Our own privet world
With its mock Tudor and ribbons of red rooftops, Metroland has been admired and ridiculed. Valerie Grove revisits the suburbia of her youth
Metroland is an evocative term. A kinder word than “suburbia”, and favoured by its eulogist John Betjeman, it is clearly defined geographically: it embraces those areas northwest of London in the counties of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire originally served by the Metropolitan Railway Company.
The name was invented in 1915 by the railway’s marketing chaps — even the trains’ brass doorplates were engraved “Live in Metroland” — to stimulate house-building for commuters outside London. These estate developments really took off after the end of the First World War, when the vast network of red-roofed boxes began to burgeon across London’s hinterland, north and south, in the 1920s. Developers obliterated medieval villages and linked ancient market towns into one homogenous suburban sprawl.
This all stopped abruptly with the outbreak of the Second World War. Postwar, they were still desirable places to live, epitomising the nuclear family’s ideal homestead in Macmillan’s never-had-it-so-good 1950s. Here Mother wore her pinny and cooked the supper for the returning Father and the two children with their Meccano sets. But the three-bed, two recep, mansard-roofed house — mock Tudor was the favourite style — with rectangle of back garden began to look stodgy and unfashionable with the arrival of high-rise developments in the 1960s and 1970s.
It took two decades for sociologists to discover that what people really preferred was to live in defensible space, with their own front door and patch of green. I spent some of my formative years in the Metroland suburbs and my heart still sinks to see those ribbons of red rooftops when driving west on the North Circular. On that benighted road itself, many houses are now boarded up, their frontages overgrown with weeds, full of old mattresses and motorbikes. My own patch — the Wembley/Harrow/Kingsbury triangle, where I went to school and travelled by bike and Tube in my teens — is still as familiar as the back of my hand, even though it is now a predominantly Asian area since the influx of the ambitious, industrious refugees from Idi Amin. Halal butchers and sari emporia line the high streets. My school, Kingsbury High, which in my day had just one black pupil and two Asians, now takes the majority of its pupils from the ethnic community.
Beyond that circle, Outer Metroland’s more affluent suburbs of Stanmore and Pinner, Chalfont St Giles and Rickmansworth, still possesses the timeless attractions of lush green charm. You can still stand on Old Redding at Stanmore and overlook a vista of meadows and the church spire of Harrow-on-the-Hill. The houses all around seem placidly locked into a time warp set between the wars, set back from wide and quiet roads where people wash their cars on Sundays, and create gardens of herbaceous pride. What can be wrong with this ideal? Londoners do still want houses on the edge of the countryside within a fast train ride of the metropolis. Just as they did in 1920 when a popular song emerged called My Little Metroland Home, and in 1928 when Evelyn Waugh (who grew up in Golders Green) created Margot Metroland in his novel Decline and Fall. Fifty years later, Julian Barnes gave the title Metroland to his first novel, making use of his 1960s schooldays when he travelled by Met Line daily from home in Northwood to the City of London School.
Between 1915 and 1924, the Metropolitan Railway Company published an annual guidebook to the historic villages of Metroland, London’s Nearest Countryside. The 1924 edition has just been republished, and it makes deeply nostalgic reading. Oliver Green, of the London Transport Museum, has provided an introduction full of fascinating nuggets: in June 1910, for instance, the Met Line introduced a Pullman service for commuters on the fast train from distant Bucks to Baker Street: you could get a light breakfast, lunch or supper for 3s (15p). Such frills vanished in the early 1930s when the Met Line was absorbed into the expanding Underground network. This facsimile 1924 edition features on its cover the proud new Wembley Stadium, built for the British Empire Exhibition of that year. This was a huge boost to Metroland’s popularity. After the Cup Final was staged there in April 1923 (Bolton Wanderers beating West Ham 2-0) 17 million Britons went to Wembley for the Empire exhibition (compared with 6.5 million to the Millennium Dome in 2000). Wembley Park — formerly a manorial estate belonging to the Page family: the estate fell into chancery “and the ‘Page millions’ still await a successful claimant”, this book tells us — became just another suburb.
In the 1920s the population of Wembley, Harrow, Ruislip-Northwood and Uxbridge increased by more than 50 per cent. Homes Fit For Heroes, Lloyd George had promised. Railway posters could advertise “Rambles and Country Walks in Metro-land” — invariably featuring the stretch between Amersham and Great Missenden, rich in beech- clad hillsides, then as now. In this stretch of outer Metroland lies Chequers, the prime ministerial retreat. The book has photographs of thatched cottages at Wendover, leafy lanes and secluded paths in Chalfont St Giles, ducks on the pond at Ickenham. Betjeman referred often to the “elmy landscape” of Middlesex. “Those who lay out building estates,” says the guidebook nervously, “ought to spare every tree they possibly can.” But this was a forlorn hope: even before Dutch elm disease arrived, whole woodlands had to be bulldozed as the demand for hundreds more of the same kind of houses increased. The earliest developers strove strenuously to maintain the rus in urbe illusion of Metroland. But this restraint could not last, as Costain and Wates and Taylor Woodrow and Wimpey got to work. How ominous it is to see within this little book so many rustic backwaters with medieval churches, farms and meadows about to be so cataclysmically altered.
Within Metroland’s popularity lay its inevitable fall from grace. The unrestricted building boom was bound to destroy most of the countryside that had been its prime attraction. Only after the Second World War was there protection for the Green Belt, and the restrictions of town and country planning. Most suburban roads were laid out in grid fashion, hence the tediously interminable stretches of almost identical avenues, interchangeable in their names — Ridgeways and Drives and Gardens and Crescents — in their sad little parades of shops, and repetitive in their house façades. That was one reason why I instinctively hated living in suburbia: it was so predictable: you could be anywhere. (“Do you know what world I live in, Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley?” wrote George Orwell in Coming Up For Air in 1939. “Even if you don’t, you know 50 others just like it.”) Suburbia had no visible history. Anyone with any spirit — Michael Portillo, Clive Anderson, Twiggy, Billy Idol, George Michael, Eleanor Bron and Screaming Lord Sutch — had to get out of Metroland to make their mark.
Pinner, a sleepy agricultural village before the railway came, still has its Tudor inns, and half-timbered cottages in the high street. I drove out there last Sunday morning and had a cappuccino in the Caffè Uno; then headed up Clamp Hill, Stanmore, to Grims Dyke, the Norman Shaw-designed Victorian manor house — where W. S. Gilbert lived, wrote The Mikado, and drowned in the pond — which is surrounded by a wonderful rhododendron garden, with yew topiary on the terrace and acres of dense woodland beyond. Such rare treasures as are still to be found in Metroland’s all-obliterating sprawl were engagingly revealed in Lucinda Lambton’s recent television series, Scintillating Suburbia. But they are utterly hidden from view. Even its few historic luminaries are forgotten. “The poet Pye,” says the guidebook’s note on Pinner, “Poet Laureate before Southey (1790), lived at Pinner, and has a memorial in the church.” I looked up Henry James Pye: The Oxford Companion to English Literature allots him a single sentence: Pye “was the constant butt of contemporary ridicule”.
Just like suburbia. The very word suburban already denoted “narrowness of view” by dictionary definition in 1817. It was an easy target for intellectual disdain. John Osborne’s grandmother’s mock-Tudor house stood in “a long cul-de-sac of pebble-dash, a terminus of semi-detached inertia”. Michael Frayn, bred in Ewell, found it “just too far from theatres and art galleries, all the things that mattered. It was on the periphery”. The big wide world has always been elsewhere, and city lights always beckon from far beyond the privet hedges.
Valerie Grove
The Times © 2004
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