The Fields Beneath (27 page)

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:

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,

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.

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),

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 13
s
. 4
d
. per week for two rooms, 16
s
. 1
d
. for three and 18
s
. 2
d
. 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.