The Fields Beneath (28 page)

It was not till the Second World War was on the way to being won that the Brave New World machine really got into gear, and, in doing so, gradually altered and expanded the concept of ‘slum clearance’ far beyond anything that early improvers could have foreseen or intended. By then, highly permissive legislation existed to enable councils to acquire properties by compulsory purchase in order to carry out ‘improvements’. What the legislators did not realise, what indeed no one realised, was the extent to which this power would presently be abused by councils to carry out grandiose schemes that owed more indeed to the visions of le Corbusier than to the real needs and wants of the population of urban areas.

Among the generation of town planners who entered the profession after the War, ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ was considered, for ideological reasons, the only proper approach. Many of these planners are still with us, disillusioned and nervous men in middle age who are yet – as one of them said to me – ‘too old dogs to learn new tricks’. A moral prejudice is the hardest thing to replace, and highly moral was what the planners of the 1950s and 1960s did indeed believe they were being when they destroyed the very street patterns in the name of progress, unnecessarily jettisoning the architecture of the past wholesale as if only by that method could they jettison the social evils of the past as well. It was a classic example of throwing the baby out with the bath-water, or of a ritualised gesture disguised in a gloss of rationalisation.

What no one admitted till well into the 1960s, when whole communities had already been destroyed in London and elsewhere and large tracts of once-living urban landscape had been turned into deserts of windy concrete towers set on useless doylies of ownerless grass, was that ‘slum’ is almost entirely a relative concept, and that much so-called ‘slum clearance’ has been no more than a form of conspicuous consumption and political self-advertisement. Most of the true, irredeemable slums of London had already gone by the mid-1950s, but by then the machinery of slum clearance was so well established as a part of the local authority apparat that, like a blind monster, it went nosing round for more. And of course it found them, for there is nothing like announcing that a certain street or district
will
be demolished under some future slum-clearance scheme to ensure that its fabric and social status have indeed deteriorated by the time the bulldozers arrive, perhaps years later. Private tenants will have sold up and left, landlords will have ceased to do repairs, no grants will have been forthcoming for improvements. A once self-respecting and thriving community will have become an area of sheet iron screens, vandalised windows, squatters, refuse and scrawled slogans. Lo, a slum has been created, a prophecy has fulfilled itself. Planning-blight has been to the mid-twentieth century what bad speculative building was to the nineteenth, but at least the Councillor Agars of that time did not make sanctimonious remarks about the virtue of their activities.

How did Kentish Town fare in this situation? The answer is, much better than some places, but that is not saying much. Fortunately in the 1930s, when slum clearance began to be adopted as a Labour Party crusade, Kentish Town was not quite poor enough to attract great attention, in view of the limited funds available in that unprosperous time. But at the end of the Second World War all the signs were that the Borough of St Pancras was about to enjoy the attentions of Brave New Worlders in no uncertain way. The County of London Plan (1944) specifically labelled Kentish Town ‘an area in need of removal’. It was, according to the planners, ‘an inchoate community … peppered with small industries.’ What the prevailing opinion of the time did not allow is that the presence of industry was a sign not of sickness but of a viable community. In any case most of the small industries of the area were not (and are not) of a type that create excessive noise or smell. The remnants of the piano trade lingered on, the many mews, empty of horses, were being taken over by branches of the motor repairing business. The ugly building fronting Highgate Road (site of the entrance to Weston’s Retreat) was a lino factory, and the nooks and corners of the old streets contained many small workshops that made envelopes, boxes, wire gadgets, toys, patent medicines. Since then, with the coming of the Greek Cypriot community in the 1950s, minor branches of the rag-trade have moved in, often into parts of the large factories from which the tide of piano-making had steadily retreated. Small industries in which local people can find work near their homes have been an essential part of inner London districts, ever since they assumed their metropolitan identity. To apply to them the same criteria that one applies to suburbs built purely as residential quarters, is inappropriate. Yet ‘zoning’ – industry here, living space there – without flexibility or regard for preexisting situations was one of the basic concepts of the County of London plan, and one that still lingers, destroying jobs and bedevilling planning applications. Ironically it led, by the 1960s, to a certain amount of destruction in Kentish Town of existing homes, particularly in the Holmes Road area, on the grounds that they were in an area ‘zoned as industrial’.

The Plan of 1944 was on a grand scale and, like all such spectacular exercises it contained ideas which would have been good ones – if other considerations could have been discounted. The best idea was a farsighted scheme for co-ordinating the main-line, suburban and tube railways in a more rational manner, something of which London is still, today, in considerable need. Had this project been carried through, Kentish Town railway station and Kentish Town tube station would no longer be sitting absurdly side by side opposite the Assembly House with no connection between them. The North London railway line would have been put underground for most of its length, and would in effect have become a branch of the Underground corresponding physically to the District Line and appearing on the Underground map. (Instead it is today the ‘Secret Railway’, a line of few trains, semi-derelict, and only kept open at all through constant agitation by the parents of children who use it as a cross-route to various schools within the borough.) The other great obsession of the 1944 Plan was the need for new ringway roads through London, a subject that has been furiously debated ever since. GLC road planners of recent years, locked in perpetual battle with militant residents’ associations, must have thought with wistful nostalgia of the days when their predecessors could airily announce that the Euston Road ‘would’ become part of the A Ring Road while the B Ring ‘would’ cut across Camden Town. Also proposed was a ‘Parkway’ connecting Primrose Hill with Parliament Hill, and a new ‘green lung’ between Camden Road and Agar Grove. Such ideas are of the kind which sound attractive on first hearing, but which, on analysis, prove to be based on the belief that the ideal human habitat is Welwyn Garden City and that urban habitats of a totally different order should be altered to conform as far as possible to this ideal, and that the urban areas through which these parkways, lung etc. would be carved were somehow non-areas that did not count. Both these misconceptions dominated town planning for the next twenty-five years and are not extinct today. Even in the early 1970s Camden Council (which superseded St Pancras Borough Council with the GLC reorganisation in 1966) were still demolishing streets of houses to create ‘green spaces’ (sacred phrase!) often in places where they were not particularly useful or where the surrounding traffic management schemes had rendered the roads too dangerous for children or elderly people (the chief users of gardens) to cross. A classic example of this type of planning misjudgement will be found adjacent to Hawley Road.

Confronted with this Plan, St Pancras Borough seems to have felt a vague unease, a conflict between the idea that anything so splendidly forward-looking must be applauded and the lurking suspicion that they did not actually want a higher authority to try to turn them into Welwyn Garden City – a project which even the most sanguine of them must have suspected was doomed to failure. The good qualities of an urban environment as a place to live, work and play are quite other than the good qualities of a garden suburb, and if you attempt to change the town habitat too drastically you risk losing its essential qualities without gaining those of another type of place. But it was not till 1962 that an American, Jane Jacobs, wrote
The Death and Life of American Cities
, suggesting what large numbers of humbler people like Montagu Slater and the local shop-keepers had known all along: that an environment of streets and alleys can be a friendly one, catering adequately for most of the needs of the inhabitants. The Plan contained a sop-sentence or two about ‘retaining and encouraging the life of the communities’, but there was no suggestion how, in the presence of the new bisecting road schemes, this was to be achieved. The response of the Borough Council was to shuffle their feet and suggest ‘various modifications’ – including the abolition of the ‘green lung’ and the shifting of the B Ring Road out of the heart of Camden Town to the southern part of Kentish Town, an area where it long lurked in spirit. (Indeed this phantom road, resurrected by the GLC in the 1960s as the Motorway Box, effectively blighted for years the prospects of the streets in its neighbourhood – Jeffries Street, Ivor Street, the tops of Camden Street, Royal College Street and St Pancras Way, one of the oldest and most architecturally homogeneous corners of the district. At least the question mark over their future in the 1950s and 1960s saved these streets from being demolished for a new estate.) In the catalogue to an exhibition of its own in 1947, entitled ‘St Pancras of the Future’, the Council stated: ‘It will be seen that, if it is possible to carry out the provisions of the County of London Plan, St Pancras tomorrow will differ widely in appearance from St Pancras today and offer better amenities to its inhabitants. It is for us, as citizens of London and residents and workers in St Pancras, to help to turn the proposals into realities.’

The same booklet contained the information that in 1939 (the last years for which figures were available) almost half the houses in the borough had been occupied by more than one family. What such statistical pronouncements hid was the fact that these houses, many of them three storeys high plus basement, had never been intended to house one small nuclear family apiece even when new. Typically they had sheltered in addition servants (sometimes four or five of these in a large house such as those on the Camden Road), extra relatives, or lodgers. But to speak of house-sharing as if it were an unmitigated evil was the standard prelude to the Council’s inevitable next remark about its plans for building self-contained flats: ‘In order to gain open ground space, each block of flats will be built as high as each site will reasonably allow.’

It is painful now to reflect on the docility with which people accepted this and other arbitrary dictates about their future way of life. ‘They’, the Council, were felt to know best, and anyway the building of new homes was a sign that peace was here, wasn’t it? Not much building had taken place after the First World War, despite promises, and this had been a source of resentment. An interesting example of the patriotism of the period combined with a sense of regret at destruction is to be found in the preamble to Grosch’s reminiscences, quoted in the preceding chapter: ‘Personally, I should like to see some effort made to preserve one or two rows of these streets and houses in which lived a people who did a very great deal to make, and hold, that Empire of which we are so proud today.’

That was written in 1947, the very year that the first large chunk of the Empire (India) detached itself. But what is interesting about Grosch’s remark is not so much its backward-looking flag-waving but its calm concept of a future in which
everything
in his native district would be swept away in the interests of progress. If public opinion had reached such a point that people accepted this awesome prospect as a matter of course, no wonder local councils believed they could do absolutely anything they liked, with arbitrary powers greater than those of any private landlord. They could, and did – in London’s East End, in Birmingham and parts of Manchester. They did not go quite so far in Kentish Town. But it was a close thing. The exhibition of 1947 blandly laid out plans for property that was to be demolished in ten years, in twenty years and in thirty years, with no apparent perception of the social shifts and changes that might take place in that period and the consequent impossibility of predicting decay with any accuracy. The future, it was felt, was on the point of arriving, and once it had arrived it would be there for good, unchanging and unchangeable.

Even when the actual future became the present and took (as it was bound to) a different form from that predicted, the static, mythic future with cloud capp’d glass towers, filled with contented socialist workers and set on billowing greensward, was not displaced from the imaginations of architects, planners and politicians. In 1962 when, after a spell in eclipse, Labour regained power in St Pancras, the cherished visions of the immediate post-war period were at once put into execution as if nothing had happened in the 1950s to render them obsolete.

What had in fact happened was an unprecedented shift in the public estimation of the value of inner London housing property. The visions of the post-war planning generation (concepts which themselves dated back to the early Fabian movement) were all constructed on the basic assumption that urban properties started life as desirable, became steadily less desirable over the course of several generations and finally declined to a state of near worthlessness. To purchase them compulsorily at the ‘end of their life’ would not therefore pose any great financial problem for the local authority or be met (of course) with any opposition, since the inhabitants would be only too grateful to be moved out. House property was a wasting asset, as the descendants of Victorian speculative builders would tell one another, sadly creeping round unmodernised properties for which they could ask only minimal rents. What neither they nor the local authority foresaw was that, from the middle 1950s onwards, house prices in hitherto despised inner suburbs began mysteriously to climb.