The Fields Beneath E-Book

Gillian Tindall

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

London, that city of villages, has never been so vividly recounted as in this particular study of Kentish Town. Gillian Tindall takes us along the banks of London's long-buried Fleet River, past wells and into public houses to reveal the real but fascinating history of its tenants, traders, freeholders and landlords. We watch as this village is absorbed by the metropolis and observe its desperate struggle to keep an identity, despite being fragmented by railways, bombed and developed. The Fields Beneath is one of a precious handful of books (like Montaillou and Akenfield) that in their precise examination of a particular locality open our understanding of universal themes, as if the microscopic examination of one place holds the key to a better understanding of the nature of community, and the role of the individual within it.

Leseprobe

The Fields Beneath

The history of one London village

GILLIAN TINDALL

… In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

T. S. Eliot, FOUR QUARTETS

‘Happy are those who see beauty in modest spots where others see nothing. Everything is beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret it.’

Camille Pissarro (1893)

This new edition of the book is dedicated to Mrs Bridget Tighe, born in County Sligo, Ireland in 1919, long time inhabitant of Kentish Town.

For all her unobtrusive help in my house over twenty-eight years, while I wrote this and many other books, I offer grateful thanks to her and to fate.

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

MAPS

POSTSCRIPT 2011

1 Introduction

2 Roads and Rivers

3 Manors and Gentlemen’s Seats

4 Ordinary People

5 ‘One hundred and twenty-two houses’

6 The Rustic Idyll

7 Country into Suburb

8 ‘Black Snow’

9 ‘Railway trains run to and fro’

10 With Gas and Attendance

11 As far as we have got

Parliament Hill Fields

A NOTE ON SOURCES

REVISED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE

A WORD ON MANOR HOUSES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Plates

Copyright

A: The growth of London

B: Pre-nineteenth century St Pancras parish

C: The same area by the early twentieth century

D: Part of the plans for the Southampton Estate, west Kentish Town (1840) Each lot for sale was typically about 200 ft square and was envisaged as containing four houses arranged two by two, semi-detached.

E: The Reality: the same part of the Southampton Estate by 1880 A frontage of 200 ft now often holds a dozen houses, terraced, each with a narrow strip of back garden. Extra streets, especially cul de sacs, have been slotted into the holdings.

F: Further fantasy: plans for re-developing the same area, drawn up by the local authority in the early 1960s but happily never implemented.

Postscript 2011

It is almost thirty-five years now since the first edition of The Fields Beneath appeared. Other editions followed, but I was not able to update the work with anything more than a brief note. Not that ‘update’ is quite the word, for to keep a book of this kind accurate in each current detail – noting changes in shops, the enhancement or loss of buildings – would require constant, impractical revising and, at another level, would not be desirable anyway. Books of history do not go obviously out of date in the way that some other forms of writing tend to, but nevertheless a book is always a product of its own time, embodying the assumptions, hopes, fears and preoccupations of that time. This Postscript does not attempt to revise my earlier views, but it seems a good moment to take a general look at the way my chosen example of a village engulfed by a great city has continued to evolve over the past generation.

The overall theme of the book is, in any case, change. In the course of sixteen hundred years or so, Kentish Town was transformed from a small settlement beside a track some miles out of London into the busy inner-city district it is today. But this change, however momentous, was sporadic. For centuries nothing much happened, and at one point in the later middle ages the settlement even seems to have declined in size. A minor building boom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced the rural retreat within easy reach of town that was Kentish Town’s character throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, though the wind of change began to blow more strongly after the end of the Napoleonic wars. The truly cataclysmic change came in the 1840s, ’50s and ’60s, when the pastures and market gardens that had been the backland to the High Road were covered inexorably, field after field, with terraces of houses. This was followed by the coming of a mainline railway, which bisected the district and destroyed, for the next hundred years, most of the pretensions it had had to prettiness and gentility. In the space of less than thirty years a sooty townscape was created, as if by a black-hearted fairy. These were essentially the streets that still make up NW5 today.

Because to us past eras are over, fixed and known, we tend to underestimate how traumatic such developments were to people living through them. In the mid-1970s I wrote: ‘To believe that change, and in particular the speed of change, is something peculiar to the twentieth century, is an error, at least where the physical environment is concerned. Except in a few specific places … the changes seen by many people living today are as nothing compared with the paroxysms of alteration and despoilation weathered by their great-grandparents.’ This, in 2011, should read ‘great-great-grandparents’, but it remains just as true.

It so happened that, when I was researching and writing The Fields Beneath, the lesser paroxysm of post-war redevelopment had only recently abated. I was thus able to describe this saga of misplaced idealism and Stalinist authoritarianism disguised as democracy while it was still very recent – see the book’s last chapter. But what is significant is that I have no comparable upheaval to report for the period between the late 1970s and today. Just as, by the 1870s, Kentish Town had acquired much the form and social composition that it was to have for the next eighty-odd years, so, after the intervening storm of the late- 1950s and ’60s, the place settled down again into very much the one that we still inhabit, more than thirty years on, and shows every sign of continuing for the time being in the same way.

In the 1970s some people feared that ‘by the year 2000’ (a then distant, mythic date) areas such as Kentish Town would have deteriorated into urban “jungles’ on the American model, dangerous to cross after dark and full of racial tensions, while others were optimistically convinced that the ever-rising price of property would ensure that Kentish Town in 2000 would be as affluent and exclusive as Chelsea. For more than one reason, I am pleased to report that neither of these predictions has turned out valid. The changes I have to signal are all relatively minor ones, in the scheme of things and in Kentish Town’s long and chequered history.

The trends visible in 1977 have simply become more evident. The district has remained remarkably mixed, socially, with inhabitants ranging from the obviously poor to the discreetly wealthy, and only the lower-middle class under-represented. You have to be relatively well-off, today, to buy a Victorian house in one of the area’s many pleasant, leafy side streets, and very few of these houses are still in multi-occupation: the old ladies who let lodgings have gone. However, the large amount of housing that remains in local authority hands continues to ensure that the district is hardly in danger of becoming exclusive. But one has to say, too, that the difference between one part of Kentish Town and another, often not far off geographically, has become more marked; and the foreboding that Kentish Town might become parcelled out, into expensively gentrified streets on the one hand and single-class ghetto estates of Council flats on the other, has to some extent come true. The planning-blight that descended upon west Kentish Town in the 1950s and ’60s had a permanent effect, and though the partial destruction and rebuilding in the name of ‘improvement’ in the years that followed was much less extreme than originally intended, it has confirmed west Kentish Town’s character as the less desirable side of town. Excepting, of course, places such Kelly Street and the Crimea enclave: these, once narrowly saved from demolition, are now carefully conserved, worlds away in character though not in distance from the ill-designed housing blocks and litter of Malden Road.

East Kentish Town has, by good luck, avoided such obvious ghettoisation. Here a whole grid-pattern of streets was initially bought by the local authority for demolition, but a belated change of heart meant the terrace houses were then rehabilitated as flats and maisonettes for Council tenants (see pages 231–2). These proved very popular, with the inevitable result that since the right-to-buy legislation of 1980, many of the properties have passed out of the Council’s stock of homes and into private ownership. They have often been sold on subsequently (something that the advocates of Council house sales apparently failed to envisage) and so the social mix is changing again, with the arrival in these streets of prosperous middle class youngsters starting out in life, or of older single people with some equity. Meanwhile, the Council has considerably fewer properties to offer to than it had thirty-five years ago. Also, the change in the allocation rules, from a system of points to the priority of need, has had the effect of excluding many solid citizens who would once have been offered Council accommodation. In Kentish Town, as all over London, this has meant that Council tenants, except for the entrenched elderly, tend to form an underclass without the profile of respectable ordinariness that they had in the recent past.

The most significant single change over the last generation has been Council’s embrace (at any rate in theory) of the idea that old buildings form a valuable heritage, and hence the designation of more and more sections as Conservation Areas where neither house-owners nor developers are free to alter windows, doors, roof-lines or back-additions at will, let alone demolish. The first CA, conservatively confined to a small collection of Georgian houses at the High Street end of Leighton Road plus the oldest part of the picturesque Leverton Street, was mapped out in 1985. That Area itself is now being widened to include the grid of small streets to the north and east, and some houses have been Listed. In the intervening years Torriano Cottages, most of the Christchurch and St Bartholomew estates, the Jeffreys Street-Rochester Square Area, Kelly Street, Harmood Street and the Crimea Area have been added to the canon, as well as the entire Dartmouth Park estate up Highgate Road.

The complete and admirable turn-about this represents, after the destructiveness of the preceding era, cannot be under-estimated, and I wish I could write that all anxieties about Kentish Town’s physical future could now be laid to rest. But it was in 1989, well after the principle of conservation was established, that the ancient Bridge House in Highgate Road was demolished over one weekend, because someone in the Planning Department had not checked their records (or this book). And at the time of writing, a protracted wrangle is still in process about the integrity of Little Green Street, a small cobbled way containing the area’s only surviving run of eighteenth century one-time shops. Inadvertently (or so it is said) Camden Council gave outline planning permission to a property developer planning to build a block of flats some way away down a pedestrian way (College Lane), not understanding that the developer was intending to turn Little Green Street into permanent vehicular access for all the future flat-owners and their projected underground garages. The impassioned row that has followed, in local and national press and elsewhere, may well be imagined by those who know what heat such issues these days arouse.

Sometimes, today, passions for the past can seem almost too enthusiastic. It is no longer the case, as it was in the 1970s, that the general public thinks that picturesque places like Hampstead have ‘history’ but that more ordinary and battered places like Kentish Town do not. Much more informed and detailed material has been published on various districts of Camden (see revised Sources) and interest remains great, though sometimes, as ever, a little fanciful. I became familiar with fantasies about remembered ‘farms’ when I was researching The Fields Beneath, but no one then tried to tell me, as they have recently, that Leverton Street was ‘originally built for a colony of expatriate Portuguese fishermen’. (Under what circumstances a Portuguese fisherman would come and settle in Kentish Town was not explored). The basis for this tale is, I think, that these one-time railways workers’ cottages, which long ago were painted in standard shades of peeling margarine, are now a rainbow of different colours, from palest green through subtle blues and greys, unashamed pink and virile terracotta – the influence, no doubt, of the holidays abroad taken by the new generation of owner-occupiers. But one may be extremely thankful that the same emotion of pride and love for the immediate environment that dreamed up the Portuguese fishermen also, in 2002, saved the Pineapple public house half way up the street from imminent disappearance. Neighbours enlisted every local celebrity to the cause and got the pub’s intact Victorian interior spot-listed by English Heritage. The place continues to thrive.

Many other pubs have closed in Kentish Town and Camden Town in the last decade. The writer who complained in The Builder in 1854 that there far too many of these edifices were being built might be gratified to know how few of these traditional meeting places remain, but of course this does not point to any decline in alcoholic intake, but simply to changing habits. Famous pubs such as the Castle, or the Old Farmhouse which were rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century but retained their ancient names, are now many of them unrecognisable as restaurants, wine-bars or ‘music venues’. Others, especially in the side streets, have been converted into private flats. This was what a developer had hoped to do with the Pineapple, since such handsome buildings are often of more value now as real estate than in their designated usage. Others again have simply been swept away. The Assembly House survives, and now flourishes in responsible hands with much of its interior cut-glass intact, but it went through a bad patch in the 1990s, when the ornate window-glass that had lasted for almost a hundred years was either smashed or sold off by a series of dishonest tenant landlords. At the same period the commemorative marble table, which had been in the pub since the early eighteenth century (see pages 99–100), disappeared for good.

Relaxation in the licensing laws in recent years has brought late-night animation and frequently noise, fights, drunkenness and drug-trading to the heart of Camden Town. The huge and garish expansion of Camden Lock Market (now, unfortunately, ‘world famous’) has also had its effect. The determination of Kentish Town residents (backed, it should be said, by the local authority) has to date stopped Kentish Town from being degraded in the same way. An agreement seems to have been forged, among those who know the respective areas, that Camden Town is one place and Kentish Town is another, as historically they always have been, and any pushy bar-developer or his lawyer who think they will get the same licence in both places is in for a disappointment. Recently, the respective locations have been lettered into opposing sides of the wall of the railway viaduct across the road, which has long stood like a portcullis-gate where Camden Town might be said to end and Kentish Town to begin.

A visitor from the recent past would, I think, find much of Kentish Town rather cleaner than before, with less peeling paint, more elegant railings back in place, and fewer patched windows and rubbish-haunted front gardens, but the change is a matter of degree rather than a striking difference. The High Street is still choked with traffic morning and evening, but it flourishes, perhaps more than it did thirty years ago, with numerous walk-in supermarkets, green-grocery stalls, a long-established butcher-fishmonger, a smart halal alternative, an independent book-shop, a proper jewellers, a specialist needlework shop, a stationers, a baker’s, a hardware store resembling Alladin’s cave in its copious and varied stock, a large health-food store and several restaurants. (The one-time Daniel’s shop, later the site of Sainsburys, is currently a Somerfield store, with Sainsbury’s located further north, so any references to the position of the long ago Old Chapel should be adjusted to this).

By great good fortune rather than by any prescient plan, when a large section of the derelict one-time railway land was redeveloped it was for occupation by various light industries, a postal sorting office, a recycling centre and a car pound. None of these has impinged on the High Street’s continuing success as a traditional shopping centre, whereas a large supermarket with parking would have inflicted considerable damage. Unlike many other old urban centres Kentish Town has had a lucky escape. It is merely rather a pity that the lack of any coherent plan for the railway land has meant that an old right-of-way across it in the direction of Hampstead has never been restored, as, with informed planning, it might have been. The wide road built to service the various works now occupying ex-railway land leads, absurdly, to a choice of dead ends, in a wilderness of blocked-off railway arches, without even a much-needed footpath through these into west Kentish Town.

Rather more planning has gone into the ‘Secret Railway’ which, in the 1970s, was delapidated and threatened with closure (see pages 219–20). Its old-fashioned wooden station has gone, and passengers have to reach it through the tube station entrance, but it is now no secret, being part of the busy Thameslink line. The separate line through West Kentish Town Station has also been upgraded, and appears on tube maps. Meanwhile historic St Pancras, the site of its one-time manor house, Agar Town, numerous burial grounds and much else besides, has found a new and high profile role as the terminus of Eurostar.

Highgate Cemetery, which was previously shut for burials and prey to vandalism, has received, some might say, all too much attention in the last thirty years. Care has been lavished on many of its fine monuments, but at present a brisk trade in graves combines uneasily with the place’s modern role as a major tourist attraction, complete with entry fee and turnstiles.

As for John Betjeman’s ‘curious Anglo-Norman parish church of Kentish Town’, that was built in 1790 to replace the chapel of ease and rebuilt in 1843, it now houses a Christ Apostolic Church. It is attended by a congregation almost entirely black, many of whom travel in from distant suburbs. The Church of England faithful have moved off to St Benet’s, on the one-time estate of Dame Eleanor Palmer; while St Luke’s in Oseney Crescent is Listed but currently mothballed, awaiting a resurrection. The Methodist congregation, who originally enjoyed the large church in Lady Margaret Road that they ceded in the 1970s to the Roman Catholics, occupied the ex-Catholic chapel in Fortess Road for about thirty years but gradually evaporated. That chapel has recently been demolished, though the ex-Presbytry next door still wears telltale crosses on its stonework.

The much-contested Talacre Open Site continues to flourish, as does the Kentish Town Farm. The Governesses Benevolent Institution in west Kentish Town that later became a series of schools is now, like the public houses, converted into flats, but on its wrought iron gates the initials GBI still entwine. Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ stable block that survived so long in St Albans Road has been replaced by an over-sized residential block. The ungainly sweet-shop in front of Village House is now a house-agents’ premises of equally ill-assorted design. The theme of land and property value evidently haunts this Postscript: it has been a significant part of the story of the last thirty-five years. The residential children’s nursery in Leighton Road, which was earlier a casual ward, relieving station and soup kitchen, and earlier still an old house where the Crane family lived and tossed colourful insults over the wall at Mr Pike and his family, has been rebuilt as a Housing Association estate of uninspired but harmless houses in traditional London stock brick.

In the house that was once the Pikes’ a typewriter has become in itself an object of nostalgic memory, but the person who was typing on it when The Fields Beneath first appeared is still using a keyboard today in the same upper room.

1

Introduction

Written in 1977

One day in the early 1970s I was roaming through a particularly disjointed and run-down area of Kentish Town, London NW5, and passed a row of houses which were then occupied by squatters engaged in a cold war with Camden Council. They were – and are – unremarkable houses; a mid-Victorian terrace of the type that has been demolished all over London in the past two decades, with none of the Georgian cottage appeal that might commend them to preservationist forces. In stock brick, three storeys, with a dank basement area below and a parapet wall on top, they faced a busy road; the most quintessentially ordinary houses, you would say, though of a uniquely English kind, built by speculative builders for Philistines, unloved now for decades, doomed soon, perhaps, to extinction.

Then I saw that over the lintel of one of them someone had carefully carved an inscription: the letters, cut through the sooty surface into the fresh yellow brick below, stood out clearly –

The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath.

It is deeply satisfying to come unexpectedly face to face with your own private vision in this way. For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that ‘God made the country and man made the town’, but this is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings – pubs, churches, institutions – often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record. The more you know about the past of one district, the easier it becomes to perceive the past of any district through the confusing veil of the present.

From this, it is only a short step of the imagination to envisage the one-time fields being themselves still there, with their grass and buttercups and even the footprints of cows, merely hidden beneath modern concrete and asphalt – as if you had simply to lift up a paving stone in order to reveal it. And while this is not literally true, what is true is that once you get outside the inner areas of old cities (whose ground has usually been so heavily disturbed by building and rebuilding through the centuries that the present houses rest on packed rubble) you do not have to go far down to find real earth, the kind cows walked on and crops sprang from, lying there fallow beneath the weight of stone.

In this sense the past can be said to be still there, not just existing in the minds of those who seek it, but actually, physically still present. The town is a palimpsest: the statement it makes in each era is engraved over the only partially-effaced traces of previous statements. Freud used the image of the ancient city as a metaphor for the Unconscious: he envisaged a city ‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones.’ He was talking about the Unconscious of one individual, but perhaps the city is a more obvious metaphor for Jung’s Collective Unconscious of the race: we may know nothing about our nineteenth- or seventeenth- or fourteenth-century predecessors on the patch of territory we call ours, but their ideas and actions have shaped our habitat and hence our attitudes as well. In Blake’s poetic vision ‘everything exists’ for ever: experience is total and cumulative, nothing, not one hair, one particle of dust, can pass away. And in point of fact he was right. Matter is hard to destroy totally, even though it may be transformed by time and violence out of all recognition. In the pulverised rubble lying below modern buildings is the sediment of mediaeval and pre-mediaeval brick and stone. Modern techniques of soil analysis can tell one what crops and wild-flowers grew in fields now buried several feet beneath modern streets. Many of our London gardens owe their rich topsoil to manure from long forgotten horses and cattle or vegetable refuse from meals unimaginably remote in time. Moreover there are a great many buildings still standing whose bricks are the compressed product of other fields, usually not far distant, whose clay was dug out in the early nineteenth century and fired in local kilns. The process is not just cumulative but to some extent cyclic also –

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf …

Seeing the past is not a matter of waving a magic wand. (Though traditionally local historians have behaved as if it were, contrasting past and present as if the two were totally separate realities, beginning paragraphs ‘It is hard now to imagine …’) It is much more a matter of wielding a spade or pick, of tracing routes – and hence roots – on old maps, of reading the browned ink and even fainter pencil scrawl of preserved documents, whose own edges are often crumbling away into a powder, themselves joining the fur, flesh and faeces to which they testify.

People have suggested or hinted to me that surely the only places whose local history is worth going into in depth are ‘interesting’ areas – ‘historical’ ones, like Hampstead or Greenwich, or York or Bath. When I ask them if they don’t suppose that other places also have a history, they say ‘Oh yes, but you know what I mean.’ As a matter of fact I do know exactly what they mean; they mean that, unless an area actually has a number of ‘old’ buildings standing, which in London usually means eighteenth-century buildings not disguised behind modern shop-fronts but nicely white-painted and readily recognisable, they do not care to envisage its past. This is a perfectly acceptable point of view, but it is not one I share.

In the local history of towns and districts where so much is already patent and indeed on display, the dynamic tension between what you see and what you know to have existed once and still to exist in some fragmented or symbolic form, is largely missing. Moreover townscapes which have managed to retain such a homogeneous aspect over a large stretch of time are, by definition, areas which have not suffered the complex social upheavals and physical dislocations that make their history worth studying. Tales about Beau Brummel in Bath (‘where one can so easily still imagine him’) or Keats in Hampstead – where one can still imagine him – are fascinating to local inhabitants, but they do not actually lead one anywhere; one cannot draw any general social or historical conclusions from them. Places that have been socially and architecturally pickled are too atypical to be examples of anything but themselves. Paradoxically, these places in which local ‘concern for the past’ is often so marked among successive generations of moneyed and leisured inhabitants, actually tell one less about the past as a whole or about the processes of historical evolution than do more ordinary, battered places.

In addition, not only is the past history of an accredited ‘historical’ area obvious for all to see, but often what is still hidden has been so fully documented already by a series of scholars, plagiarists, band-waggoners and chatterboxes, that little discovery remains to be done and what there is can only consist of the unattractive task of setting others right regarding some cherished piece of local fable. Books on areas like Hampstead (to choose the example so near at hand to my own territory that their outlying fields touch) are legion. Some, both old and modern, are excellent. Many are virtually worthless, typical examples of the ‘Idle Stroll Around the Old Stones’ school of local antiquarianism, which endured for so long in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, but now at last is being displaced by something more stringent. In those nineteenth-century compendia about London and its surroundings, often copiously illustrated with cheap engravings which antiquarian dealers now chop out and mount, the same localities – and the same stories about them – occur over and over again, while vast tracts of London are barely touched upon. Typical is the attitude of Howitt, friend of Mrs Gaskell and author of The Northern Heights of London (1869), who did the usual rounds of Hampstead and Highgate with a glance in the direction of Kilburn Priory (site of), but dismissed Camden and Kentish Towns with the remark ‘these places do not lie within the limits of this work.’ One might give Mr Howitt the benefit of the doubt and assume he was speaking geographically, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ‘scope’ implied was social as well: at his period, the once-favoured villages of Camden and Kentish Town were steadily declining into urban working class districts and, as such, were apparently becoming invisible to gentlemen with antiquarian interests. In fact, Mr Howitt lived on Highgate West Hill, well within the fringes of what was, or had recently been, considered part of Kentish Town. Nor were his eyes fixed resolutely upwards: he writes with moving pity at one point of the plight of horses straining under repeated lashes to drag heavy loads up this steepest of hills, and of his own attempts to get something done to alleviate their distress. But evidently it didn’t occur to him that the streets through which these horses had just passed might be a worthwhile subject for investigation.

So Kentish Town, like most of the other districts which now form London’s ‘inner ring’, is for the historian comparatively untouched and therefore particularly tempting. It is, to use an archaeological metaphor, like a dig on a new site where earlier comers have not been burrowing about disturbing things and perverting evidence. In addition, there happens to be a wealth of archive material concerning the district, hardly any of which has been exploited: most of it was collected over the course of two lifetimes by members of the Heal family – owners of the big furniture shop in Tottenham Court Road – and is now in the archives of Camden Public Library. The other reason for the choice of Kentish Town is more fundamental: by a combination of circumstances, it exhibits many of the classic and most interesting features of the long-term metamorphosis of mediaeval village into twentieth-century renewal-area.

There have, for centuries, been pressures on Kentish Town, formative and conflicting ones; its present equivocal situation, geographically midway between city and suburb and partaking of some of the characteristics of both, reflects a struggle that has been going on certainly for two hundred years and perhaps for much longer – that between the needs of the district as a district in which people live, work and sleep, and the needs of the rest of London and the country to use it as a corridor. In the beginning, certainly before the Normans, perhaps even before the Romans came, there was a road, passing somewhere near St Pancras old church and continuing northwards. From it dates the existence and history of Kentish Town, as of very many other places, and from it stem most of its problems.

Kentish Town is not special – except of course to me, but I cannot expect any but other local inhabitants to share my particular attachment to it. I have taken it as a subject, not because it is special but because it is archetypal. The general outlines of its story are those, with modifications, of a million other ancient villages gradually absorbed into metropolises; not just round London but in many parts of England, and not just in England either. Paris, too, has its Kentish Towns. So has Moscow – though there they would be harder to disinter. If, therefore, I dwell on particular local events, personalities or structures, it is because I am using them to demonstrate a pattern, geographical, historical and social. I am using Kentish Town to give a local habitation and a name to the expression of something far more general, and in the hope that some readers may perhaps be sufficiently interested and inspired to look at other, comparable, areas with fresh eyes afterwards.

I am also conscious of being typical of my own era, just as Mr Howitt was of his, just as the Rev. Dr Stukeley, eighteenth-century resident, Druid, and enthusiastic Roman camp-finder, was of his. That I should wish to live in and even write about a district as traditionally ‘unpromising’ as Kentish Town, is, I have no doubt at all, symptomatic of certain social shifts that have taken place within my adult lifetime. In the last fifteen years or so large areas of this inner-city ring have become visible again in a way they were not when Mr Howitt was writing. Paradoxically, it is now these areas, which appear so unattractive to the outsider travelling – traffic himself – through the traffic-wracked main street, which actually attract the most passionate loyalty and commitment from inhabitants of several different social levels. It is perhaps here, rather than in the self-conscious, ex-rural ‘villages’ of the Bucks, Herts, and Sussex commuterlands, that something resembling an old-fashioned identification with the soil of the place can most readily be found, even though that soil is represented by tarmac, asphalt and the sort of old York stone slabs which ‘no local authority could afford to buy and lay in these days’ (in the words of the urban historian H. J. Dyos).

Possibly the very existence of commuterlands, spreading wider and wider, and more and more dependent on the car, devaluing the rural image by associations with the phoney, has helped to revive the idea of attachment to a physically compact urban landscape, and to the ‘urban values’ reassessed by sociologists such as Peter Willmott and Jane Jacobs. Certainly the wholesale destruction of large parts of London and many other towns since the Second World War in the name of ‘planning’ has led to a massive loss of confidence in shining visions of a Brave New Future and to a revaluing of such districts as still retain some of their traditional aspect. The loss of a sense of place that follows upon big urban redevelopment schemes is not just due to the physical disturbance and remodelling of the territory: even when the new tower blocks, motorway junction or whatever have become familiar to the eye, they still convey little idea of being here, on some ordinary but individual patch of land. This is partly because they have no local distinguishing features and ‘could be anywhere’, but more because the whole scale is wrong – non-domestic, monolithic, discouraging. Urban motorways work very well when you are in a motorcar, and tower blocks work well too when seen from a car speeding along: soothing white oblongs that rise and sink before your eyes, dream cities, not quite real. But none of it works well for the pedestrian on the ground. By contrast, areas like Kentish Town are, despite huge traffic problems passing slowly through them, essentially pedestrian areas to the people who live in them. If you want to get to your place of work, or to a school or a shop or a street market or to visit a friend on the far side of Kentish Town, you don’t get the car out or wait for a bus: you walk, in just the same way, and quite likely along the identical route, that other people, hundreds of years ago, walked on similar errands. Their paths, their muddy cart-tracks, their hedgerows, lie beneath your feet.

‘The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath’ still, at the time of writing, proclaims itself from the lintel of the house in Prince of Wales Road. But the squatters have been evicted (or, as they insist, have managed to induce the Council to re-house them) and the house is in the hands of builders. Originally it was supposed to be knocked down as part of a grandiose scheme for the area, conceived at a period which now seems laughably remote. That was why the squatters found it empty in the first place – a theme in Kentish Town’s most recent history to which I shall be returning at a later stage in this book. The bit of land on which it and the rest of the terrace stands was originally ‘scheduled as an open space’ in the jargon of the planning report, and had that been carried through the field underneath would indeed have been revealed again as the inscription seems to predict, though perhaps without its cows and buttercups. But in fact local resentment about the destruction of inoffensive, liveable houses became so intense in the early 1970s that the plan was abandoned, at any rate for the moment. Currently, the house is being rehabilitated (the jargon of this decade). The roof has been taken off and put on again, at the upper storey a large expanse of new, yellow London stock bricks shows the house’s original pristine colour by contrast with the greyish tinge the rest of it has now assumed. The variegated windows are being restored to the correct, twelve-paned uniformity. When Camden Council does decide to do up an old house for its own tenants, it restores it to its original appearance with a care and knowledge few private owner-occupiers emulate – which, ironically, leads the casual passer-by to the false assumption that the house has been acquired by middle-class owner-occupiers. Since this book will inevitably contain a number of harsh words about those who are now the public custodians of a very large slice of Kentish Town, I should like to put their care on record also.

Perhaps some council servants, reluctantly abandoning the authoritarian, late-1940s planning precepts on which many of them were reared, have come round in recent years to the realisation that William Morris’s famous dictum still has validity today. It is often quoted, but I make no apology for quoting it again here; it needs perennial restatement: ‘… These old buildings do not belong to us only … they belonged to our forefathers and they will belong to our descendants unless we play them false. They are not in any sense our property, to do as we like with them. We are only trustees for those who come after us.’