The Fields Beneath (19 page)

Agar Town, and the substantial houses set among lawns and trees in the north of Kentish Town, represented two extremes. Between them, both geographically and socially, lay Camden Town and Kentish Town proper, and quite early in their urbanisation both these areas developed a speckle of local industries. Mann and Sargon's Floor Cloth factory, established on the Camden Road around 1830, and at first regarded as distinguished enough to form a fit subject for a print, was a sign of more to come. By the later half of the century Kentish Town, and in particular west Kentish Town, had metal work shops, suppliers to the building trade, a glass engraving and painting works, numerous laundries and a manufacturer of artificial teeth (in Angler's Lane). Here, and still more in Camden Town to the south, skilled trades predominated: telescopes and other scientific instruments were made in small workshops, but the big trade in the area was the manufactory of pianos and organs.

In the late eighteenth century the Tottenham Court Road area had become a centre for furniture making; when increasing trade and the advance of the town displaced the manufacturers, they moved northwards. They thus found themselves in the Camden Town, Regent's Park, Kentish Town area just at the period when a piano was becoming
the
symbol of home comfort and respectability, and when their trades could readily be applied to this end. At one time there were literally dozens of piano works in the area, some general, some catering to a specialised branch of the manufacture such as key-board construction or french polishing. Burford's Painting Rooms (see page 128) became the Rotunda Organ Factory – and later the scene of one of those disastrous and under-insured fires that characterised the trade. As time went by some factories were even designed as two twin buildings with iron doors in between, so that when one side was gutted business could go on as usual in the other. Derelict or converted factories still abound, standing like extinct beasts against the skyline, as rich in wooden beams as mediaeval tithe barns, and much bigger. Even today, if you ask elderly people in the area what work they or their fathers used to do, the answer is extremely likely to be either ‘worked in a piano factory' or ‘worked on the railways' – both occupations at the more prosperous end of the working class scale. With the exception of Somers Town and Agar Town, much of which had been extinguished by the railways by 1870, no part of the borough, even at its grimiest, ever developed that desperate poverty which came to characterise the East End and parts of south London. The middle-class myth, current between the wars and even up to about 1960, that St Pancras was ‘all slums now' tells one quite a lot about the traditional English obsession with the virtues of rurality and the consequent fear of the ‘dismal city', but very little about the true state of affairs.

The piano-making trade, incidentally, is also said to have been responsible for the very large number of public houses which flourished in Camden and Kentish Town, to the disgust of many middle-class or chapel-going inhabitants. Evidently Bennett's remark (1821) that the provision of public houses was more equitable with the number of the inhabitants than it had been in the past did not remain true for long in the eyes of many. Piano workers had the means to treat themselves to beer, and they also had the excuse that they worked in a hot, dry atmosphere.
The Builder
wrote in 1854:

By a symmetrical twist of fate, this scene was briefly recreated in many streets in the 1960s, when whole sections of west Kentish Town and other similar parts of London were demolished for the then-fashionable ‘comprehensive redevelopment', but the pubs – whose licence-holding demanded that they did not close – were allowed to remain standing, at any rate until a replacement was built. For the second time the ‘palaces', now become rather faded and cavernous, found themselves standing in isolation amid acres of churned mud.

Perhaps one man may represent the many who, in the nineteenth century, moved from a rural setting and modest origins, via industry, to urban wealth, and whose lives thus paralleled the transformation of vast areas of what became London. John Brinsmead was born in north Devon in the year before Waterloo, the son of a farm-worker, but went into the cabinet-making trade. He came to London in 1836, when he was twenty-two, and presently set up a small piano-making business off Tottenham Court Road. By the time he died in 1908 he had been for half his lifetime proprietor of a huge company whose main workshops were in Grafton Road, Kentish Town. He owned a fine house near Regent's Park and, in the phrase of the period, was ‘widely known for unobtrusive philanthropy' as well as being for some years Chairman of the Board of Poor Law Guardians. He had been married for seventy years, and when his wife died a month before he did, the doleful news was successfully kept from him. Clearly, he was born under a lucky star, for his death more or less coincided with the end of the Great Piano Era. Pianolas and other early forms of the gramophone had begun clicking away in drawing rooms; no more fortunes would be made, and after the First World War the piano was swiftly relegated from being the universal prestige object to a symbol of all that was now despised and derided in the Victorian era. The ill-educated and under-employed daughters of clerks and tradesmen, who had thumped their way through five finger exercises in a million stuffy front rooms, now thumped typewriters instead. Keys yellowed, apricot silk panels faded, walnut veneers became cracked and dried. What happened to all the pianos in the end? It is almost impossible to believe that the twentieth century could simply have absorbed and dissolved the vast numbers of pianos produced in the nineteenth, and yet it has apparently done so, just as it has absorbed iron ranges and tin baths and countless gas-light fittings which were a similar essential feature of Victorian terrace housing.

Naturally the traditional rural occupations were not displaced by industrial ones overnight, or even over the course of a decade or two. Until well into the second half of the century Kentish Town retained its coachmen, its gardeners, its cow-keepers, its agricultural labourers. Nevertheless, between the years 1841 (the date of the first effective Census), 1851 and 1861, even in areas that were already built up by the earliest date, some interesting changes are apparent and serve as pointers to the way Kentish Town was going.

From the wealth of unprocessed material the Census returns contain, one can only select a few streets, a few factors, to indicate much. Let us, for example, take Harmood Street, which was at least
there
by 1841: most streets in Kentish Town post-date this. Harmood Street was one of the first side-developments of the Chalk Farm Road (‘Pancras Vale') and thus on the south-western fringe of Kentish Town. John and Mary Harmood owned the field that was here
c.
1800 on a lease from the manor of Tottenhall. When it was built during the 1830s, first one side and then the other, fields separated it from the Kentish Town Road and nursery gardens stretched towards Haverstock Hill on the north. The houses in it were – and are – extremely small, the two-up, two-down-and-a-wash-house variety, with tiny back gardens. The presence of quite a number of large old fruit trees in the gardens even today suggests that the land was in use as an orchard immediately before being built upon. They can never have been intended as true middle-class dwellings; nevertheless they must have been, originally, extremely pleasant places to live in.

In 1841, by which time Harmood Street had forty houses, it had 251 inhabitants. Among heads of households, the largest group of all was those of ‘independent means' – some sixteen people and their families; clearly Kentish Town was still a place to which to retire and live out your days modestly on your modest savings. There were eight clerks; five people employed in various capacities on the railway, which had then newly arrived in Camden Town, just down the road; a surveyor and a builder. The rest of the population represented a fair cross-section of the skilled lower-middle, upper-working class of that date: there was a coach-builder, three printers, two binders, an engraver, a milliner, a carpenter, a gardener, two carver-gilders, a tailor, a schoolmaster, a surgeon and several shopkeepers. There was a ‘music student', an engineer, a ‘merchant', two governesses but only one laundress. In an adjacent cottage was a blacksmith.

By 1851 the picture had changed somewhat. The street was becoming surrounded by others, both on the Southampton Estate to the northeast and the Hawley-Bucks Estate to the south. There were now double the number of houses in Harmood Street itself – eighty-two to be exact, including a pub and a few shops – but the number of inhabitants had more than doubled, from 251 to 561. In other words the average number of people per house had gone up from six – already quite a lot in a four-roomed house – to seven. But the most noticeable thing is that many more professions are listed, since more of the wives were employed than had formerly been the case, and more of the houses were in multi-occupation. One house actually contained a ‘solicitor's managing clerk' (a frequent claim in Census records), his wife and five children (fortunately small), a railway messenger, a monthly nurse and – at any rate on the night of the Census – a casual lodger whose name was unknown. One must assume that the clerk and his family, having fallen on hard times, had let two rooms out of the four, and that the railway messenger and the ‘monthly nurse' were their lodgers. I also suspect from the unnaturally frequent appearance of ‘monthly nurse' on the Census records, here and elsewhere, that the term was in fact a common euphemism for an even older profession and that the nameless lodger was therefore one of her clients.

To be fair, not all households showed such signs of social decline. There were still twenty-four people variously described as being of independent means, though this represents, proportionally, a considerable drop on the previous decade. There was a sprinkling of artist-engravers (a genteel form of sweated labour at the period), governesses, a landscape artist, a ‘portrait painter in oil' (his sisters went in for landscapes and modelling in clay), and a missionary. There was even a ‘ladies seminary' run by the wife of a surveyor: it had four pupils. Out of eight laundresses, four were in the same household and three of these were teenage girls; there was also a ‘wife who takes in mangling' (shades of the
Punch
writer's ‘patent mangles to let') and quite a few ‘dressmakers' or ‘needleworkers' with both husbands and children to occupy their time in addition. There was even an ‘artistic florist' aged eleven. Few households kept a living-in servant. No less than thirty-two people were now employed in some way on the railway, either building it or running it, and there were half a dozen piano-makers. There was also a person exercising the new art of daguerrotypes.

By 1861, by which time west Kentish Town was largely covered in houses, the number of houses in Harmood Street was still eighty-two but the population had gone up again, not spectacularly but slightly, to 578. The number of persons of independent means had gone down to nine; two of these were pensioners and two were visitors not normally living in the street. In other ways also the composition of the street appears more working-class, not dramatically but significantly. There are proportionately fewer clerks, and rather more people of unequivocally humble station in life, such as a coal porter, bootmakers, a dealer in earthenware toys and a widowed mother and daughter who made baby-linen. There were now four photographers, a typical living-by-your-wits trade. The artists, engravers and governesses seem largely to have abandoned the place, and indeed few of the tenants of ten years previously were still in occupation. Evidently Harmood Street was a place for people on the way up – or the way down. There are actually rather more children listed as ‘scholars' than there had been in 1851, but presumably this reflects the general increase in school-going in all classes but the poorest at that period, rather than a local social fluctuation.

For comparison, let us look at Gloucester Place – the High Street end of what later came to be called Leighton Road. Older than Harmood Street, it participated in some of the piecemeal villa development that made Kentish Town attractive in the early years of the century. The map of 1796 shows a footpath following the line of it alongside the bowling green and paddock belonging to the Assembly House, to a stile and to a further path leading across the fields to Islington. There were no houses as yet. By 1804, however, the path had been widened and paved as far as the stile and was dignified with the name ‘Evans Place'. The ground landlord of this whole slice of land, running back from the Assembly House towards Maiden Lane, was a gentleman with the exotic name of Joshua Prole Torriano, who was nevertheless a descendant of a perfectly English soap-maker called Cox. He is remembered in Torriano Avenue up the road, built rather later in the century. The land on the north side – the public house land, that is – seems to have been early sold off in small freehold lots, whose purchasers built houses for their own occupation, and the houses on it are freehold to this day. Several of the houses were large enough to have stables, but those have disappeared, swept away either by the construction of Leverton Street on the north post-1850 or by the advent of the Midland Railway on the south in the 1860s. One substantial one remains, built as a large single family house, its porch graced by delicate ionic columns: later in the century it was divided into two houses and another, more ordinary porch was added at one side. But before this occurred the decent garden space between it and its original next-door neighbour had already been filled by a small double-fronted house standing on a plinth with the air of a doll's house, needing only a brass hook on one side to complete the illusion.