The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  The English ideal home, then as now, was a detached villa, but only a landlord or builder without an eye to the main chance, or else with a very definite expectation of being able to let or sell the finished villas for high amounts, could afford to use land in such a prodigal way. Parts of St John’s Wood and Nash’s Park Villages are the classic surviving examples of building to fulfil an ideal rather than for the immediate profit motive, though no doubt profits were made. Another such area – now almost all rebuilt – was The Grove at Kentish Town Green (opposite Grove Terrace): a solitary double-fronted house of the period remains, shorn of its garden, surrounded by cliffs of flats of both ‘mansion’ and council variety. There is a pleasant early nineteenth-century villa with decorative eves still standing at the corner of Prince of Wales Road opposite the Mother Shipton, and a few more, semi-derelict and spectral, at the junction of Kentish Town and Hawley Road. But most of St Pancras was not developed in this way except where individual landlords built individual dream homes, big or small, for their own habitation. In the places where it did occur the detached nature of the houses was either destroyed by subsequent in-filling (as in Gloucester Place, Leighton Road) or the houses were pulled down later in the century for a continuous terrace to be built – this was the fate of ‘Bellina Villas’, which went up along the newly opened Fortess Road around 1820, but were replaced later in the century by a dreary run of houses, when lower-grade housing swamped that quarter after the coming of the railways.

  The typical ribbon-development in St Pancras parish, and indeed all over London, around 1820, was already the terrace. This was the form of building that made most economical use of the land available along a given road-frontage. In fact this peculiarly English type of house, found nowhere else in the world except in places to which the English exported it, is thought to have been due, to a large extent, to the prevailing building-lease system. The road frontage would be divided into narrow but often quite long strips, running back from the roadway at right angles. At the front, each house would occupy the whole of the cramped width, commonly no more than about sixteen feet. The spare space was (and is) all at the back, on land that was no use to the builder because there was no road access to it – at least until another street was planned, parallel with or at right angles to the first. Here the houses, so cramped-looking from the front, could extend into back-additions – which are called that even when the ‘addition’ has not been subsequent to the house’s building but is an integral part of the design. Here were – and are – yards, lawns, vegetable gardens. Even today one terrace house in Leighton Road has a garden of 200 feet, and gardens of 80 or 100 feet are common in the district. Yet houses of this type have, typically, only two or at most three rooms on each floor. The conception is radically different from that of the Continental ‘house’, in reality a substantial tenement block with multiple lodgings grouped around an interior courtyard; its oddity struck Louis Simond and produced a memorable image: ‘The small houses in London are very narrow and high with a number of small storeys, one for eating, one for sleeping, a third for entertaining company, a fourth underground for the kitchen, a fifth right at the top for the servants. The speed, agility and ease with which the whole family hops up and down between these different floors makes me think of a bird-cage with its perches.’

  As family homes today, these houses do not fulfil modern concepts of good design: four sets of stairs to service no more than eight or so rooms obviously date from an extinct era when there was no shortage of people to fetch, carry and sweep. But the design is otherwise less inconvenient than outsiders suppose. The numerous separate strata, initially reflecting the socially stratified nature of nineteenth-century life, adapt well to the disparate needs of a modern family, who do not necessarily wish to gather in one large circle round the parlour lamp of an evening, or even round the television set: modern lighting and heating systems render such unity unnecessary. The larger terrace houses have also proved very suitable for multi-occupation, with a separate household to each floor and the stairs (where the lavatories were normally situated anyway) as common territory. Post-war local councils, in their wisdom or folly, have destroyed acre upon acre of such multi-occupied houses in areas like Camden and Kentish Town, in the belief that such ‘shared, substandard accommodation’ was not good enough to be used as homes any longer. It is only now that the errors of such wholesale, high-principled destruction become apparent, when it is observed that the carefully purpose-built accommodation which has replaced these traditional terraces simply lacks, in most cases, the flexibility and privacy which the old houses, whatever their shortcomings, were able to provide. But this is a melancholy theme to which we shall be returning.

  Within a very few years of their building, many earlier nineteenth-century terraces fronting main roads were already in fact proving their adaptability; their ground floors were being converted into shops. A number of the Kentish Town terraces Bennett listed in 1821 as being new housing were, within a decade or so, to lose their small front gardens to a ‘front-extension’, with the old front room becoming the back parlour of the shop. You may take this as a sign of England’s overall industrial prosperity and growth of consumer goods during this period, or as a portent of Kentish Town High Street’s decline. Doubtless it was both.

  But in Bennett’s era the keynote of the district was still selectness: otherwise his little book would hardly have been written, or not at any rate with his note of quiet pride. He was pleased, for instance, that the residential building of recent years had resulted in a proportion of public houses to private ones ‘more equitable than it formerly was.’ Also, ‘Besides the chapel of ease to the parish church, there is a meeting house of the Independents, which was opened in 1807, and another of the Wesleyan methodists opened in 1817 … The village is watched throughout the year, and lighted from the 1st day of September to the last of May, pursuant to an act of Parliament obtained in 1817.’ He speaks of highway robbery as a thing of the rustic past: this was another epoch. And yet people looking back to Bennett’s time a generation later were, in turn, to remark how tame Kentish Town had become since those days. In 1820, the often-flooded road (Water Lane) between Camden Town junction and the start of Kentish Town proper, was still unpaved and unlighted and mostly unbuilt. The Regent’s Canal, which crosses under the road at that point, was opened that year, and presumably the coal merchants and the small industries, many of them connected with the building trade, which soon clustered themselves round its wharves did nothing to improve the immediate neighbourhood. A canal was not then, or for more than a hundred years, considered a social amenity, but an industrial one. A correspondent to a local newspaper in the 1860s, looking back to these years, recalls that this stretch of roadway was felt to be dangerous at night. The inhabitants at the southern end of Kentish Town (the Jeffreys Street area) used to fix bells to their shutters to act as a warning if anyone should try to tamper with the fastenings. There were no police then, only ‘old Lorimer, the Constable … and of course there was a sense of insecurity then’. A rural kind of insecurity. There was still a duckpond on one corner, and a village cricket ground on the edge of what later became Hawley Road. But Bennett wasn’t interested in ducks (unless confined within the ‘model farm’ then attached to Bateman’s Folly, which he notes approvingly) and probably considered the chickens which then still stalked and pecked in every side lane as something Kentish Town could well do without. Here he is on the area’s developing amenities:

  … we now turn to the gratifying task of recording the benevolent institutions of Kentish Town, for which, whether they be viewed with regard to their number, their extensive usefulness, or the practical good resulting from them, the village may proudly vie with any other in the kingdom.

  A school for the education of the children of the poor, bearing the name of ‘The Kentish-Town and Camden-town National School’ was opened at Kentish Town-town on the 12th of August 1815.

  The inhabitants of both villages had
contributed to it by public subscription, and

  The melioration which the advantages conferred by this institution have effected in the manners and morals of the children of the lower classes, must be visible to the most casual observer … the inhabitants see even in the streets, decency where they encountered disorder, and civility where they experienced rudeness … a large proportion of children among the inferior classes attend the established church, and contribute with their voices to the devotion and pleasure of its service …

  These schools then occupied a plot of land on the eastern side of Royal College Street (named for the Royal Veterinary College in Camden Town), near the top, just above the fork with St Pancras Way. Later, in 1849, they moved to a new building in what became Islip Street further up the town – part of which remains to this day, with its bell on top, as a Church of England primary school. The old school building in Royal College Street became a laundry for many years, but the site passed in due course to the Board of Education and a board school was established there in the 1870s. It was rebuilt and enlarged in 1908, and is there today as Richard of Chichester Roman Catholic secondary school – a circumstance which would doubtless have shaken the original subscribers of Kentish and Camden Town, through whom the site was acquired in those anti-Papist days.

  Bennett mentions a ‘Dispensary for the Relief of the Sick Poor’, a ‘Ladies Working Society’ for making clothes for the poor, a newly established Auxiliary Bible Society and a Religious Tract Society; both these last were presumably dedicated to the dissemination of those great avalanches of moral print which deluged the nineteenth century, drifting down into every odd corner, silting up behind items of furniture or wedged into the draughty gap between floor boards – so that even today, when a house is demolished in an area like this one, grimy tracts issue from between the house’s joists, just as broken tea-seats and clay pipe bowls surface perennially in its gardens. The establishment of tract-producing organisations in 1821 was a sign of the deluge to come, and presumably it would fall to Bennett to do much of their printing. But his favourite local charity was ‘The Lady’s Society, for the relief of the industrious female poor of Kentish-town and Camden-town,* during their lying in’ – a charity which, as he says, ‘must more particularly obtain the most powerful advocacy in the breast of every mother’. The prevailing note of Victorian charitable enterprise, genuinely compassionate yet intolerably patronising by twentieth-century standards, is already audible in his writings. It is clear too that the institutionalisation of social organisation, mainly through the Church of England and various non-conformist sects, was already, in the early nineteenth century, superseding older, ad hoc village organisation.

  All in all, with plenty of people like Bennett around, and others with more substantial resources living up at Green Street and The Grove, Kentish Town does not sound a bad place to have been poor in during the early nineteenth century, even if you did get tracts along with your baby clothes and your hot soup. Despite a succession of bickering Poor Law officials, your lot was likely to have been far more fortunate than that of similar families in places that had never had much of a middle-class population, like Somers Town, or quarters like Spitalfields and Whitechapel from which the wealthier citizens had moved away.

  But it should not be supposed that an oppressive Victorian earnestness had wholly overtaken Kentish Town even before Victoria came to the throne. It still retained, until the middle of the century, enough of those characteristics of a ‘village retreat’ – superficially – to attract the sort of talented, mildly bohemian society that either cannot afford or does not want to live in a more imposing district. Lady Hamilton is said to have lived for a while in a house near the Castle, where – one hopes – Nelson’s garden-loving uncles made her feel welcome. Mrs Serras, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland, was living in a house in Trafalgar Place (opposite present day Sainsburys) during the protracted law suit which she instigated against her natural father in order to claim her rights. One can see that Kentish Town would be just the place for people who required a fundamentally quiet and respectable life without actually being ‘respectable’ in the most conventional terms. Doubtless, a number of the summer lodgings to let there came in discreetly useful for ladies wishing, for natural reasons, to be out of the public eye for a little while, and not all those allegedly there for the sake of their ‘consumption’ were actually suffering from anything as lethal and permanent.

  John Keats, that archetypal and genuine consumptive, lived for a while in a house in the then newly built Mortimer Terrace off the Highgate Road (named after Farmer Mortimer) where Leigh Hunt also lodged. The house is still there, hemmed in by railway arches. Later in life, Leigh Hunt lived in another house on Highgate Hill ‘the corner of Bromwich Walk’ – that is, near a footpath which ran across what is now the Holly Lodge Estate. It has several times been claimed that Shelley lived in Kentish Town, but this is not true. What is true, however, is that in 1824 when Byron’s funeral cortege passed in the rain through Kentish Town, Mary Shelley and her friend Mrs Williams, both recently widowed, watched it from the windows of the lodgings they then had in Trafalgar Place and marvelled bleakly on the effects of time and chance and on the premature deaths of their own husbands. Mary Shelley, incidentally, was not impressed by Kentish Town’s famous healthy atmosphere: she considered it an ‘odious swamp’.

  A number of artists and engravers lived in Kentish Town during these years – the sort of names which, though well enough known in their day and eulogised on their passing, were not, in the final analysis ‘known to the man in the street of the next generation’ – that is, not in the blue plaque class. One, Burford, even had a special circular building there – the Rotunda painting rooms, where he painted the Diorama exhibited in a similar though more opulent building in Regent’s Park. The Rotunda stood behind the National Schools, and later became an organ factory. Another artist, an engraver called Grignion who lived for many years in Grove Terrace, was, as his name suggests, a French émigré, one of those who had taken the north-west passage from Somers Town, where they first settled, just as Irish immigrants were to do a couple of generations later. Another French immigrant – or so I assume – was a gentleman called the Baron de Beranger, who lived in a place called ‘Target Cottage’, which I have not been able to locate but which must have been up the Highgate Road – Green Street end of the village: it has a rural sound to it, and so do the goings on there in 1827. The Baron had a running feud with his neighbour, George Mason, who claimed that the Baron’s ducks used to cross the ditch that separated their two properties and eat his cabbages. One morning, he took out a shot gun and shot twenty-seven ducks and ducklings – the Baron was particularly outraged at the massacre of the ‘innocent’ ducklings, and perturbed because his children had also been running around while Mr Mason had been taking his pot shots. To this, Mr Mason said that yes, indeed, the Baron’s children had been annoying him too. He also threatened to shoot the Baron if he suffered any more trespass. For this threat, he was brought to court, where the judge opined that he was quite unfitted to be trusted with a gun and bound him over to keep the peace – which perhaps he did, as no more is recorded on this subject. It might be thought that this was one of the last examples of such country-style feuds in Kentish Town before the encroaching houses drove ducks, cabbages and fowling pieces further off, but not a bit of it. Full forty years later two people in adjoining houses in Leighton Road, right in the centre of the built-up area, had a bitter quarrel which centred on the unruly behaviour of a set of chickens (see page 159).

  Similar violent goings-on involving animals – dogs – between people otherwise leading a peaceful and law-abiding existence, occurred in the second decade of the century in Mansfield Road (now Holmes Road) between two tenants there: a Mr Cummings, aged about sixty, and a Mr Holmes aged about forty, whom I take to be the son of the Richard Holmes who laid out the land in houses. Holmes assaulted Cummings, and Cummings was finally awar
ded £100 damages by a sympathetic jury who would have liked to have given still more. The going rate for crimes of violence had increased considerably since the days of the manor courts in the fifteenth century. It was commented ambiguously in court that ‘the parties were both persons of respectability’.

  The same, however, could not be said for a Captain Borthwick, who in 1818 was residing at Village House, the ‘very pleasantly situate house’ by the Assembly House which J. F. King noted as having been earlier the home of a Captain Finch (see page 111). The coincidence of professions and rank does suggest a connection between the two men, but it is a little surprising that in his notes King makes no mention of Captain Borthwick, as one would have expected the scandal of his behaviour to have rocked the village. According to a contemporary newspaper report he