Another eighteenth-century house survives, with a mansard roof, and a second-hand car dealer on its ground floor, on the corner of Fortess Walk, once Willow Walk. Its memory goes back not only to willow trees but to the days when Willow Walk, now cut off short by Fortess Road, curved round in a crescent to meet the main road again, enclosing a paddock where Dr Rowley kept his horses, and passing en route another so-called Old Manor House – in reality, another eighteenth-century gentleman’s abode.
Further north up the Highgate Road there is the Bridge House, hiding behind a later pebbledash facade, and several cottages in College Lane, including a doll-sized pair with a triangular scrap of garden (appropriated from the public way by stealth, undoubtedly) and a sign saying ‘Ancient Lights’ nicely painted yellow to match the rest of the woodwork. Then, just before the point where the lane runs under its own specially-constructed arch beneath the Hampstead Junction Railway, it crosses a remarkable and now carefully preserved survival of Kentish Town’s late eighteenth-century prosperity in the shape of a row of bow-windowed shops, fronting a cobbled lane running between College Lane and the high road. It is called Little Green Street – the only reminder left that the main road at this point used to be known as Green Street – and the shops no longer sell coffee, ribbons and mousetraps but have become carefully modernised homes. Next to them, on the high road, are two more houses which are probably also eighteenth-century, but they have been altered almost out of recognition. One has a pleasant rose garden in front: the other, blinded by ill-shaped modern windows, is fronted by a wilderness of overgrown plants, bits of broken plastic, wall paintings, slogans and other signs of radical decay. A decent tallow-chandler once made his candles here.
But the finest survival of this era is Grove Terrace, at which point College Lane emerges from its tunnel and runs openly along the facade of the terrace between it and the lawns stretching down to the main road – a bit of waste which managed not to get squatted on in the eighteenth century – before losing its identity irrevocably in Woodsome Road. The terrace has twenty-seven houses, all much of a kind but not uniform, varying in detail within a gentlemanly consensus of opinion about what a town house should look like – for these were some of the first houses built in Kentish Town which conformed to the prevailing recipe for a town residence rather than aspiring to be a Gothic cottage, picturesque retreat or villa fit for a retired Roman general. They were a portent of things to come but, with the exception of a run of pleasant houses built soon after near Jeffreys Street at the other end of the town, few of the later Georgian, neo-Georgian or Victorian terraces that were to swallow the fields of Kentish Town were constructed with Grove Terrace’s fine detail as to iron-work and cornices. Within are elegant staircases, fireplaces and ceiling mouldings. Yet this terrace, now pointed out as a noteworthy example of what the eighteenth century could do when it tried, was, like much architecture of that period, put up by a builder without benefit of architect. Indeed perhaps its delightful irregularity is due, in part, to the rule-of-thumb techniques of uneducated men, who didn’t have much use for grand plans like Thomas Nash’s but knew what the genteel public liked: a nice Grecian style doorway, a nice balcony to show themselves on on summer evenings, a convenient iron holder for a lamp over the front gate, a walled garden behind and a mews for their chaises and traps – nothing opulent, no palace-facade over-all such as the great squares of London; just three- or four-storey family homes for people who liked decent brick combined with fresh air.
J. F. King’s depiction of the terrace is a particularly good example of the method he employed throughout. He shows several houses built, with scaffolding up, and the rest of the view is of the field that was there before. For the ‘Panorama’ does not embody what Kentish Town was actually like in (say) one given day in 1810, but is a retrospective record, made rather later in the century, presumably with the aid of previous sketches, and showing concurrently buildings which did not, in fact, coexist. It is clear from the notes accompanying it that King’s intention was commemorative and valedictory. As a lifelong resident of the village he wanted to record it at a phase which he could remember clearly but which was passing by the time he was adult. But it is not to be supposed that he necessarily deplored the changes he saw in his life time – or, to be more precise, he probably deplored them emotionally, but felt that this was an unworthy attitude, that one must move with the times, that after all these new terraces were very fine and a sign of progress. For example, ‘That portion where the trees and Barn stand, Six excellent houses are built. House No 25 is where farmer Holmes lived; the whole space is known as Holmes Terrace.’
The population of the whole of St Pancras parish in 1776 was stated to have been only 600 people, and though this is now thought to have been an underestimation the overall dimensions of the total would not allow for a very large error. By 1801 the number of people had increased to 32,000. Admittedly a large part of this huge increase would be accounted for by the 1790s development of Camden Town – which from now on we allow to fall away from our account of Kentish Town, as a place with a separate life of its own – and by the new and crowded development of Somers Town to the south of it. But it is plain that Kentish Town proper had grown too, if less spectacularly. The decision in the 1790s that the old chapel would no longer accommodate the populace was a sign of what was happening, and in 1817 the one that had been built to replace it further up the road had, in turn, to be enlarged.
By chance, this crucial period in the village’s development has been documented not only by King but also in a little book – the only one of its kind ever written till now – entitled Some Account of Kentish Town showing its Ancient Condition, Progressive Improvement and Present State. It was printed and published in Kentish Town by a J. Bennett who probably also wrote it – and is not to be confused with Elliott, who wrote later in the century and in a quite different, florid style. Writing in 1821, J. Bennett seems to have been a modest, conscientious person, much more inclined to admire the ‘Progressive Improvement’ of the area as evinced by its increasing gentility than to lament it. Here he is on the town’s growth:
It has been calculated that between the years 1775 and 1795, the village increased in its buildings one half – Within that period the Terrace, Upper and Lower Craven Place, Prospect-row, New Chapel-row, Hayman’s-row, a part of Mansfield-place and Spring-place, and Camden-row, were erected; besides other houses either detached or not particularly named. And subsequently to the last-mentioned year, a still greater increase has taken place; Mortimer-terrace, Pleasant-place, Cottage-row, Fitzroy-terrace, Fitzroy-place, Francis-terrace, Gloucester place, Montague-place, Inwood-place, York-place, Holmes’s-terrace, a very considerable part of Mansfield-place, part of Spring-place, Crown-place, Eden-place, part of Old Chapel-row, Alpha-place, Southampton-terrace, Trafalgar, Bartholomew-place, Providence-place and Cane-place, very much exceeding in the number of their houses one-third of the whole of the village, having risen on land which had previously been chiefly unoccupied by dwellings.
Kentish Town was reflecting what was, in fact, a general building boom between 1816 and 1826. Some of these new runs of houses led off, like Mansfield Place and Gloucester Place (present day Leighton Road) at right angles to the high road, making literal ‘in-roads’ into the fields, but most were in-filling developments lining the main road, each given a separate name according to the whim of the ground landlord or the year of its construction (e.g. ‘Trafalgar’). It was then considered quite acceptable to have a street name which changed every few houses up the same roadway, and these old names for the different sections and different sides of what is now all Kentish Town High Street persist on maps till the middle of the nineteenth century. A few fragmented sections of the terraces themselves remain to this day, dwarfed by higher late-Victorian or twentieth-century replacements, their doll-sized upper floors peering out over the top of inappropriate modern shops.
It took a foreigner at that period to define the curious an
d indeed unique spectacle which the outskirts of London then presented. London was spreading outwards along all its main arteries with an essentially urban growth. The fields behind the new terraces might still be as rural as ever, sprinkled with cows and barns, but they were no longer visible to the passing traveller. Instead, he saw rows of pedimented, stuccoed facades as uncompromisingly urban as any in the new planned developments like Bloomsbury or the Cavendish Estate. Yet places like Kentish Town, still improperly paved and lighted and innocent of drainage, were not really part of the town yet; the houses along the main roads were in every sense a facade. Louis Simond, visiting in 1812, perceived that there was something anachronistic about all these new houses, improbable even:
We have spent several days in the County of Hertford, twenty miles to the north of London. One travels half the distance between two rows of brick houses. New ones get themselves built every day [Ils s’en bâtit de nouvelles tous les jours]; the walls are so thin that you tremble for them…. One feels that the leases of these spectral houses must stipulate that no dancing is to take place there. London is stretching out her great arms on all sides, as if to embrace the whole countryside. Yet her population is not growing in proportion, it is simply displacing itself from the centre to the outskirts. The centre has become a trading counter, a place of business. Instead, the people live more spaciously in the suburbs, with better air, and more cheaply; the public coaches which pass by every half hour make it easy to travel back and forth.
The whole idea, so tenaciously English, of a separate small house for each family, was new to Simond; however his tolerant readiness to accept the virtues of a new way of life which was totally new to him is a marked contrast to the bitter detestation of the suburbs shown by several English writers a generation later. But about one thing he was wrong. He thought that London had already had her major spurt of growth, and would soon reach her maximum size and population level. How wrong he was the rest of this book will show.
7
Country into Suburb
Three years after Simond’s visit in 1812, another observer, an Englishman called John White, wrote:
It is not a little singular that with very few exceptions as to small spots, the whole gravel district will be built upon, when that space of Crown estate which lies within a few hundred feet of the New Road is covered with buildings. The gravel strata there approach their terminations, as if to say to builders ‘Thus far shall the town extend, but no farther. Here is the limit of local springs of fresh water, and here health and comfort require you to stop.’
Such pronouncements make odd reading in conjunction with the map of London that developed – and went on and on developing – as the century went by. But there was this much truth in them: the line of the New Road (Euston and Marylebone Road) more or less coincided, perhaps by design, with the ending of London’s ‘Taplow terrace’ of river gravel, which gives way at this point to worse-drained London clay. And the New Road did indeed mark, by the end of the eighteenth century, the limits of the grand building schemes, such as those on the Portland or Portman Estates or in Bloomsbury. It remained a boundary. There were pockets of high-class development north of it: Nash’s terraces all along the edge of Regent’s Park are the obvious example of this. But on the whole developers seem, like John White, to have been of the opinion that ‘here health and comfort require you to stop’. Not, of course, that they actually stopped building, but they didn’t build north of the New Road for the same class of person, and didn’t therefore nurse the same comprehensive schemes.
A piece of minor town planning was the Polygon – later called Clarendon Square – built on land originally part of the St Pancras Manor, subsequently owned by the Charterhouse and then by the Cocks family, one of whom became Lord Sommers or Somers. However, Somers Town (as the area is still called) simply failed to appeal to the sort of occupants for which the Somers family may originally have hoped. As the Gentleman’s Magazine put it in 1813, ‘everything seemed to proceed prosperously, when some unforeseen cause occurred, which checked the fervour of building, and many carcasses of houses were sold for less than the value of their materials.’ Later, and in consequence of this débâcle, Somers Town became over-crowded, and rather squalid.
Was the cause really so ‘unforeseen’, or were the administrators of the Somers Estate over-optimistic? Lord Camden’s estate next to it (the old Cantelowes manor lands) does not seem to have made the same error, in that their expectations were all along lower. The early streets of Camden Town on the east of what became the High Street – Pratt Street, Bayham Street, Royal College Street – were laid out not with fine houses but with modest ones: Dickens’s impecunious family lived here when he was a boy. Similarly the early houses on the Southampton (ex-Tottenhall) lands on the western side of Camden Town were described – in the official building leases of 1809 – as ‘third-rate’, and Nash (whose own Regent’s Park development adjoined them) called them ‘mean’. John White called them ‘miserable, modern erections’. It has been suggested that the resolutely lower-middle-class nature which Camden Town seems to have assumed from the first was due to the fact that the leases from ground landlord to builders were only for forty years and this discouraged speculative builders from putting up good class properties, but it is possible that the short lease was a symptom rather than a cause. A short lease would be cheaper to acquire than the 99-year one which had by then become standard in ‘better’ areas, and therefore would attract the smaller builder who would be likely to speculate only in modest runs of houses on a modest scale. The big landlords such as the Southampton and Camden families were not financial fools (that much is quite clear) and if they deemed that an area ‘ripe’ for building was only likely to attract a rather commonplace populace, they would tend (whatever they said in their initial brochures) to try to secure the sort of speculators who were at least likely to build in such a place. It was, you may say, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The southern part of St Pancras parish, for so long marginal urban land, was hardly virgin territory. It had numerous water-filled pits, the result of brick-earth diggings. There were the kilns themselves. There were a number of burial grounds and a sprinkling of light industries such as soap-boiling works. These must have combined to make the celebrated wells and the tea-gardens less attractive than they might have been, and certainly seedier than the relatively select establishments up the road in Kentish Town. There were plenty of cow-lairs still, for this area was, with Islington, one of the main milk-producing districts for the metropolis, but on the 1796 map of the district the old names of fields like ‘the Murrells’, ‘Church Field’ and ‘Figs Mead’ have disappeared, to be replaced by ‘Lower Brickfield’, ‘Upper Brickfield’ and ‘Dustground’. Farmer Rhodes and others were engaged in the lucrative business of turning pastures into bricks. It is true that brick-making is an essentially transient industry, which invades an area, despoils it, but then moves on to other fields. Sometimes the land passed straight from meadow to brickfield to acreage of terraced housing (as in Cruikshank’s famous cartoon in Punch), but sometimes, when the brick-earth was exhausted, it was allowed to return again to pasture. Much of St Pancras therefore retained for decades a partly-green, partly rural air. Building, in fact, was rather slow, because builders were not over-confident of the area’s potential, and this, paradoxically, helped to keep it more pleasant than it might otherwise have been. The population of St Pancras parish did, however, go from 46,000 in 1811 to almost 72,000 in 1821, over 100,000 in 1831 and almost 130,000 in 1841. But this is looking ahead.
It has been calculated that a good half of London was built by this odd, indeed unique, ‘building lease’ system. The landowner sold leases of parcels of land on the understanding that the lessee of each parcel would build on it a house or houses which, at the expiry of the lease, would become the property of the landlord. The ground rent which the lessee paid to the landlord would normally be only a peppercorn for the first year or two, after which
houses might be expected to have been built on it and the amount demanded would increase. But the lessee – the builder – usually had considerable freedom in the way he chose to use his land and thereby offset the amount of the ground rent against his profit in letting or selling the houses. Sometimes, in the more prestigious estates, the ground landlord would lay down rules about the size and general appearance of the houses, since, if the area declined into a slum during the period of the building leases, he would be the loser at the end of it. But this only occurred in comprehensive, planned developments, whereas in St Pancras in the early years of the nineteenth century most building was piecemeal – a terrace here, a line of detached villas there. Many of the speculating builders – and indeed the ground landlords – were, like the builder of Grove Terrace, quite small men, local masons and bricklayers who only ventured a few houses at a time, in the hope of being able to rent them quickly and then, but only then, use the rent to finance a little more cautious building.
In Kentish Town, many of the short terraces fronting or adjacent to the high road, which Bennett listed, were built in this way. Holmes Terrace, for instance, was built by ‘Squire Holmes’, a local farmer, tenant in turn of Farmer Morgan – in fact his descendants are landlords of that piece of Kentish Town property to this day. Evans Place (soon to be renamed Gloucester Place – the high street end of Leighton Road) perpetuates the name of the man who owned the livery stables opposite the Assembly House. Certainly a large number of the inhabitants listed in local censuses in the following generations declare themselves to be ‘owners of house’ or ‘living on rents from property’, and many of these were clearly, judging from their neighbours and from the street they lived in, people in relatively humble circumstances themselves. ‘Owning houses in London’ was not then, nor indeed until the 1950s, the golden nest-egg it subsequently became: it was the security of the more insignificant and cautious classes. The commodity of real value – the land – still remained in most cases vested in a ground landlord who was not the house-owner, and land ownership was very often a matter of luck and chance. Fenimore Cooper, the early nineteenth-century American novelist who was Consul in Switzerland in the 1820s, visited London then and dined with English relatives. These people had, two generations earlier, innocently bought a small property in the vicinity of London to give their children the benefit of country air, but when Cooper visited them he found himself in the midst of streets built upon the property, which were providing the grandson of the original purchaser with an income of between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds per annum.
The Fields Beneath Page 13