The Fields Beneath (4 page)

Yet it is fair to add that so rapid and complete was the transformation of Kentish Town, as of many analogous areas, between roughly 1840 and 1870, that there must indeed have been many inhabitants of the district in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, whose own childhood memories had assumed the quality of an improbable dream. This is an old man writing to a local newspaper in 1909:

The history of the Fleet river has been described as ‘a decline from a river to a brook, from a brook to a ditch, and from a ditch to a drain’. The drain is the classic symbol for man the destroyer, but in fact, today it is only a ‘drain’ in an innocuous sense, not the more usual fetid one. It has become a storm relief drain, taking the overflow from particularly heavy downpours. This is essential in cities, for whereas rain sinks readily down through grasslands or ploughlands or indeed unpaved roads, and is soon absorbed, rain in areas largely covered by stone, asphalt and tarmac cannot sink away and must be channelled. Harmless, necessary Fleet.

Because the river was there, defining the contours of the land, the road came. But where the earliest road lay is not absolutely certain. Norden, the Elizabethan topographer, identified Watling Street, the ancient road to Chester, as the way that is now Tottenham Court Road, Hampstead Road as far as Camden Town, then Chalk Farm Road, Haverstock Hill and so on to Hampstead and the north. At all events Watling Street seems to have been a pre-Roman track, which was improved and perhaps partially paved by the Romans and then, during the Dark Ages, was allowed to fall into decay till resurrected by Abbot Leofstan of St Alban’s shortly before the Norman Conquest.

It has been suggested that an alternative route for Watling Street is the one described by Norden as also very ancient: the way from Holborn on the edge of the City, up Gray’s Inn Road to King’s Cross (site of an undetermined ancient battle, as its old name, Battle Bridge, suggests) and thence up what is now called St Pancras Way but was for centuries called Longwich Lane and then the King’s Road. At the level of the present day Crowndale Road (Fig Lane, where a fig tree survived till the late nineteenth century) the road would have forked, one branch curving west to pick up the route of what is now the Hampstead Road and the other continuing north through Kentish Town to Highgate.

I slightly prefer the second of these alternatives, for several reasons. Firstly, it follows the course of the river and hence the valley, the most logical place for an early road to be. Secondly, it starts from a point much nearer the City than Tottenham Court Road: it is a little hard to see why, in very distant times, the main road to the midlands should have been located so far to the west of the small settlement that was London. Thirdly, the route up Gray’s Inn Road passes at least two very ancient sites, Battle Bridge and St Pancras church itself. There have been Roman finds near Gray’s Inn Road: two cremation urns. By contrast, the other route up Tottenham Court and Hampstead Road is not known to pass by any ancient settlement (Camden Town is modern – 1791, to be exact); the only significant building recorded there is the one from which the present day Tottenham Court Road takes its name, the manor house of Totenhale near the present Euston Road underpass, sometimes misleadingly called St John’s Palace, the earliest parts of which seem to have been mediaeval.

In addition, two other roads concern us. One is the eastern fork from Gray’s Inn Road leading up York Way (anciently Maiden Lane), across Copenhagen Fields to Holloway, Hornsey and Muswell Hill. The Maiden Lane section was the eastern boundary of the ancient parish of St Pancras and of the manor of Cantelowes (of which much more later); it is still the eastern boundary of the modern metropolitan borough of Camden, and is also the farthest possible eastern limit of Kentish Town. The dual and contradictory nature of a road – a means of connection to those who travel it, a social demarcation line and barrier to those who live around it – is no new thing.

The other road, a latecomer dating only from 1386, is the by-pass road for the above, built through Holloway and up Highgate Hill by the Bishop of London, who charged tolls for its use (hence High-gate).

There is yet another road which ultimately became important in shaping the whole northern inner-suburb area. It determined the position of the three big stations, Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross, and thus had a profound effect on the later development of Kentish Town. But it was constructed so many centuries after even the Bishop of London’s road that it hardly seems relevant to this chapter. This was the New Road, deliberately built as a by-pass through uninhabited fields in the mid-eighteenth century, and one of the few far-sighted road schemes for London which did become reality. Today, it is called the Marylebone Road, Euston Road and Pentonville Road. It was in 1800, and still is today, the demarcation line where central London gives way to more outlying parts. We shall return to it.

When the area north of London was surveyed at the time of the Norman Conquest, it consisted mainly of forest, infested by outlaws, robbers and beasts of prey. Trees and scrub are the natural vegetation of a large part of England. The first mention of St Pancras church as such occurs at the period of the Conquest, but there seems to have been some form of clearing and settlement in the vicinity of the church – or
a
church – hundreds of years before this, probably since about AD 400. At any rate St Pancras was made a prebendal manor by King Ethelbert and granted by him to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral in 603.

Slowly over the centuries we now call ‘dark’, a few changes took place. By the time of the Domesday Survey (1086) four manors are recorded, though one is not called a manor, plus some other land, covering roughly the area that was to become the Borough of St Pancras (merged into Camden in 1965 when the LCC became the GLC). The named manors were St Pancras itself, Totehele (Totenhale) and Rugmere. Each manor had a plough or two (Totenhale had three and ‘another half can be made’), each had its handful of villeins, some pastureland, and ‘wood for hedges and for pigs’.

Almost exactly a hundred years after the Domesday Survey, the propagandist FitzStephen wrote in his ‘Survey of the Metropolis’ that the St Pancras district had ‘cornfields, pastures and delightful meadows, intermixed with pleasant streams, on which stands many a mill whose clack is grateful to the ear.’ The number of mills (typical service industries) suggests that the area had already embarked on the beginnings of its long-time special role as country-by-the-town. FitzStephen added that the cornfields were not of a hungry, sandy mould but ‘as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn’. He continued: ‘Beyond them, a forest extends, full of the lairs and coverts of beasts and game, stags, bucks, boars and wild bulls.’ Clearly, the frontiers of the great Forest of Middlesex, for so it was, had by now been pushed back, outlaws and all no doubt, to more manageable proportions: it formed the main hunting grounds for the citizens of London.

The hamlet centred on St Pancras grew. According to a Visitation of the Churches made in 1251, there were by then thirty ordinary houses in the parish, four manor houses, and two moated, stone-built ones – the vicarage and the rectory.

London was also growing, however slowly, and its needs were growing – for food and fodder and fuel. In 1218, the second year of the reign of Henry III, an edict went out that the forest lands should be cleared. As trees were cut down they went to build new timber houses in the city, or to replenish the hearths of those already built, and gradually more and more of the land came under the plough and had its rough contours smoothed into those rounded slopes which, in western Europe, we regard as natural landscape but which are really nothing of the kind. At first considerable portions of the forest were preserved, being now reserved hunting grounds for royalty: no doubt it was the presence of their hunting lodges in the area which have given rise to persistent tales of ‘King John’s Palace’ and the like. But time, and the ever-present needs of the nearby town, gradually eroded these preserves. Today the only remaining scraps of the once enormous Forest of Middlesex are Highgate Woods, and Ken Wood within Hampstead Heath, just on the edge of Kentish Town.

Those familiar with the area may possibly, by now, be asking themselves when I am going to stop discussing the general history of St Pancras and home-in on Kentish Town proper. After all, St Pancras church and the early settlement round it is one thing, but Kentish Town, a mile or so up-river, is surely quite another?

As a matter of fact it isn’t. Or rather, it is now, but as far as one can tell, it wasn’t in the Dark Ages, nor yet at the Norman Conquest nor yet in 1400. Until about the middle of the fifteenth century the names ‘Kentish Town’ and ‘St Pancras’ appear to have been synonymous, and either name could be used for the hamlet. Frequently on documents relating to property the place is styled ‘St Pancras alias Kentish Town’. In fact in Kentish Town we have an interesting example of a village that was apparently established in one place for a considerable period – perhaps a thousand years – and then drifted off to another locale.

In an often-quoted passage, the late-sixteenth-century Norden wrote:

So, by the Elizabethan period, Kentish Town, with its new chapel of ease ‘within itself’ was being regarded as a separate entity. The chapel had been built some hundred years earlier, in 1449, on land given by a local landlord, Robert Warner, after some parishioners had made representations to him on the subject: evidently there was local feeling by then that the old church was now too remote from most of the currently inhabited buildings. The plot of land chosen was in the heart of the present-day Kentish Town, in the high road, the site to be occupied in the early twentieth century by part of Daniels’s department store and, today, by Sainsbury’s supermarket. The raising of this chapel was both an indication of the shift of habitation which had already taken place and a confirmation of it: once the chapel was there the tendency would be to group any new houses near it and to abandon still further the old site down the King’s Road. When another hundred odd years had passed since Norden’s description of ‘poor Pancras, without companie or comfort’, a William Woodehouse, JP, amateur antiquarian and local freeholder (
c.
1700), wrote in the manuscript book he inscribed for his own pleasure and interest:

Why did the village move? The best explanation lies, in fact, in the ‘only sign of true life there’ – the persistent Fleet. This was hinted at by Robert Warner himself, declaring that his new chapel would be a boon for those who could not get to the church itself ‘when foul ways is and great waters’. We know that flooding was a perpetual hazard of the lowlying land around it: already, when the church was substantially rebuilt in 1331 and a new vicarage and rectory built near it, reference was made to the ‘overflowings of the River Fleet’, which had presumably become worse as the stream got silted up lower down its course. An Inquisition taken of Totenhale manor, lying west of the Fleet, in 1350, paints a picture of dilapidation – a half-ruined house, unkempt woods, one hundred acres of fairly decent land worth 4
d
. an acre ‘and 100 acres worth 2
d
. an acre and no more because the land is marshy’. Also ‘ten acres of Marsh Meadow worth 5 shillings by the year and no more, because they were overflowed and could not be mowed, except in a dry time.’ The general neglect could have other causes besides the flood menace – two years earlier, the Black Death had first visited England – but a map of the same manor seventy-two years later in 1422 shows, as well as a water-mill just above St Pancras church, extensive marshy reed beds lining the stream on its western side. So it was quite logical for the inhabitants of Kentish Town, especially those that could afford decent houses, to take themselves by degrees to the higher, drier land about a mile up the Fleet, where by now another road (Tottenham Court – Hampstead Road) joined the King’s highway. Just north of this junction, where the Castle Inn was and is today, the new Kentish Town established itself, and there it has remained – except that a slight drift further northwards becomes apparent in the nineteenth century, and was confirmed by the siting of railway and Underground stations.