The Fields Beneath (21 page)

It is, in fact, a moot point whether the coming of the railways blighted the areas through which they passed, or whether the railway companies had a marked tendency to select routes through areas which already had little prestige or value. Obviously it was easier for railway companies, both financially and in terms of appeasing public opinion, to route a line through west Kentish Town or to efface Agar Town with a main line station, than it would have been to take a line through St John's Wood or to build a station on Regent's Park. Significantly, when the Midland Railway had to put their line through Belsize Park in the 1860s, they buried it in a tunnel. The lie of the land is relevant too, but several engineers at the time specifically advocated choosing the cheapest route even if it did not necessarily offer the most direct access to the desired point. In
The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities
, Kellet comes to the conclusion that the pattern of the railway, as it evolved, was subordinate to estate holdings and land values: the presence of three major termini in a row (four, if you count Marylebone) all sitting along the Marylebone–Euston Road and glaring at the select Bedford and Portland Estates to the south, is testimony to the ultimate power of money and prestige to keep undesirable things at bay.

Nevertheless, one can think of a number of instances where an apparently salubrious neighbourhood was, seemingly, ‘spoilt' by the railway: one half of Nash's Park Village East was demolished to accommodate the London and Birmingham line only a generation after the houses had been built. And there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence that people in an area like west Kentish Town did see the railway as a despoiler – as well they might, since it was carried through the already-built area in the 1850s, on a viaduct, rooftop high. The Governesses' Institution, for instance, which had been established in Scottish baronial grandeur in the newly-developed Prince of Wales Road in 1849, as an ‘asylum' for aged and infirm governesses, found by 1865 that ‘the increasing encroachment of the railways, disturbing this once peaceful home with shrill shrieks at all hours of the day and often of the night, besides shutting out the access of the sweet air that used to come from Hampstead and Highgate, has caused the removal of the old ladies to be seriously contemplated.' (Removed they were, in the early 1870s, to a place further out; the building became Miss Buss's North London Collegiate School. Later it was inherited by her sister-school, the Camden School for Girls, and today is part of the senior school of St Richard of Chichester's RC school.)

Probably the truth about the effect of land on the railways or railways on the land is to be found in a complex interaction between reality and perceived expectations: a district might be – as so much of Kentish Town was pre-1850 – perfectly respectable and pleasant, yet lack that cachet of smartness, that upper-middle-class character which would ensure for it special consideration. So it would be claimed as a ‘third rate district' and a railway or railways would be put through it – which, of course, had the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gospel Oak is a case in point. It had always been a rather inaccessible spot, isolated from both Hampstead and Kentish Town, away from the main roads. There was, in theory, no reason why it should not have been laid out handsomely. But the various small landlords were evidently unable to get together and agree on such a project, and meanwhile the first railway came and placed its seal on the place. Ten years later no one had yet bothered to build a proper carriageway from Highgate Road, and its remoteness, instead of being rural, was becoming squalid. In 1867 Lismore Circus, planned years before, was still a ‘mud island', and a letter to the local newspaper the same year complains of ‘the dank, pot-holed state of the roadway lying at the back of Oak Village … we are completely isolated from the civilised world. Vehicles can only approach our dwellings by a long and roundabout detour.' The letter went on to speak of garbage, puddles of dirty water, dead dogs and squads of children playing in the street – the mark of a poor area, even today. Another letter from a different correspondent, later the same year, complained that the dispossessed poor of Agar Town, then newly demolished to make way for St Pancras Station, ‘are crowding, and lowering in character, the once-promising locality springing up known as ‘Oak Village'.

It appears to be true – though it would take a lot of comparative work with different Censuses to prove it – that many of those who settled in the greyly-expanding areas of north Kentish Town in the 1850s and 1860s did indeed come from the districts nearer the centre of London which had been disrupted by the railway: Euston had been built in the early 1840s (the line in the late 1830s ended at Camden Town), King's Cross in 1852; St Pancras followed in 1868. Certainly, by the beginning of the 1860s, the demolition and destruction caused by the railway companies, which a previous generation had been inclined to regard complacently as a form of desirable ‘slum-clearance', had become something of an open scandal. Lord Derby declared in an impassioned speech to Parliament in 1861: ‘The Poor are displaced, but they are not removed, they are shovelled out of one side of the parish only to render still more over-crowded the stifling apartments in another part.' Professor Dyos has calculated that between 1859 and 1867 alone, 38,000 people were displaced in London by the railways.

Whether the coming of the railways simply exaggerated and made patent a social decline already insidiously overtaking Kentish Town, or whether it was
the
important factor in the transformation from semi-rural village to urban semi-slum, their ultimate physical effect on the geography of the area is indisputable. For a railway, particularly one on a viaduct but even to some extent in a cutting, is a physical barrier in a way that a road is not: it cuts off streets, truncates estate patterns, and even where there are arches under which people and vehicles pass it constitutes a visual barrier. Thackeray, writing in 1860, ingeniously used this image of the railway barrier to symbolise the barrier between past and present which the coming of the railways effectively raised: indeed it would be hard to overestimate the enormous change experienced by people, like Thackeray or Dickens, who were born in the fifteen-miles-an-hour stage-coach era and who lived on into a time when long journeys between, say, London and Liverpool, took the same amount of time as they do today: ‘Your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and to the old one … They have raised those railroad embankments up, and shut off the old world that was behind them. Climb up that bank on which the irons are laid, and look to the other side – it is gone' (Thackeray, quoted by Richard Altick in
Victorian People and Ideas
).

A literal taste of what Thackeray meant can still be obtained today down by St Pancras Old Church. If you approach it from the west, it stands on its grassy knoll just as it has for centuries, an unchanging island in a world that has transformed itself not once but several times. But mount the knoll and cross it – on the far side, instead of a vista of cows and trees, another hillock rears up, a railway viaduct, and beyond it one of those
terrains vagues
that are the curse of railways: a wilderness of derelict goods yards, a disused canal, gas works, the rear of London's most exotic station.

Such wildernesses were another reason for the railways' disruptive effect on a neighbourhood. For railway land is not flexible or piecemeal. Unlike the mews, garages, tram depots, bus yards and the like generated by road traffic, the ancillary services for a railway line cannot be scattered about. The shunting yards, goods yards, workshops, loco sheds, coaling bays etc. had to be grouped together, usually on large wedges of land which previously might have been open field crossed by footpaths, but which then by virtue of their new use became inaccessible to the general public and invisible behind high walls of sooty pink brick. Moreover these wedges of land were often larger than was strictly necessary, even in the heyday of steam trains, since, by the middle of the century, companies had adopted the policy of buying up more land than they immediately needed, to be on the safe side. The results of this policy were sometimes curious. In Kentish Town, until very recently, there existed a small copse and part of a field in a totally untouched state, appearing much as it must have over a hundred years earlier. This was because the railway company concerned – the North London Line, Tottenham branch – had acquired a large segment of land behind College Lane in the 1860s (the old Green Street race fields of eighteenth-century days) but in the end had only used a part of it, for sheds and a railway hostel. The rest had remained untouched, wood violets and all, except for generations of marauding local children, delighting in its wildness. All in all, by the end of the nineteenth century, in that part of London which lies north of the Euston Road, over three hundred acres of land had disappeared into the hands of the railway companies, including most of the old manor of St Pancras, a large slice of northern Kentish Town and a similarly extensive chunk of northern Camden Town – Chalk Farm.

The distorting effect of this on local communications, and indeed the whole shape of districts, is considerable. The railway dominates Kentish Town today like an unseen presence, for the wedge of railway land north of Holmes Road and west of the Highgate Road is far larger than most people living in the area realise. They are so accustomed to making detours around it that it does not, for instance, strike them as odd that there is no proper route westwards from the High Street but Prince of Wales Road in the south and Gordon House Road in the north on the fringe of Parliament Hill. But viewed from a passing train, or from the top of one of Kentish Town's few tower blocks (Monmouth House, Raglan Street, for instance) the scene comes into perspective – a swathe of open but inaccessible land half a mile wide and nearly a mile long, much of it now derelict and empty. This was the land which, in the early 1860s, fell into the hands of the Midland, who were bringing their main line through to the projected new station at St Pancras and were looking for a suitable site for their workshops.

Their first choice was St Pancras Old Church and graveyard, which they confidently attempted to purchase. But public concern for ancient monuments was beginning sluggishly to assert itself by the 1860s and the church was denied to the Midland Company; they were, however, allowed to buy much of the eastern portion of the graveyard (i.e. most of what had been the original graveyard). It was supposed that a tunnel 12 feet deep would avoid disturbing any graves, but so much had the height of the ground risen with burials in it over the centuries that bodies were found to lie at that level. A cut-and-cover method, with removal of coffins, was therefore adopted. It was done in considerable haste, at night and behind screens – the young architect Thomas Hardy was one of those present, and was perturbed by the manner of its doing. A much later poem of his is based on that youthful experience.

Mr Agar's old house, where tea parties had been given on the lawns earlier in the century, became railway offices. Agar Town itself was wiped out. But, balked of the amount of space it needed for all its ancillary services, the Midland turned their eyes to the area further to the north, and the first bit of open ground they found was this Kentish Town wedge behind Highgate Road – the estate of a Mr Harrison, descendant of the farming and brick-making family. Indeed the land was said to have been used for brick-making and gravel-digging earlier in the century, and to be rather low-lying and marshy in consequence. Two tributaries of the Fleet ran through it, and there were watercress beds where the streams converged, just north of the present junction of Holmes Road and Spring Place. (To deal with this, clay spoil from the diggings further south in Camden Town was later dumped there – a good example of the indestructibility of matter. Is
that
where the pulverised fragments of the old manor houses finally went?) It was also quite expensive: out of the £35,000 the Midland had to pay out in compensation to various parties for their extension to London, £20,000 was spent just on acquiring Harrison's estate. But presumably the Company reckoned this still came cheaper than buying up a comparable acreage of houses – the only other alternative.

The coming of the Midland after 1864 really constitutes the invasion of Kentish Town by the railway. The London and Birmingham Line into Euston constructed in two stages during the 1830s and 1840s convulsed Camden Town, but did not touch the older suburb up the road; nor did the construction of the Great Northern Line across the fringe of Islington to King's Cross in the early 1850s, though this greatly altered the southern part of St Pancras Borough. Even the extending of the North London Line (‘Hampstead Junction Railway') in the late 1850s did not at first seem to threaten great changes for the area, since much of the track north of Prince of Wales Road and the Governesses' Asylum at first ran through open fields. A disastrous railway accident that took place on the line in 1861 occurred in this open terrain: a crashed train fell off the viaduct, but onto open land, not houses as it would have further south. In any case the new branch line to Hampstead was an amenity for the area, opening new possibilities for commuting to the City and for day-excursions to places as daringly distant as Richmond. A school teacher on a working trip to London at that period was enchanted with this new means of getting about – ‘making my way to the Railway Station, from there I soon was carried along by that large Tea Kettle called An Engine to Camden Town …' (from an unpublished MS diary). But the Midland, because of the size and central nature of its invasion, was another matter. Kentish Town was once again filling its historic role as a place on a great route north – but the new road was not stone but iron, and the buildings it brought in its wake were not inns and hunting lodges but ‘quite a little town in itself, with offices, dwellings, workshops, stables etc.' – in the words of a fulsome Midland Railway circular to shareholders.