The Fields Beneath (14 page)

By chance, this crucial period in the village’s development has been documented not only by King but also in a little book – the only one of its kind ever written till now – entitled
Some Account of Kentish Town showing its Ancient Condition, Progressive Improvement and Present State
. It was printed and published in Kentish Town by a J. Bennett who probably also wrote it – and is not to be confused with Elliott, who wrote later in the century and in a quite different, florid style. Writing in 1821, J. Bennett seems to have been a modest, conscientious person, much more inclined to admire the ‘Progressive Improvement’ of the area as evinced by its increasing gentility than to lament it. Here he is on the town’s growth:

Kentish Town was reflecting what was, in fact, a general building boom between 1816 and 1826. Some of these new runs of houses led off, like Mansfield Place and Gloucester Place (present day Leighton Road) at right angles to the high road, making literal ‘in-roads’ into the fields, but most were in-filling developments lining the main road, each given a separate name according to the whim of the ground landlord or the year of its construction (
e.g.
‘Trafalgar’). It was then considered quite acceptable to have a street name which changed every few houses up the same roadway, and these old names for the different sections and different sides of what is now all Kentish Town High Street persist on maps till the middle of the nineteenth century. A few fragmented sections of the terraces themselves remain to this day, dwarfed by higher late-Victorian or twentieth-century replacements, their doll-sized upper floors peering out over the top of inappropriate modern shops.

It took a foreigner at that period to define the curious and indeed unique spectacle which the outskirts of London then presented. London was spreading outwards along all its main arteries with an essentially
urban
growth. The fields behind the new terraces might still be as rural as ever, sprinkled with cows and barns, but they were no longer visible to the passing traveller. Instead, he saw rows of pedimented, stuccoed facades as uncompromisingly urban as any in the new planned developments like Bloomsbury or the Cavendish Estate. Yet places like Kentish Town, still improperly paved and lighted and innocent of drainage, were not really part of the town yet; the houses along the main roads were in every sense a facade. Louis Simond, visiting in 1812, perceived that there was something anachronistic about all these new houses, improbable even:

The whole idea, so tenaciously English, of a separate small house for each family, was new to Simond; however his tolerant readiness to accept the virtues of a new way of life which was totally new to him is a marked contrast to the bitter detestation of the suburbs shown by several English writers a generation later. But about one thing he was wrong. He thought that London had already had her major spurt of growth, and would soon reach her maximum size and population level. How wrong he was the rest of this book will show.

Three years after Simond’s visit in 1812, another observer, an Englishman called John White, wrote:

Such pronouncements make odd reading in conjunction with the map of London that developed – and went on and on developing – as the century went by. But there was this much truth in them: the line of the New Road (Euston and Marylebone Road) more or less coincided, perhaps by design, with the ending of London’s ‘Taplow terrace’ of river gravel, which gives way at this point to worse-drained London clay. And the New Road did indeed mark, by the end of the eighteenth century, the limits of the grand building schemes, such as those on the Portland or Portman Estates or in Bloomsbury. It remained a boundary. There were pockets of high-class development north of it: Nash’s terraces all along the edge of Regent’s Park are the obvious example of this. But on the whole developers seem, like John White, to have been of the opinion that ‘here health and comfort require you to stop’. Not, of course, that they actually stopped building, but they didn’t build north of the New Road for the same class of person, and didn’t therefore nurse the same comprehensive schemes.

A piece of minor town planning was the Polygon – later called Clarendon Square – built on land originally part of the St Pancras Manor, subsequently owned by the Charterhouse and then by the Cocks family, one of whom became Lord Sommers or Somers. However, Somers Town (as the area is still called) simply failed to appeal to the sort of occupants for which the Somers family may originally have hoped. As the
Gentleman’s Magazine
put it in 1813, ‘everything seemed to proceed prosperously, when some unforeseen cause occurred, which checked the fervour of building, and many carcasses of houses were sold for less than the value of their materials.’ Later, and in consequence of this débâcle, Somers Town became over-crowded, and rather squalid.

Was the cause really so ‘unforeseen’, or were the administrators of the Somers Estate over-optimistic? Lord Camden’s estate next to it (the old Cantelowes manor lands) does not seem to have made the same error, in that their expectations were all along lower. The early streets of Camden Town on the east of what became the High Street – Pratt Street, Bayham Street, Royal College Street – were laid out not with fine houses but with modest ones: Dickens’s impecunious family lived here when he was a boy. Similarly the early houses on the Southampton (ex-Tottenhall) lands on the western side of Camden Town were described – in the official building leases of 1809 – as ‘third-rate’, and Nash (whose own Regent’s Park development adjoined them) called them ‘mean’. John White called them ‘miserable, modern erections’. It has been suggested that the resolutely lower-middle-class nature which Camden Town seems to have assumed from the first was due to the fact that the leases from ground landlord to builders were only for forty years and this discouraged speculative builders from putting up good class properties, but it is possible that the short lease was a symptom rather than a cause. A short lease would be cheaper to acquire than the 99-year one which had by then become standard in ‘better’ areas, and therefore would attract the smaller builder who would be likely to speculate only in modest runs of houses on a modest scale. The big landlords such as the Southampton and Camden families were not financial fools (that much is quite clear) and if they deemed that an area ‘ripe’ for building was only likely to attract a rather commonplace populace, they would tend (whatever they said in their initial brochures) to try to secure the sort of speculators who were at least
likely
to build in such a place. It was, you may say, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The southern part of St Pancras parish, for so long marginal urban land, was hardly virgin territory. It had numerous water-filled pits, the result of brick-earth diggings. There were the kilns themselves. There were a number of burial grounds and a sprinkling of light industries such as soap-boiling works. These must have combined to make the celebrated wells and the tea-gardens less attractive than they might have been, and certainly seedier than the relatively select establishments up the road in Kentish Town. There were plenty of cow-lairs still, for this area was, with Islington, one of the main milk-producing districts for the metropolis, but on the 1796 map of the district the old names of fields like ‘the Murrells’, ‘Church Field’ and ‘Figs Mead’ have disappeared, to be replaced by ‘Lower Brickfield’, ‘Upper Brickfield’ and ‘Dustground’. Farmer Rhodes and others were engaged in the lucrative business of turning pastures into bricks. It is true that brick-making is an essentially transient industry, which invades an area, despoils it, but then moves on to other fields. Sometimes the land passed straight from meadow to brickfield to acreage of terraced housing (as in Cruikshank’s famous cartoon in
Punch
), but sometimes, when the brick-earth was exhausted, it was allowed to return again to pasture. Much of St Pancras therefore retained for decades a partly-green, partly rural air. Building, in fact, was rather slow, because builders were not over-confident of the area’s potential, and this, paradoxically, helped to keep it more pleasant than it might otherwise have been. The population of St Pancras parish did, however, go from 46,000 in 1811 to almost 72,000 in 1821, over 100,000 in 1831 and almost 130,000 in 1841. But this is looking ahead.

It has been calculated that a good half of London was built by this odd, indeed unique, ‘building lease’ system. The landowner sold leases of parcels of land on the understanding that the lessee of each parcel would build on it a house or houses which, at the expiry of the lease, would become the property of the landlord. The ground rent which the lessee paid to the landlord would normally be only a peppercorn for the first year or two, after which houses might be expected to have been built on it and the amount demanded would increase. But the lessee – the builder – usually had considerable freedom in the way he chose to use his land and thereby offset the amount of the ground rent against his profit in letting or selling the houses. Sometimes, in the more prestigious estates, the ground landlord would lay down rules about the size and general appearance of the houses, since, if the area declined into a slum during the period of the building leases, he would be the loser at the end of it. But this only occurred in comprehensive, planned developments, whereas in St Pancras in the early years of the nineteenth century most building was piecemeal – a terrace here, a line of detached villas there. Many of the speculating builders – and indeed the ground landlords – were, like the builder of Grove Terrace, quite small men, local masons and bricklayers who only ventured a few houses at a time, in the hope of being able to rent them quickly and then, but only then, use the rent to finance a little more cautious building.

In Kentish Town, many of the short terraces fronting or adjacent to the high road, which Bennett listed, were built in this way. Holmes Terrace, for instance, was built by ‘Squire Holmes’, a local farmer, tenant in turn of Farmer Morgan – in fact his descendants are landlords of that piece of Kentish Town property to this day. Evans Place (soon to be renamed Gloucester Place – the high street end of Leighton Road) perpetuates the name of the man who owned the livery stables opposite the Assembly House. Certainly a large number of the inhabitants listed in local censuses in the following generations declare themselves to be ‘owners of house’ or ‘living on rents from property’, and many of these were clearly, judging from their neighbours and from the street they lived in, people in relatively humble circumstances themselves. ‘Owning houses in London’ was not then, nor indeed until the 1950s, the golden nest-egg it subsequently became: it was the security of the more insignificant and cautious classes. The commodity of real value – the land – still remained in most cases vested in a ground landlord who was not the house-owner, and land ownership was very often a matter of luck and chance. Fenimore Cooper, the early nineteenth-century American novelist who was Consul in Switzerland in the 1820s, visited London then and dined with English relatives. These people had, two generations earlier, innocently bought a small property in the vicinity of London to give their children the benefit of country air, but when Cooper visited them he found himself in the midst of streets built upon the property, which were providing the grandson of the original purchaser with an
income
of between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds per annum.

The English ideal home, then as now, was a detached villa, but only a landlord or builder without an eye to the main chance, or else with a very definite expectation of being able to let or sell the finished villas for high amounts, could afford to use land in such a prodigal way. Parts of St John’s Wood and Nash’s Park Villages are the classic surviving examples of building to fulfil an ideal rather than for the immediate profit motive, though no doubt profits were made. Another such area – now almost all rebuilt – was The Grove at Kentish Town Green (opposite Grove Terrace): a solitary double-fronted house of the period remains, shorn of its garden, surrounded by cliffs of flats of both ‘mansion’ and council variety. There is a pleasant early nineteenth-century villa with decorative eves still standing at the corner of Prince of Wales Road opposite the Mother Shipton, and a few more, semi-derelict and spectral, at the junction of Kentish Town and Hawley Road. But most of St Pancras was not developed in this way except where individual landlords built individual dream homes, big or small, for their own habitation. In the places where it did occur the detached nature of the houses was either destroyed by subsequent in-filling (as in Gloucester Place, Leighton Road) or the houses were pulled down later in the century for a continuous terrace to be built – this was the fate of ‘Bellina Villas’, which went up along the newly opened Fortess Road around 1820, but were replaced later in the century by a dreary run of houses, when lower-grade housing swamped that quarter after the coming of the railways.

The typical ribbon-development in St Pancras parish, and indeed all over London, around 1820, was already the terrace. This was the form of building that made most economical use of the land available along a given road-frontage. In fact this peculiarly English type of house, found nowhere else in the world except in places to which the English exported it, is thought to have been due, to a large extent, to the prevailing building-lease system. The road frontage would be divided into narrow but often quite long strips, running back from the roadway at right angles. At the front, each house would occupy the whole of the cramped width, commonly no more than about sixteen feet. The spare space was (and is) all at the back, on land that was no use to the builder because there was no road access to it – at least until another street was planned, parallel with or at right angles to the first. Here the houses, so cramped-looking from the front, could extend into back-additions – which are called that even when the ‘addition’ has not been subsequent to the house’s building but is an integral part of the design. Here were – and are – yards, lawns, vegetable gardens. Even today one terrace house in Leighton Road has a garden of 200 feet, and gardens of 80 or 100 feet are common in the district. Yet houses of this type have, typically, only two or at most three rooms on each floor. The conception is radically different from that of the Continental ‘house’, in reality a substantial tenement block with multiple lodgings grouped around an interior courtyard; its oddity struck Louis Simond and produced a memorable image: ‘The small houses in London are very narrow and high with a number of small storeys, one for eating, one for sleeping, a third for entertaining company, a fourth underground for the kitchen, a fifth right at the top for the servants. The speed, agility and ease with which the whole family hops up and down between these different floors makes me think of a bird-cage with its perches.’

As family homes today, these houses do not fulfil modern concepts of good design: four sets of stairs to service no more than eight or so rooms obviously date from an extinct era when there was no shortage of people to fetch, carry and sweep. But the design is otherwise less inconvenient than outsiders suppose. The numerous separate strata, initially reflecting the socially stratified nature of nineteenth-century life, adapt well to the disparate needs of a modern family, who do not necessarily wish to gather in one large circle round the parlour lamp of an evening, or even round the television set: modern lighting and heating systems render such unity unnecessary. The larger terrace houses have also proved very suitable for multi-occupation, with a separate household to each floor and the stairs (where the lavatories were normally situated anyway) as common territory. Post-war local councils, in their wisdom or folly, have destroyed acre upon acre of such multi-occupied houses in areas like Camden and Kentish Town, in the belief that such ‘shared, substandard accommodation’ was not good enough to be used as homes any longer. It is only now that the errors of such wholesale, high-principled destruction become apparent, when it is observed that the carefully purpose-built accommodation which has replaced these traditional terraces simply lacks, in most cases, the flexibility and privacy which the old houses, whatever their shortcomings, were able to provide. But this is a melancholy theme to which we shall be returning.

Within a very few years of their building, many earlier nineteenth-century terraces fronting main roads were already in fact proving their adaptability; their ground floors were being converted into shops. A number of the Kentish Town terraces Bennett listed in 1821 as being new housing were, within a decade or so, to lose their small front gardens to a ‘front-extension’, with the old front room becoming the back parlour of the shop. You may take this as a sign of England’s overall industrial prosperity and growth of consumer goods during this period, or as a portent of Kentish Town High Street’s decline. Doubtless it was both.