The Fields Beneath (22 page)

There was a good deal of opposition to the Midland Railway Extension to London Bill when it came before Parliament in 1864. The days of total
laissez faire
over expropriation had already passed, and, as already mentioned, the company had to spend a substantial amount in compensation, as well as £12,500 for a new church in Oseney Crescent on the Christ Church Estate, designed by Basil Champneys, to replace the old St Luke's demolished with Agar Town. (It was the new St Luke's that Mr Pike objected to.) The Bill was opposed by the Great Northern Railway Company, the North London Railway Company, the newly-formed Metropolitan Board of Works, St Pancras vestry, the Regent and Grand Junction Canal Companies, and the Imperial Gaslight and Coke Company whose gas works had been on the St Pancras site since 1822. It is, however, obvious that most of these, except the vestry, were opposing the Bill not out of any high-minded concern for the amenities of Kentish Town but out of self-interest: in any case the Bill was eventually passed.

In 1864 the fields of Harrison's estate were mown for the last time. The railway workings began, and continued through 1865 and 1866, though with some setbacks. The first contractor turned out to be undercapitalised and had to be replaced; relations with the St Pancras vestry were not easy and a bond of £15,000 had to be entered into to indemnify them for possible damage to the Fleet sewer. Indeed the cholera epidemic which occurred in the district in 1866 was widely believed to be due to disturbance of the Fleet in its bed of long-lying filth. In the spring and early summer of the year Agar Town and a large chunk of Somers Town disappeared, and the crowding of their population into the northern parts of the parish (‘the poor are displaced, but they are not removed') may have had as much to do with the outbreaks of fever as any sewer. A special team was organised by the Medical Officer of Health, who visited 7,000 families in St Pancras parish and found their ‘sanitary arrangements were mostly defective'. Many cases reported were probably due to simple dysentery rather than cholera, but several hundred died including the MOH himself. The sewers were sluiced with disinfectants – then a relatively new discovery – and the Metropolitan Board of Works took the opportunity to insist that the Fleet should be cased in iron pipes for the whole of its underground journey. Although these facts are usually quoted as evidence for the insalubrious state of London in the mid-century, they are equally a witness to the gradual rise in standards of public health that had been going on. A hundred years earlier, outbreaks of ‘low fever', with deaths, hardly occasioned comment.

Agitation about the waste-disposal arrangements of the vastly expanding metropolis had in any case been going on for over a decade, ever since the major cholera epidemic of 1849, which was generally attributed – probably correctly – to underfloor cess pits. A lot of main sewers had already been laid in the 1850s, though connection to them was voluntary; house-owners paid a sum of money for a connecting drain usually shared with a neighbour. The summer of 1858, with a phenomenally low rainfall, had brought the Great Stink, when the Houses of Parliament found the smell rising from the river Thames – still the common drain for London – almost intolerable. The newspapers of the late 1850s and 1860s are full of discussion on the subject of drains, some people upholding Edwin Chadwick's idea that a comprehensive waterborne sewage system was the only solution for London (and much cheaper in the long run than paying men to empty cess-pools) while others held fast to the belief that such a system would inevitably end by contaminating the drinking water.

Under the sheer pressure of numbers, the social organisation was, of necessity, changing in these years: old parishes like St Pancras were soon to be scissored up into smaller, densely populated parcels, old landmarks were every month being lost. Between 1851 and 1871, the population of St Pancras rose from 166,000 to 221,000. Half way through this period the population of Kentish Town alone was given as 23,000. The old village was all but drowned in a flood of anonymous urbanness, yet through this anonymity a new identity as an urban district was struggling.

The newspapers, particularly the local ones, reflect all this seething growth, but in an inevitably dazed and myopic way. Thus the momentous coming of the railway yards to Kentish Town appears in the
Camden and Kentish Towns Gazette
only as a series of querulous details: new, poor people, it was complained, were crowding into Kentish Town; the railway workings attracted ‘riff-raff' and spawned illegitimate babies, some of whom were subsequently to be found dead at the bottom of cuttings or abandoned in convenient railway carriages – the classic no man's land of the late Victorian novel. There were complaints that the noise of the new line was scaring horses in Camden Road (under which the line ran), and an intermittent grumble about lost footpaths and inadequate compensation. The footpath question was in fact debated by the vestry in November 1867, and one could wish they had taken the matter further. Present day Carkers Lane, a dank inlet between two factories on the Highgate Road opposite College Lane entrance, is the rump of a once respectable and useful right-of-way that crossed the fields there in the direction of Hampstead, passing near the Gospel Oak itself. An early plan for the Lismore Circus development allowed for its inclusion and development into a road, but this seems to have been conveniently forgotten by the Midland Railway when the time came.

The Company also suppressed the traditional Gospel Oak Easter Fair, and indeed probably did for the actual Gospel Oak, though a certain mystery surrounds this venerable tree. Various claims have been made for it – there is evidently something about oak trees which makes people lose their sense of the probable – and a motley and fundamentally unlikely selection of people are reported to have preached under it, starting with St Augustine (
c.
590) and going on to Wycliffe, Wesley and Whitefield (of Whitefield's Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road). You might well think there would be local consternation when the actual day came for its removal, but in fact the ending of the oak fades into imprecision. On a detailed map of 1834 it is shown very clearly lying near the present Southampton Road (the borough boundary with Hampstead), approximately on the site of the present-day Wendlings Council blocks. Yet the development plan for the Lismore Estate (
c.
1850) shows it inked in and labelled considerably farther east, in the middle of the present railway land. Had its very existence, by that time, become a matter of myth and romantic conjecture rather than of existential fact? If so, that seems in itself a measure of how far events, unchecked by any responsible overall plan, were overtaking the inner suburbs by the middle decades of the century. Little wonder that, by the 1870s, reminiscences from ‘An Old Inhabitant' and ‘Glimpses of the Past' had become a regular feature of local papers: local history was by then acquiring the appeal of the fairy tale. References to cow-keepers and hay-fields took on a mythic, visionary quality. The phrase ‘railway milk' (which meant milk brought by the new trains and stored in the new refrigeration depots) was spoken with meaning: in practice, it was probably more healthy than milk from cows kept in confined city quarters, but it was regarded as being in some high moral way less desirable. In the same way the new public houses, traditionally stigmatised as ‘gin palaces' though the days of ferocious gin-drinking were then past, were regarded as less moral than the old inns had been. Even the ancient ‘dwellings of the labouring poor', the huddles of wooden shacks that pre-dated the new streets, were seen, once they had been swept away, with a sentimental eye. The squalidly rural Camden Town dwelling of the chimney sweep in
Dombey and Son
seems regretted by Dickens once it had ‘vanished from the earth'. The sweep now lived in ‘a stuccoed house three storeys high, and gave himself out, with golden flourishes upon a varnished board, as contractor for the cleansing of railway chimneys by machinery'.

The railways may not have exactly brought the new commercial style, but they typified it. The correspondent who wrote to the
Gazette
in February 1868, the year St Pancras station was finally opened, hit more than one nail on the head. He complained about the new advertisements on the railway arches in Kentish Town Road (the viaduct of the North London Railway) and went on ‘it is most unjust … that these great companies should be allowed to disfigure our neighbourhood in this wanton manner. What a storm there would be if a railway company were to attempt to carry a line of arches over Belgravia!'

What indeed. But Kentish Town was not Belgravia, and the proliferation of railways had now ensured that it would never become so. Indeed if all the railways proposed during the boom year of 1863 had actually been built, virtually the whole of the district, the east side as well as the west, would have disappeared under rails and heaps of cinders! There was even a line suggested to Highgate Cemetery, like the Necropolis Company's private line from Westminster Bridge Road to Brookwood in south London.

It seems that the effect of the new acreage of shunting yards on the houses in Highgate Road, and on the terraces off it like Mortimer Terrace and Prospect Place, must have been similar to one of those Victorian scrap books where different pictures are stuck next to one another to create a composite but often ill-matched landscape. One year, the people in the good-class terraces and large, select villas on the west of Highgate Road looked out at the back on fields, hedgerows and elm trees with a clear view towards Hampstead. Two or three years later the frontage of the houses was just the same, the road was just the same – but the back-land had become a landscape of shunting trains. Prospect Place now had a prospect of coal bays. Pleasant Place was a travesty of its name. Except where actual garden space was lost, no one compensated the inhabitants for this grim transformation in their habitat, but it is clear that the bottom fell out of the property market in this particular area. For instance, throughout 1867 and 1868 a big house was interminably advertised in the local paper as being to let for £50 per annum (a price above the mean level, but suspiciously cheap by upper-middle-class standards). It was described as having ten rooms and a conservatory and as being ‘three minutes from the Bull and Gate', where the omnibuses stopped – a fulsome phrase which obscured the fact that this placed it squarely in the railway-blighted area, but evidently did not obscure the fact enough to tempt any tenant. Later, the price was reduced further. By the end of 1868 tactics had changed, and similar large houses in the neighbourhood were being advertised with the proximity of the railway as an inducement to purchase: it was suggested that their site would shortly be needed for yet more railways, and that therefore they represented an investment.
*
But it was not to be. That year, the North London availed themselves of some of the Midland's land to insert a branch-line to Tottenham which crossed Highgate Road. It carried away with it the playground of Southampton House Academy and St John's Park House opposite, but did not involve much demolition of houses. Highgate Cemetery never got its necropolis line, perhaps because it would have had to cross the land of Angela Burdett-Coutts. The railway had come, had done its worst and then swept on, cutting off streets and lanes leaving behind a permanent legacy of smuts, fumes, noise, vibration, but leaving also houses, gardens, people stranded in its wake.

Those who could, obviously moved out. Ford Madox Brown the painter left Fortess Terrace in 1866. Comparison of Censuses for the Highgate Road area in 1861 and 1871 is instructive. In Lower and Upper Craven Place and Francis Terrace, ascending the Highgate Road, people with several servants lived in 1861, including two doctors with resident apprentices. There was another doctor in Bridge House opposite. There were the ubiquitous small academies. Further up, in Fitzroy Terrace, was the entrance to a remarkable late example of the pleasure garden – Weston's Retreat. Mr Weston only opened the place at about that time, converting his own garden and gradually adding grottoes, fountains and cascades; he advertised firework displays, the traditional balloon ascents and other delights, all readily accessible by omnibus from central London. He claimed that his gardens covered seven acres and were lit by 100,000 gas jets, neither of which is believable. The vestry, who had at first been opposed to his venture on the grounds that it opened on Sundays, later commended him for keeping ‘howling cads' out of his premises, but this did not save his Retreat. The whole chimera was swept away by the railway within five years, so Mr Weston may have been a compensation-hunter; but, if so, he was not a successful one: the newspaper of 1868 records his bankruptcy, by which time he was working as chairman at the Bedford Music Hall, Camden Town. Fittingly, several years later Weston's house was being lived in by a Mr Wedderburn, Railway Superintendent.

The overall picture in 1871 is of a far greater number of houses in multi-occupation than before. Some, as you would expect, retained middle-class tenants, but others had become crowded: that is, the social mix was now considerable. For instance, at 53 Highgate Road were living, in 1871, a coachman, his wife and four sons, all of whom, down to the six year old, were listed as ‘locomotive cleaners'. An engine fitter, his wife and son lived in the same house. Further up again, at 103, a cow-keeper still lived, but in the houses on either side of him were engine-fitters. In 109, a substantial Georgian house whose three-storey bay at the back had previously commanded a fine view to Hampstead, lived a widow of forty-five and one servant. Next door lived a sixty-one-year-old comedian and his family. Further north again, in the section of the road formerly known as ‘Green Street', which was particularly badly blighted, the social decline was more pronounced. Labourers, charwomen, hawkers of china and many other ephemeral trades of the Victorian era, had moved in. And this, it should be remembered, was less than five years after the railway's establishment. I suspect that the Census for 1881 may show a more pronounced decline and a progressive thinning of the numbers of middle-class tenants still hanging on, but at the time of writing (1976) that Census is not yet available to be consulted. By law, one hundred years has to elapse before the possibly scandalous secrets of people's domestic arrangements may be casually exposed.