Under the sheer pressure of numbers, the social organisation was, of necessity, changing in these years: old parishes like St Pancras were soon to be scissored up into smaller, densely populated parcels, old landmarks were every month being lost. Between 1851 and 1871, the population of St Pancras rose from 166,000 to 221,000. Half way through this period the population of Kentish Town alone was given as 23,000. The old village was all but drowned in a flood of anonymous urbanness, yet through this anonymity a new identity as an urban district was struggling.
The newspapers, particularly the local ones, reflect all this seething growth, but in an inevitably dazed and myopic way. Thus the momentous coming of the railway yards to Kentish Town appears in the Camden and Kentish Towns Gazette only as a series of querulous details: new, poor people, it was complained, were crowding into Kentish Town; the railway workings attracted ‘riff-raff’ and spawned illegitimate babies, some of whom were subsequently to be found dead at the bottom of cuttings or abandoned in convenient railway carriages – the classic no man’s land of the late Victorian novel. There were complaints that the noise of the new line was scaring horses in Camden Road (under which the line ran), and an intermittent grumble about lost footpaths and inadequate compensation. The footpath question was in fact debated by the vestry in November 1867, and one could wish they had taken the matter further. Present day Carkers Lane, a dank inlet between two factories on the Highgate Road opposite College Lane entrance, is the rump of a once respectable and useful right-of-way that crossed the fields there in the direction of Hampstead, passing near the Gospel Oak itself. An early plan for the Lismore Circus development allowed for its inclusion and development into a road, but this seems to have been conveniently forgotten by the Midland Railway when the time came.
The Company also suppressed the traditional Gospel Oak Easter Fair, and indeed probably did for the actual Gospel Oak, though a certain mystery surrounds this venerable tree. Various claims have been made for it – there is evidently something about oak trees which makes people lose their sense of the probable – and a motley and fundamentally unlikely selection of people are reported to have preached under it, starting with St Augustine (c. 590) and going on to Wycliffe, Wesley and Whitefield (of Whitefield’s Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road). You might well think there would be local consternation when the actual day came for its removal, but in fact the ending of the oak fades into imprecision. On a detailed map of 1834 it is shown very clearly lying near the present Southampton Road (the borough boundary with Hampstead), approximately on the site of the present-day Wendlings Council blocks. Yet the development plan for the Lismore Estate (c. 1850) shows it inked in and labelled considerably farther east, in the middle of the present railway land. Had its very existence, by that time, become a matter of myth and romantic conjecture rather than of existential fact? If so, that seems in itself a measure of how far events, unchecked by any responsible overall plan, were overtaking the inner suburbs by the middle decades of the century. Little wonder that, by the 1870s, reminiscences from ‘An Old Inhabitant’ and ‘Glimpses of the Past’ had become a regular feature of local papers: local history was by then acquiring the appeal of the fairy tale. References to cow-keepers and hay-fields took on a mythic, visionary quality. The phrase ‘railway milk’ (which meant milk brought by the new trains and stored in the new refrigeration depots) was spoken with meaning: in practice, it was probably more healthy than milk from cows kept in confined city quarters, but it was regarded as being in some high moral way less desirable. In the same way the new public houses, traditionally stigmatised as ‘gin palaces’ though the days of ferocious gin-drinking were then past, were regarded as less moral than the old inns had been. Even the ancient ‘dwellings of the labouring poor’, the huddles of wooden shacks that pre-dated the new streets, were seen, once they had been swept away, with a sentimental eye. The squalidly rural Camden Town dwelling of the chimney sweep in Dombey and Son seems regretted by Dickens once it had ‘vanished from the earth’. The sweep now lived in ‘a stuccoed house three storeys high, and gave himself out, with golden flourishes upon a varnished board, as contractor for the cleansing of railway chimneys by machinery’.
The railways may not have exactly brought the new commercial style, but they typified it. The correspondent who wrote to the Gazette in February 1868, the year St Pancras station was finally opened, hit more than one nail on the head. He complained about the new advertisements on the railway arches in Kentish Town Road (the viaduct of the North London Railway) and went on ‘it is most unjust … that these great companies should be allowed to disfigure our neighbourhood in this wanton manner. What a storm there would be if a railway company were to attempt to carry a line of arches over Belgravia!’
What indeed. But Kentish Town was not Belgravia, and the proliferation of railways had now ensured that it would never become so. Indeed if all the railways proposed during the boom year of 1863 had actually been built, virtually the whole of the district, the east side as well as the west, would have disappeared under rails and heaps of cinders! There was even a line suggested to Highgate Cemetery, like the Necropolis Company’s private line from Westminster Bridge Road to Brookwood in south London.
It seems that the effect of the new acreage of shunting yards on the houses in Highgate Road, and on the terraces off it like Mortimer Terrace and Prospect Place, must have been similar to one of those Victorian scrap books where different pictures are stuck next to one another to create a composite but often ill-matched landscape. One year, the people in the good-class terraces and large, select villas on the west of Highgate Road looked out at the back on fields, hedgerows and elm trees with a clear view towards Hampstead. Two or three years later the frontage of the houses was just the same, the road was just the same – but the back-land had become a landscape of shunting trains. Prospect Place now had a prospect of coal bays. Pleasant Place was a travesty of its name. Except where actual garden space was lost, no one compensated the inhabitants for this grim transformation in their habitat, but it is clear that the bottom fell out of the property market in this particular area. For instance, throughout 1867 and 1868 a big house was interminably advertised in the local paper as being to let for £50 per annum (a price above the mean level, but suspiciously cheap by upper-middle-class standards). It was described as having ten rooms and a conservatory and as being ‘three minutes from the Bull and Gate’, where the omnibuses stopped – a fulsome phrase which obscured the fact that this placed it squarely in the railway-blighted area, but evidently did not obscure the fact enough to tempt any tenant. Later, the price was reduced further. By the end of 1868 tactics had changed, and similar large houses in the neighbourhood were being advertised with the proximity of the railway as an inducement to purchase: it was suggested that their site would shortly be needed for yet more railways, and that therefore they represented an investment.* But it was not to be. That year, the North London availed themselves of some of the Midland’s land to insert a branch-line to Tottenham which crossed Highgate Road. It carried away with it the playground of Southampton House Academy and St John’s Park House opposite, but did not involve much demolition of houses. Highgate Cemetery never got its necropolis line, perhaps because it would have had to cross the land of Angela Burdett-Coutts. The railway had come, had done its worst and then swept on, cutting off streets and lanes leaving behind a permanent legacy of smuts, fumes, noise, vibration, but leaving also houses, gardens, people stranded in its wake.
Those who could, obviously moved out. Ford Madox Brown the painter left Fortess Terrace in 1866. Comparison of Censuses for the Highgate Road area in 1861 and 1871 is instructive. In Lower and Upper Craven Place and Francis Terrace, ascending the Highgate Road, people with several servants lived in 1861, including two doctors with resident apprentices. There was another doctor in Bridge House opposite. There were the ubiquitous small academies. Further up, in Fitzroy Terrace, was the entrance to a remarkable late example of the pleasure garden –
Weston’s Retreat. Mr Weston only opened the place at about that time, converting his own garden and gradually adding grottoes, fountains and cascades; he advertised firework displays, the traditional balloon ascents and other delights, all readily accessible by omnibus from central London. He claimed that his gardens covered seven acres and were lit by 100,000 gas jets, neither of which is believable. The vestry, who had at first been opposed to his venture on the grounds that it opened on Sundays, later commended him for keeping ‘howling cads’ out of his premises, but this did not save his Retreat. The whole chimera was swept away by the railway within five years, so Mr Weston may have been a compensation-hunter; but, if so, he was not a successful one: the newspaper of 1868 records his bankruptcy, by which time he was working as chairman at the Bedford Music Hall, Camden Town. Fittingly, several years later Weston’s house was being lived in by a Mr Wedderburn, Railway Superintendent.
The overall picture in 1871 is of a far greater number of houses in multi-occupation than before. Some, as you would expect, retained middle-class tenants, but others had become crowded: that is, the social mix was now considerable. For instance, at 53 Highgate Road were living, in 1871, a coachman, his wife and four sons, all of whom, down to the six year old, were listed as ‘locomotive cleaners’. An engine fitter, his wife and son lived in the same house. Further up again, at 103, a cow-keeper still lived, but in the houses on either side of him were engine-fitters. In 109, a substantial Georgian house whose three-storey bay at the back had previously commanded a fine view to Hampstead, lived a widow of forty-five and one servant. Next door lived a sixty-one-year-old comedian and his family. Further north again, in the section of the road formerly known as ‘Green Street’, which was particularly badly blighted, the social decline was more pronounced. Labourers, charwomen, hawkers of china and many other ephemeral trades of the Victorian era, had moved in. And this, it should be remembered, was less than five years after the railway’s establishment. I suspect that the Census for 1881 may show a more pronounced decline and a progressive thinning of the numbers of middle-class tenants still hanging on, but at the time of writing (1976) that Census is not yet available to be consulted. By law, one hundred years has to elapse before the possibly scandalous secrets of people’s domestic arrangements may be casually exposed.
Several new churches were built to minister to the supposedly urgent spiritual needs of the greatly-increasing population: rather fortunately however, as it has turned out, the scheme enthusiastically submitted by Canon Dale (the vicar of St Pancras) for ten new Church of England churches in the old parish was firmly opposed by both vestry and parishioners on the grounds of expense. The churches that did get built mostly stand today forlorn and quiet, their expensively rough-hewn stone darkened by a hundred years of soot, houses in which God Himself can no longer afford to live. In their day, they were crowded, particularly the non-conformist† ones where popular preachers (including Spurgeon) promised their pleasantly titillated congregation hell-fire and damnation – but it should not be supposed that ‘everyone went to church then’, either in Kentish Town or anywhere else. Universal church-going is one of those golden age myths: ‘everyone’ never went to church. It was mainly indulged in – often indeed to excess – by middle-class families such as the Pikes, by the more respectable working class with middle-class aspirations, and by the not-quite-so-respectable who went for what they could get out of it in the way of Sunday School prizes and boots for the children. But as social institutions and foci for local life the importance of the churches in newly urbanised areas like Kentish Town would be hard to overestimate, and charitably-minded clergymen were among the most prominent and powerful of local figures. Two ragged schools were opened in Kentish Town in the late 1860s, one in Reeds Place near the Rotunda Organ factory and another off Hawley Road. A mission hall was presently opened in Warden Road – Lyndhurst Hall, a mission-to-the-slums administered from the new church at the corner of Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, a fact which tells one much about what was happening in Kentish Town at this time. Soup kitchens and free dispensaries were opened in Leighton Road and in Holmes Road, supported by voluntary contributions – the buildings still stand, now under the aegis of the all-benevolent Council. Bags of coal were distributed. Penny readings were held in the church schools, which were almost invariably described by the local press as having been ‘a great success despite the inclement weather’. Ladies, from Baroness Burdett-Coutts downwards (both socially and geographically) held perpetual sales of work at which the proceeds of their ample leisure hours were sold to raise money. ‘Berlin woolwork’ was the most favoured form of pastime, and there were shops in Kentish Town devoted to selling solely the materials for that, at three-pence farthing the dozen skeins.
The management of St Pancras workhouse (down by the Old Church) and its local relieving stations, where grudging handouts were made to people who were not workhouse inmates, was the subject of continual dissension through the 1850s and 1860s. In 1868 a running battle was going on between Harding, the Medical Officer to the Board, and Chapple, a relieving officer of ‘over-bearing manner’. It was said in the vestry meeting that Mr Harding was kind to the poor but that ‘some considered him too meddling’. It is not clear whether he won his battle with the Relieving Officer, or whether the same quarrel was still continuing two years later. In the January of 1870 a girl of nineteen with a baby in her arms walked about the streets all one bitter December day, because an old man in the relieving office at Grafton Hall (west Kentish Town) told her when she came in the morning that the officer was not there and told her the same thing again in the late afternoon: in neither case was it true. The girl finally collapsed on the doorstep of the house belonging to Mr Flemming, a prominent non-conformist minister in the district. Mrs Flemming sustained her with bread and butter and sympathy; the muddle was sorted out, and mother and child were admitted to the workhouse. But the baby afterwards died of bronchitis said to have been contracted that cold day. The report of the inquest continued: ‘The Coroner said the worst of it was that a sturdy beggar, who knew how to go about it, could get anything he wanted, but a poor girl was turned aside.’
How had the antique machinery of local government – the vestry – coped with the enormous change and growth in the borough during the first half of the nineteenth century? The answer, not surprisingly, is ‘very badly’. The subject of local government in St Pancras, and its major task, the administration of the Poor Law, would require a book on its own to do it justice, and it constitutes in any case part of the history of St Pancras parish as a whole rather than of Kentish Town. Very briefly, the traditional method of local government in each parish had been by open vestry, a sort of parish council presided over by the vicar and churchwardens but which every parishioner had the right to attend. By the eighteenth century, with the slow but steady influx of people into areas like St Pancras and the adjacent parish of St Marylebone, and in particular the appearance of a substantial number of middle-class people who liked to run matters their own way, this form of homespun democracy was beginning to seem too cumbersome and disorganised. In Marylebone in 1768 a handful of local landowners managed to persuade Parliament to pass a Local Act converting the Open Vestry to a Select Vestry consisting mainly of themselves. St Pancras then attempted to follow suit, but met with greater difficulty. At the turn of the century a twenty-year fight ensued, led by Thomas Rhodes, the farmer of the southern end of the parish whose lands extended into Marylebone also, and who served at various times as a churchwarden and as an Overseer of the Poor. As the duties and responsibilities of the vestry, particularly towards the poor, increased in proportion with the population, he became a powerful local figure. When the Select Vestry was finally introduced in 1819 he naturally became one of its first members, along with the Duke of Bedford, the Lords Camden, Somers, Mansfield, Dartmouth, Southampton and prominent local citizens. He did not finally die till 1856, when he was ninety-three, and the parish had been transformed out of all recognit
ion from the area he had known as a boy and young man.
Of the change to Select Vestry, Walter E. Brown, who was cemetery clerk to the vestry right at the end of the nineteenth century, just before it became the Borough Council, has written:
… the people were somehow blindly feeling their way towards representative government in local affairs. The Select Vestry was supposed to be a step in that direction, but it was soon discovered to be a retrograde one. Inefficient as it was for the performance of the many duties that accumulated, the old system, at least, was self-government; but the Vestry created under the new Act rendered great landlords and property owners absolute masters of the situation … It is not to be supposed that the rate-payers, who were increasing daily in power and numbers, were content to allow the representatives of an oligarchy to usurp those rights which should be exercised by themselves, and to consent to be, so to speak, wiped out in thus summary manner. The result was that, for ten years, constant quarrels took place …
These quarrels, then and later, centred mainly on provisions for the poor and the poor rate levied to pay for these. By the Act of 1819 the Directors of the Poor became subservient to, and were elected by, the vestry: in practice, they were often the very same clique. The 1820s saw a number of petitions to Parliament from irate ratepayers, who resented the fact that they were asked to do nothing but indeed pay the rates, and in 1832 with the New Vestries Act the system was modified: in future the ratepayers were to choose and elect the vestry rather than the vestry being self-selecting and thus self-perpetuating. But there again in practice very much the same names cropped up. Two years later, the Directors of the Poor became the Poor Law Commissioners and there some new blood must have come in, for the late 1830s were marked by a series of expensive legal proceedings, the result of the Commissioners trying to have things their own way and the vestry ‘protecting the interests of the rate-payers’ (i.e. refusing to raise the poor rate). At one point two rival sets of Poor Law officials were in existence, both approved of by an unwise vicar trying vainly to keep the peace! Guerilla warfare continued, matters not helped by the fact that the workhouse built for 500 near the Old Church during the early years of the century was now accommodating over 1,000 and the whole poor relief system was cracking at the seams. Something of a climax was reached in 1852, when the vestry took the keys of the workhouse away and wanted to dismiss the Master. The Poor Law Commissioners claimed they had no right to do this, and the vestry fought back with handbills and posters proclaiming ‘Invasion by the Poor Law Commissioners of the Rights and Privileges of the Vestry and Ratepayers’. The Commissioners finally backed down, but the rows went on.
The Fields Beneath Page 21