A Good Parcel of English Soil

by Richard Mabey

  Charles Pearson died the year before the Metropolitan Line officially opened, and ten years later the board appointed a very different kind of man to become its chairman. Sir Edward Watkin was a hard-headed northern businessman, with railway interests all over England, including the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, the South Eastern and the French Chemin de Fer du Nord. And he had a private agenda for the Met. He wanted it to be the London section of a mega-railway joining Paris (where he reputedly kept a mistress) with his home town, Manchester (where he kept a wife). It would have involved a considerably more daring adventure in the bowels of the earth than any of the London tube diggings, and in the delicious understatement of one of his aides, he was ‘frustrated only by the political and financial problems bound up with constructing a channel tunnel’.

  Watkin did create his trunk line in the end, and the Great Western Railway opened in 1897. He died in 1901, and didn’t see the full flowering of his personal cut-and-cover run. But in the preceding years he had been driving the Metropolitan Line ‘extension’ ever further westwards. The potential problems of suffocation posed by having steam trains in enclosed tunnels had been solved by the development of ‘condensing’ devices, in which the exhaust fumes were passed through cold-water tanks on board the locomotive. So the line pushed on, reaching Swiss Cottage in 1868, Harrow, Pinner and Neasden in the 1880s, Rickmansworth in 1887, Chesham in 1889, Aylesbury in 1892 and Uxbridge, on a branch line, in 1904. On the way some station jewels were created that have since vanished. St John’s Wood is now on the Jubilee Line, but was originally a Met halt, just half a mile from Lord’s Cricket Ground. For a few months in the summer of 1939, at the urging of the MCC, it was renamed Lord’s Station, until it was closed in November of that year. Its remains now lie under the Danubius Hotel, Regent’s Park.

  Meanwhile the Metropolitan Railway was prudently buying up parcels of pleasantly rural land around the line far in excess of what was needed for the permanent way itself – and in the process exposing (for anyone who didn’t already know) what vast swathes of England were owned by Oxbridge colleges and the Church. In 1908 Robert Hope Selbie became general manager of the Metropolitan and saw that there were other, more feasible business opportunities than using the Met as part of a link between Paris and the North-West. The company was perfectly positioned not just physically to transport workers between the city and the country, but to sell them an entire rural dream. It would build rose-wreathed cottages that would tempt commuters to live outside London and therefore be in need of the company’s trains to get home: the market as Möbius strip. Over the next few years Selbie engineered a number of private Acts and legal loopholes that gave the Metropolitan Railway the right to do what had previously been forbidden by its constitution: to buy and develop land for purposes other than railway use, without any statutory sanction or time limit (chiefly by hiving such activities on to a separate but associated company). A few years later, the chairman of the Metropolitan Railway, Sir Clarendon Golding Hyde, had the brass to put a public-service gloss on the building bonanza that ensued: ‘The Metropolitan has always had one definite policy. It was that whenever the jaded Londoner went northwards in pursuit of his ideals – open air and a garden – there the Metropolitan tried to follow him.’ But from the outset it was clear that the Metropolitan was in the van, dangling a home-grown carrot.

  Just how the term ‘Metroland’ (or ‘Metro-land’, as the company preferred to spell it) originated is the subject of various urban legends. One version attributes it to James Garland, a copywriter employed by the company’s Advertising and Publicity department. Another traces it to a verse by the journalist George Robert Sims which succinctly, if wincingly, sets the tone of the image-building that was to follow:

  I know a land where the wild flowers grow,

  Near, near at hand if by train you go,

  Metro-land, Metro-land.

  Meadows sweet have a golden glow.

  Hills are green in the Vales below …

  Leafy dell and woodland fair,

  Land of love and hope and peace,

  Land where all your troubles cease,

  Metro-land, Metro-land,

  Waft, O waft me there.

  Whatever its origins, it was an inspired naming, evoking a fairy-tale Avalon that could be reached by the modern magic carpet of an electrified railway. That year it became the title of the company’s annual guide, and the prompt for a whole new design. The cover of the 1915 edition (‘Price One Penny’) carried a full-colour painting of a bright young thing, in bonnet and long white dress, picking flowers in a tree-fringed meadow; and subsequent issues all featured rustic images of Chiltern landscapes or classic Metroland mock-Tudor houses. The contents praised the amenities of various areas along the line, and included announcements of properties for sale on the new mushrooming estates.

  In the early editions, the appeal of the Met Line’s province to weekend pleasure-seekers (including fossil hunters and clay-pigeon shooters) was strongly underlined, as for instance in the copy about the Orchard Bungalow and Field at Ruislip, ‘An Ideal Resort … for School Outings, Bands of Hope and Other Parties’, and there were advertisements for maps and rambling guides. Golf especially was offered up as the sport du pays. There were at least eighteen golf courses being advertised in Metro-land by 1920, not just as destinations for a day’s play, but as pleasant and convenient amenities to have at the end of the garden. The stress on the physical, and often it seemed spiritual, health to be found at the end of the line was endorsed by Selbie himself, who wrote in The Railway Yearbook for 1930 that ‘Metro-land lays definite claim to be the most healthy district round London.’

  The great campaign worked. Over the next ten years property developers unrolled Metroland estates all the way from Wembley Park to Chesham. The grandest was the Cedars Estate, built on 500 acres of farmland between Chorleywood and Rickmansworth, which the estate-management arm of the Metropolitan Railway bought for £24,000 in 1919.

  The houses sold as soon as they were on the market, as the fairy tale of Metroland was playing to a receptive (one is tempted to say captive) audience. It had been launched during the tail end of a widespread reaction against the industrialization and urbanization of the countryside, a feeling that had found expression in phenomena as diverse as the Arts and Crafts movement, the ‘flight to the land’ and the pastoral poetry of the Georgians. It reached its fullest flowering in the aftermath of the Great War, when there was a popular yearning for the green fields of old England as an antidote to the obscene horrors of the trenches, and a fit place for homes and gardens for the returning soldiers. In 1926 the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, published a eulogy for rural England that could have come straight from a Metroland brochure:

  The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load of hay being drawn down a lane as twilight comes on, when you can scarcely distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in the autumn evening, or the smell of the scotch firs; that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, must have caught on the air when they were coming home from a day’s forage.

  An appeal to such sentiments was a powerful part of the government’s programme for national unity in the troubled 1920s.

  But there is an intriguing feudal footnote to this story of the mostly democratic colonization of the Chilterns. The Met’s commuter traffic pretty much petered out at Aylesbury. But during the 1890s the company extended their line deep into rural Bucks and Oxfordshire, through Waddesdon, Quainton Road, Brill and Grandborough Road, ending at Verney Junction. This was largely because of pressure from the Duke of Buckingham at Wotton and his neighbour Sir Harry Verney (from Claydon House), who were both on the board of the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway. The ABR ran six miles of track from Aylesbury to Quainton Road, and connected up with the ‘Brill Tramway’, the Duke’s private line to his esta
te. In 1891 Sir Edward Watkin saw the potentialities of this stretch of line as another jigsaw piece in his grand dream of a super-railway (perhaps it should have been called the Cosmopolitan) between Paris and Manchester, and persuaded the Met to buy out the ABR.

  The Quainton Road/Verney Junction extension now became an extraordinary hybrid, though well within the limits of Met Line eccentricity. It transported London horse manure out for the Duke of Buckingham’s farms at night and ferried the local toffs to and from the City during the day – in some style. It had two Pullman carriages (named Mayflower and Galatea) with window blinds of green silk, and above each seat, marvelled the Railway Magazine in 1910, was ‘an ormolu luggage rack with finely chased ornamentation and panels of grass treillage’, while glass-topped tables were lit by ‘a tiny portable electrolier of a very chaste design’. Whisky was served en route in crystal glasses.

  In the end, this forelock-tugging by the Met had to give way to commercial hard-headedness. The number of travellers out as far as Verney Junction was often in single figures, and starting in 1932 with Waddeson, these outer-limit halts were closed. Brill went in 1935 and Verney Junction in 1936, though the latter remained open for goods traffic until 1947.

  With the onset of economic depression in the 1930s, the development of Metroland slowed down, and with it the fortunes of the company. The government drew up plans to take overall control of London’s passenger transport, and in June 1933 the Metropolitan Railway Company ceased to exist and was absorbed into what was soon called simply London Transport. The Second World War brought all housing development abruptly to a halt, and the raft of Town and Country Planning Acts in the 1950s and 1960s severely controlled it in rural areas such as the Chilterns. Now, in 2013, it’s a different, privatized world. New upmarket estates are popping up sporadically right across Metroland’s old territories, and new entrepreneurial railway companies are joining up lines in a way that must have Sir Edward Watkin cheering in his grave. But the spirit of Metroland – a territory in the mind as much as on the ground, neighbourly, sentimental, oddball, accommodating and forever fraying at the edges, continues to thrive.

  The story of how the Mabeys arrived on the fringes of Metroland three years after the Metropolitan Railway disappeared has become a modest legend in our family. I think we were simply chuffed to have found a moment of real prescience in our dad’s life, which had later petered out in illness and disappointment. But looking back at the story now, its ingredients seem to echo those of the Metroland myth itself: the shining hope of technology, the escape from turmoil, the green haven at the end of the line.

  I remember hearing the full (and doubtless slightly embellished version) just after my dad died in the 1960s, when I was just twenty. We were sitting in what was virtually a Metroland theatre – the ‘lounge’ of our detached 1930s house on the edge of Berkhamsted, with its view through the ‘French windows’, over rows of box and laurel hedges, to a strip of undeveloped parkland and the cedars of Lebanon from which our road got its name. And we were riffling through an old brochure of business machines. Inside was a picture of my dad’s own invention, the fully patented ‘May-bee’ automated ledger book. He’d worked as an accounts clerk in a City bank in the 1930s (riding the Northern Line from Norwood then) but had been spotted as having a gadgeteer’s mind and an intuitive understanding of accounting machines. In the mid-1930s he was sent to Germany as part of a contingent to scout out new business technology. They’d toured the big machine companies, and their hosts had boasted of German factories’ flexibility, and of how easily they could be converted into, say, small-arms manufacture. By a bleak but providential coincidence, the party was staying at the same hotel as a National Socialist rally at which Hitler (and Dad swore he saw him) was in attendance to give one of his psychotic performances. Dad returned home with no doubts about what was going to happen, and in 1936 moved my mother and their small daughter out of London, away from the bombs to come.

  The reason they chose the Chilterns never made it into the family myth, except, perhaps, that it was the first stretch of open countryside which from a German point of view was on the far side of London. But the nagging lure of Metroland must have played a role too. My father was a curious kind of techno-patriot who could easily have escaped from an H. G. Wells novel, and the idea of a retreat in Deep England from which you could be effortlessly beamed into the commercial centre of London would have appealed to him.

  What was on offer, just a score of miles north-west of the capital, was the dream of satisfying two strong and contrasting human drives: to be both settled native and adventurous pioneer. The Metropolitan company’s pitches at helping their customers resolve these dreams were masterpieces of arcane double-speak, blending antiquarian nostalgia with an appeal to the frontier spirit, and subliminally suggesting a kind of resonance, a continuity, between the ancestral journeys of fieldworkers and their clients’ daily forays to and from the City:

  This is a good parcel of English soil in which to build home and strike root, inhabited from old, as witness the lines of camps on the hill tops and confused mounds amongst the woods, the great dyke which crossed it east and west, the British trackways, the Roman Road aslant the eastern border, the packhorse ways worn deep into the hillsides, the innumerable fieldpaths which mark the labourers’ daily route from hamlet to farm. The new settlement of Metroland proceeds apace, the new settlers thrive amain. [Metro-land brochure, 1927, a year after Stanley Baldwin’s appeal.]

  The spot our family had fetched up in, the expanding Hertfordshire market town of Berkhamsted, wasn’t on the Metropolitan Line itself (Dad commuted, usually, from the local LMS main-line station), but it was, in character and by definition, squarely in Metroland. The company mapped out its signature estate as the land which lay up to five miles either side of the line, a penumbra (or perhaps ‘curtilage’, to use an aptly antique estate agent’s term) of countryside which straggled almost 50 miles from Baker Street to the remote heart of north Buckinghamshire. Our nearest Met station was only four miles to the south, at Chesham, so we were passport-carrying citizens of the new Arcadia. And we had all the accoutrements that made up ‘a good parcel of English soil’, as laid down in the company’s manifesto. Stretches of Grim’s Ditch, part of the ‘great dyke’ system that divided up the tribal ranches of the Iron Age Chilterns, snaked through commons north and south of our house. There were mysterious mounds in most of the woods and Berkhamsted High Street itself was partly a Roman road. Even the origins and character of the new community in which our house was situated replicated those of Metroland’s core in their combination of urban opportunism and do-it-yourself backwoodsmanship.

  Cedar Road was part of a new housing estate built on what had once been the landscape park of Berkhamsted Hall, the residence of Graham Greene’s uncle Charles. The Hall’s estate, like many others, was broken up just after the First World War. The western half of its grounds was sold off for council houses in the mid-1920s, the eastern for 200 red-brick commuters’ dwellings ten years later. (They were advertised as ‘homesteads’, adding an instant sense of old habitation.)

  But this is where our neighbourhood’s story starts to wander from the utopian blueprint laid down by the Metropolitan Railway. The two new settlements were separated by about 100 acres of the old park – rough grassland, specimen trees, terraced tennis courts, walled gardens, all the trappings of a grand estate – which remained as an undeveloped no-man’s-land, slowly returning to the wild. It became, of course, an adventure playground for every child that lived in its two contrasting estates, which could just see each other across the park. Grammar Diggers and Council Bugs (as we called each other) glowered across the scrub like rival football supporters, jealous, respectively, of the other’s street skills and home privileges. But we rubbed along, as adjacent tribes must do, and somehow worked out a code of territorial rights and acceptable behaviour. The Hall itself survived for a while as a boys’ prep school, but became infested with rot and had to be
demolished. Its brick remains lay like two long tumuli at the foot of the park, full of cryptic secrets and possibilities.

  When I began seriously exploring this wilderness in the early 1950s (our neighbourhood gang of nine- to twelve-year-olds called it The Field, as if it were the only one in Creation), it had evolved into a kind of common, and was not being played in by the sedate rules of Metroland at all. Our dads dug up turfs from the park’s derelict lawns to lay on their own modest greenswards, and recycled the Hall’s elegant bricks and marble in their garden walls. They were mostly city workers, and walking to and from the station they wore out their own ‘innumerable’ footpaths, based around a diagonal transect across The Field, from which small side-tracks radiated to individual back-garden gates. With an entrepreneurial spirit that matched that of the railway company, our gang recognized the market potential of this regular throughway and its captive audience, and set up an orange-box stall alongside it, under one of the park’s great walnut trees. We nicked vegetables from our fathers’ gardens and sold them back to the hapless growers as they trudged home for supper, too tired and vulnerable (and maybe a mite proud of our cheek) to resist. In the landscape between, increasingly a jungle of feral ornamental trees and burgeoning hawthorn scrub, we created our own network of camps and inscrutable mounds, impressive in their complexity and aboriginal sense of occupation despite a total absence of provenance, and acted out the fantasy of being Amazonian explorers. We learned to cook on wood fires, churn butter on upturned bicycles, build huts, invent a kind of Lord of the Flies sex, and devise ways of torturing kids from the council estate when they strayed across our boundaries – all entirely proper skills for pioneering settlers.