the church became the province of the incumbent and many a country church today is little more t
han an additional drawing-room for the rector’s wife to which the family at the manor has presented some new but ecclesiastical ornaments.

  Yet it is wrong to suppose that the Calvinism of Edward VI, the Romanism of Mary, the compromise effected by Queen Elizabeth, killed people’s interest in God. The continual change in church services, the destruction of many ornaments for which the people had paid and which was part of their life, harmed the Catholic Church in England, and Cromwell nearly killed it. But though they were no longer full Catholics, people still talked a lot about God. In Cromwell’s time they talked about Him in public-houses, at street corners, at home, during business and everlastingly in Parliament. The translated Bible, full stops, commas, mistranslations and all, was open to any who could read, and the pious English put their own interpretation on various scriptural texts, counting one text as more important than others. So arose Fifth Monarchy men, Muggletonians, Seventh Day Baptists, Millenarians among the lesser Cromwellian sects, Independents1 (now called Congregationalists), Presbyterians (now mostly Unitarians in England), Baptists and Quakers among the greater. A Catholic would say these sects arose because there was no Church guidance in the interpretation of the scriptures. A Puritan would say that now at last people could read the word of God.

  It would be too sweeping to say that the early meeting houses were that architecture of the people which had been driven out of the churches merely because the early Puritans were mostly intellectuals and their ministers clergy who had been ejected from their livings, displaced heads of colleges and scholars. The congregations, according to the Lambeth returns, consisted of a good sprinkling of landowners, schoolmasters and merchants. The earliest meeting places were cottages and larger private houses, for ministers and congregation expected to be replaced in the church at some change of government.

  When the Restoration brought about a High Church reaction, and later when William III, the one and only Royal Calvinist, failed to insist that the Church of England was Presbyterian, Baptist or Independent, the dissenters started to move out from their cottage meetings and to build their own conventicles.

  The earliest Nonconformist places of worship, built specifically for worship, are all later than 1650. They were designed as preaching houses.2 Usually they are plain, often delicate, compositions with windows on three sides and the pulpit approached by steps against the fourth. Sometimes there is a clear space in the middle of the room, for a communion table. Galleries round three sides were often added.

  In their simplest form, in the Quaker meeting houses where the doctrine of the Society demanded no worldly ostentation whatever, the buildings have the quality of a well-scoured farmhouse kitchen—a stone or tiled floor, scrubbed oak open seats, white walls and clear glass windows. Sometimes in the older meeting houses the walls were covered to the height of a man’s shoulder with rush matting. One might say the Quakers were the Cistercians of Nonconformist builders. The Unitarians (then Presbyterians) were the Cluniacs. They did not despise decorative treatment, angels’ heads as exterior keystones, broken pediments, excellent brickwork. The Unitarian Year Book gives the dates of the foundations of various churches, and where these have not been rebuilt much excellent work is to be found.

  Among the best Nonconformist churches of this first phase, what we might call the theological style, are Friars’ Street, Ipswich; Mary Street, Taunton; Churchgate Street, Bury St. Edmunds; Underbank, Stannington; the Octagon, Norwich. All these have lavishly furnished interiors, somewhat after the manner of a Wren church.

  Of the buildings belonging to the Quakers, necessarily far simpler, Jordans, near Beaconsfield, is probably the best example, though I have attended numerous small country meetings where a scrubbed and white-washed austerity still recalls the strictness of old Friends. The earliest Baptist churches, notably Cote, Oxon (1657), have the austerity of Friends’ Meeting Houses.

  Friars’ Street, Ipswich. 1700. Plaster walls and white woodwork. This and the following three chapels illustrated represent the theological style belonging to the convinced phase of Nonconformity when it emerged from secret meetings and built its own conventicles.

  The first Methodist preaching house was not built until 1739 in Bristol and it survives almost as it was, for Sir George Oately, the Bristol architect, has carried out a conservative and sensitive restoration of the old place. This building is the first of a larger series of chapels than that of the first group and I think we might name it the first building of the architecture of Enthusiasm.

  Consider the difference between the motives for building Methodist chapels and those for building Unitarian, Independent, and even Bapist places of worship. The latter were built for congregations versed in theology, to hear the Word of God from Ministers who held similar views on the Word to those of the congregation.

  Underbank Stannington, nr. Sheffield. 1742. Local grey stone.

  When John Wesley died in 1791 there were 60,000 Methodists in Great Britain and 11,000 in Ireland; most of them were in the northern and western counties of England and in the north and east of Ireland. These people were mostly men who had not previously bothered about spiritual matters; they were workers from early and dismal, industrial districts, half starved people who saw no hope of ease and happiness in this life and were attracted by the promises of indescribable ease and happiness in the next. Where Wesley or Whitfield lifted their voices, people fell down with groans and wrestled with the Evil One.

  Exterior and interior of Unitarian Chapel, Bury St. Edmunds. Early eighteenth-century. Dark red brick, white paint. Unitarians were intellectuals. They had no moral objections to decoration and built many lovely chapels with Wren-like exteriors and fine woodwork within. They were not allowed towers or spires.

  Cote Baptist Chapel, nr. Bampton, Oxon. 1651. Grey limestone among the willows, elms and flat landscape of the upper Thames. Interior: high pews, white walls, gallery and clear glass. Neighbouring brooks and ponds suitable for baptism. The simplicity of these Puritan Chapels, built for people who believed and argued not for people who believed and sang or shouted praise, was deliberate.

  The first chapels to be built by the Methodists were meant to serve as overflow preaching houses when the Established church was either too far distant, too hostile, or too small in seating capacity for the numbers attracted by the new preaching. Like the buildings of the earlier group, they were designed to seat as many people as possible within a good view of the pulpit. Crosses, altars and decoration were regarded as unnecessary, for there were such things at the Parish church. They followed, in plan, the “theological” preaching houses, but they were larger, flimsier buildings, and did not scorn a bit of carpenter’s or plasterer’s moulding here and there by way of internal embellishment. They were erected mostly by pious merchants or landowners whose enthusiasm extended to their pockets. They were hardly any of them erected from the subscriptions of the people. Indeed enthusiasm in the late eighteenth century was as rife as Tractarianism was seventy years later and touched similar classes at the top, though it had a greater hold than Tractarianism over the people at the bottom of the social scale.

  Lady Huntingdon Chapel, Worcester. An “enthusiastic” interior in a Chippendale Gothic style, with nineteenth-century liturgical movement additions. Clustered columns, cornices, gallery pews, buff, yellow and white paint, dark green walls, organ with stencilled pipes, stained glass and pulpit rails are Victorian. Entrance screens (not shown) have good early nineteenth-century coloured glass. This chapel belongs to the second phase of Nonconformity (Wesley and Whitfield) when the buildings often conform to classic rules of proportion and are indistinguishable externally from contemporary buildings of the Establishment.

  Louth, Lincs. Methodist, 1835. Small town Enthusiasm: not architect designed but by a builder with a Georgian tradition and some Adam-style casts. Windows not spoiled by cathedral glass of liturgical movement, two rows allow for gallery between first and second floors. Later it became customary to bring the galleries across th
e single long windows on entrance front to give a non-domestic appearance to the façade. This and the following five illustrations show the development of a native English style.

  Blockley, Gloucestershire. 1835. The façade, except for the large windows and wide door, is in the Bath tradition which often survived as late and as far east as this.

  Swaffham, Norfolk. Methodist c. 1870. Fanciful; a certain debt to Soane and Wightwick. White brick, frosted glass and bright coloured borders.

  Market Harborough, Leicestershire, c. 1850, White brick and pale yellow stucco.

  When great cities prospered after the depression following the Napoleonic wars, and Methodist merchants grew richer, stately chapels were built in the chastest Greek or Commissioner’s Perpendicular. Liverpool, Manchester, London and Bristol still contain a number. But they were built at a time when education in architectural matters was confined to those classes which were rich enough to have an extensive education or to recognize established taste when they saw it. There was little to choose between an early nineteenth-century Methodist, New Jerusalem, Roman, Independent or Unitarian chapel in a large town (where most Nonconformist building at this time took place) and a Proprietary chapel or new chapel of ease erected for the Established Church. They did not have bells or towers, but their internal arrangements were similar. Enthusiasm was strong in parts of the Established Church. The pulpit dominated the altar. Several octagonal, circular, and hexagonal churches were built for the Establishment (the Octagon Chapel, Bath; the Octagon Chapel, Wisbech; St. Andrew’s Church, Dublin—circular—and a dozen or more) while those which retained the rectangular plan, also favoured by Nonconformists, had exceedingly shallow chancels and the pulpit was more than often in front of the Table. On the Nonconformist side, there was an ‘Established’ look at, for example, the Wesleyan Chapel, Stanhope Street, Liverpool (c. 1820), where a contemporary account says “A powerful, fine wind organ, by Bewsher and Fleetwood, gives solemnity to the services; and the ‘semi-religious light’ falling through an oval window of stained glass, executed by Messrs. Lyon & Son, imparts a sacred shade to the communion table.”