The Fields Beneath (30 page)

I do not believe the pitchforks. I think they are an imaginative touch put in to indicate the (literally) grass roots nature of local feeling over the issue. But they are none the less significant for all that.

The disappearance of cheap flats and rooms to let brought other evils in its train besides squatting by outsiders. Young local people, sometimes from families that had been in Kentish Town for generations, could no longer find ‘two rooms in Prince of Wales Crescent’ when they got married. This particularly affected the sort of couple with ambitions and a certain standard of living, who had no intention of instantly starting a large family to qualify for priority on Camden’s long housing lists, or yet of bringing up a couple of children for years in Mother’s front room. These were the Class 3, the lower middle class, actual or potential, who moved out to remote suburbs, a loss to the district. Blandly, in self-congratulation, Camden’s Director of Housing remarked in a pamphlet published in 1971 that ‘steadily the proportion of privately rented flats must be expected to fall and, with a vigorous housing programme the number of Council dwellings must be expected to increase’. Yet well before this point it had become obvious that the community was becoming socially polarized in an undesirable way between council tenancy and owner occupation. It was glumly predicted that by the year 1984 (or whatever arbitrary date was chosen) the whole of the Kentish and Camden Town areas and indeed the ring of comparable districts right round London would be parcelled out into expensively gentrified streets and, in utter physical and social contrast to them, one-class ghetto estates of council flats.

For the supreme irony of council estate construction is that it has ultimately proved socially divisive and anti-egalitarian. Partly this is due to the physical nature of most estate architecture – the way it turns its back on prevailing street patterns and, in discouraging through-traffic, inevitably discourages outsiders from entering on foot also. Many estates, indeed, are as much unknown territory to people living in the adjacent streets as if they were in another neighbourhood altogether. But another important divisive factor is the constraints placed upon council tenants, the petty regulations about door-painting and petkeeping, the general lack of real privacy despite the much vaunted ‘selfcontainment’. Few people would be council tenants, at least not in a flat, if they had any financially feasible alternative, and it is significant that vandalism is far worse on estates than it is in the more mixed social communities of the streets. If you live in a house in a street then you are of the community of that street and, by extension, the whole area, whether you occupy a whole house or a self-contained basement flat or two rooms and a shared bath on the landing. If you live on a Council estate, however, you live ‘in Lenham’ or ‘in Baxton’ and you are instantly labelled.

Some of these drawbacks in the council housing system are, of course, the product of several factors beyond the control of individual councils. It is hard to see how, today, under any system, a good supply of cheap rented accommodation could be maintained in London, given that people will no longer tolerate the overcrowding they put up with in the past. It is a moot point whether, had public authorities
not
attempted to control the situation so heavily since 1945, but had allowed the traditional
laissez faire
system of private landlordism to continue, the result today would on balance be better or worse. It would certainly be different.

One change of council policy in the last few years in Camden is, however, doing much to bridge the widening gulf between council tenant and owner-occupier. Many of the houses originally acquired in the early 1960s with a view to demolition are now being done up and re-let to council tenants, which pleases both the prospective tenants and the middle-class conservationists. It may be that time will expose certain follies in this policy too, and certainly it has its critics (‘Throwing good money after old bricks’). But for the time being it seems a good idea – and, what is more important, a modest, piecemeal, flexible idea which does not involve taking long-term expensive decisions that cannot easily be revoked. Indeed it is a measure of the success of this policy that its results do not jump to the eye. The numbers of nineteenth-century houses now in council ownership in Kentish Town, including the whole of the Christ Church Estate and much of the Bartholomew Estate which were acquired at an auction in the 1950s, is far greater than a casual observer would suppose walking round the streets. Such an observer, seeing a pleasant house, restored in appropriate style without the alarming picture windows and glass and iron front-doors that characterise some private conversions, is more apt to assume that its owners are ‘another middle-class family that has moved in’. Hence the idea that Kentish Town is steadily going up and can only continue to rise, gains further currency.

The fact is, however, that after the social and physical upheavals of the 1960s, the district has probably reached another period of near stability. Including modern estates, the Council now owns more than half the housing in the area, and this has effectively put a stop to any lingering property developer’s dream of it even becoming another Chelsea or Hampstead. At the same time, its dangers seem to be, for the moment, past. No Motorway Box will mutilate its southern area. No more vainglorious schemes will attempt to transform it out of all recognition: for the moment local authorities have run out of both steam and money. The slums of the future – and the near future at that – will not be found in ‘inchoate communities … peppered with small industries’ like Kentish Town, but in the bleakly coherent wastelands of places like the Pepys Estate in south London or the Ben Johnson estate in Stepney, or Woodberry Down in north London.

Paradoxically, the various threats to Kentish Town’s very existence that have been posed since 1945 may have played an important part in sharpening people’s ideas about what life in an urban area is or ought to be. Between the wars, when districts like this stagnated, no one took much interest in them except those who wished to change them. Not until they seemed to be trembling on the brink of extinction, their rows of terraces apparently doomed to pass into history like the open fields and the timbered farmhouses before them, did people of all classes stop and ask themselves what, in fact, was still good about these places, or whether they really wanted them knocked down. The prolonged wrangles over demolition which at first had threatened to divide the articulate newcomers from the resigned long-term inhabitants, in the end united them, albeit temporarily. The final saving of Harmood Street by public outcry, and the final defeat and loss of the elegant curve of Prince of Wales Crescent, which received coverage in the national press, were topics of interest shared by everyone. Here, as in other comparable areas all over London but perhaps particularly here, local enterprises began to flourish in the late 1960s: local news-sheets were published, street festivals were held, organisations for helping people with commodities ranging from legal advice to psychodrama, appeared in every street. A Neighbourhood Advice Centre, financed by the Camden Council for Social Services was set up. Some eighteen residents’ and tenants’ associations came into being within a square mile of streets – significantly, the level of all this communal activity was far higher in west Kentish Town, where there had been so much trouble and strife, than in the relatively calmer district to the east of the high road which no one had tried to pull down. A free-floating and at first slightly mysterious organisation called Inter Action settled in Kentish Town, in the misguided belief that here was a forgotten district no one was doing anything about. Having discovered their mistake they nevertheless stayed, occupying a derelict medicine factory where the director’s office was still panelled in mock-Jacobean, and busied themselves with a variety of causes such as open spaces (that King Charles’s Head of reformers) and street games for children, always referred to in an approved radical style as ‘the kids’. Some people thought they were Maoists and others that, on the contrary, they were not all that different in their basic attitudes from the Mission Hall clergymen of a hundred years ago. But nearly everyone was pleased when, in 1974, they succeeded in opening a riding stable, allotments and a miniature ‘farm’ (goats, chickens, a donkey, a calf) on a segment of railway land with old stabling and stock sheds.

It was an inspired idea. As a symbol of the new urban peasantry, as a focus for the idea of the village that lurks disguised in city streets and as a means of creating a sense of the revival of the lost past, it could not be bettered. Look, it seemed to be saying, the fields are not only sleeping underneath: they are
here
, exposed once again, with people working in them, tending animals, learning about real things, doing things instead of gazing into shop windows and television sets. The ‘farm’ soon became, and is still, the focus for all sorts of myths: people were eager to believe that it was an actual fragment of farmland overlooked for a hundred years and miraculously rediscovered like the Sleeping Beauty’s domain, that the ‘farm buildings’ (in reality Midland Railway stabling) were the remains of the eighteenth-century Mortimer’s Farm.

The earth itself is indestructible – the tough, sticky London clay studded like a currant cake with the fragments of other lives. But what stands on the earth seems more like a geological formation. A hundred years ago this image was already used by a foreign observer (Karl Capek) to describe the amazing agglomeration of terraced housing that met his eye, but today, when the terraces are broken and interspersed with so many more recent deposits, the metaphor seems still more appropriate. The buildings of different periods, themselves converted or modified in different ways, are mixed together like stratified rocks that have been churned up not once but several times by changes in the social climate. Temperate, sunny eras have deposited elaborate fanlights, stucco mouldings, cornices and parapets; colder eras have peeled stucco and rotted trimmings, making facings porous. Successive ice ages have left piles of masonry like great rocks standing out above the more delicate roofscape of slates – piano factories, engine sheds, model dwellings, greyly serviceable blocks with stone dressings, post-War follies in roughcast concrete. In the ‘urban sprawl’ the petrified tide-marks of earlier building waves are still clearly visible: here the airy stuccoed facades give way to heavier, mid-Victorian ones with porticoes, here these in turn lie alongside late-Victorian debased Scottish baronial style. Here is an untouched segment of Edwardian red-brick and hung tile, here a slice is missing and in its place (brought hither by a glacier from a distant suburb?) is a piece of 1930s by-pass architecture. Here traffic sweeps noisily round a new traffic island, there children play in a pot-holed, ancient unmade lane under flowering trees.

The surface vegetation the houses currently wear is equally varied. In one run of near-identical houses, the blistered chocolate and margarine paint of pre-war days, endlessly proving how ‘serviceable’ it is, may be flanked on one side by fresh white rendering and a stripped pine front door and on the other by a neighbour done up like a doll’s house, each individual brick picked out in mauvish-pink by its Greek Cypriot owners. The house at the end of the run, slightly bigger than its neighbours, its path squared in black and white tiles of long-ago elegance, presents a sorrier sight than any of the others. Its area railings, taken during the war supposedly to make armaments but actually to rust in a field in Lincolnshire, have been replaced by a sagging cat’s cradle of stakes and wire, the steps where maids once lingered are covered with green slime and blown chip papers; ragged Robin grows at the bottom. In tribute to a respectable past, all its windows are occluded with dirty net curtains, but in one of them a pane of glass has been blocked for years by a cornflakes packet. In another stands a little Sacred Heart, facing the street: perhaps He enjoys watching the goings-on in the new adventure playground opposite. From His vantage point He cannot see that the house next door has been sanded all over and now presents the pristine, bright yellow appearance it must have presented around 1840, before a hundred years of London grime had come to darken it. Actually this startling new façade is a façade in every sense, for, in currently approved fashion, the occupants have restored the outside to a perfect simulacrum of what it must once have been, new eight-paned windows and all, but have transformed the small-roomed interior into a barn-like Paradise of rolled steel joists, spotlights and a spiral staircase leading to a studio in the roof-space. Their bleak good taste is not much admired by the neighbours who have seen inside, particularly not by the ones further up the street whose own identical house is completely smothered in Virginia creeper and whose front patch is a riot of sunflowers, roses, geraniums and garden gnomes.

The Indians arrive in their shining car, full of wives and large-eyed children. They run the small grocers in the next street (open till nine at night seven days a week) which they bought three years ago from the Greeks.

An alsatian pads past, very busy. A woman with a pram and eye-shadow eyes it suspiciously.

In the pub at the corner someone is washing the cut-glass windows. Posters advertise ‘Disco’ and ‘Topless Go-go dancers’, but most of the time the place wears an air of intense respectability.

An old man dodders past with woollen gloves and a shopping bag. His wife has sent him to Sainsburys to get him out from under her feet.

A rather angry-looking young woman in a long, crumpled cotton skirt goes by, pushing a double push-chair vigorously in front of her containing two small children of disparate colours. Relic of a high-minded commune of squatters, she has now, as an unsupported mother, been rehoused by the council.

A colony of Irish workmen arrive and prepare to dig up the pavement. The accents of the young ones are just as strong as those of the older men. Ireland itself must be half empty these days, but the Catholic churches in North West London are well filled.