The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  How did Kentish Town fare in this situation? The answer is, much better than some places, but that is not saying much. Fortunately in the 1930s, when slum clearance began to be adopted as a Labour Party crusade, Kentish Town was not quite poor enough to attract great attention, in view of the limited funds available in that unprosperous time. But at the end of the Second World War all the signs were that the Borough of St Pancras was about to enjoy the attentions of Brave New Worlders in no uncertain way. The County of London Plan (1944) specifically labelled Kentish Town ‘an area in need of removal’. It was, according to the planners, ‘an inchoate community … peppered with small industries.’ What the prevailing opinion of the time did not allow is that the presence of industry was a sign not of sickness but of a viable community. In any case most of the small industries of the area were not (and are not) of a type that create excessive noise or smell. The remnants of the piano trade lingered on, the many mews, empty of horses, were being taken over by branches of the motor repairing business. The ugly building fronting Highgate Road (site of the entrance to Weston’s Retreat) was a lino factory, and the nooks and corners of the old streets contained many small workshops that made envelopes, boxes, wire gadgets, toys, patent medicines. Since then, with the coming of the Greek Cypriot community in the 1950s, minor branches of the rag-trade have moved in, often into parts of the large factories from which the tide of piano-making had steadily retreated. Small industries in which local people can find work near their homes have been an essential part of inner London districts, ever since they assumed their metropolitan identity. To apply to them the same criteria that one applies to suburbs built purely as residential quarters, is inappropriate. Yet ‘zoning’ – industry here, living space there – without flexibility or regard for preexisting situations was one of the basic concepts of the County of London plan, and one that still lingers, destroying jobs and bedevilling planning applications. Ironically it led, by the 1960s, to a certain amount of destruction in Kentish Town of existing homes, particularly in the Holmes Road area, on the grounds that they were in an area ‘zoned as industrial’.

  The Plan of 1944 was on a grand scale and, like all such spectacular exercises it contained ideas which would have been good ones – if other considerations could have been discounted. The best idea was a farsighted scheme for co-ordinating the main-line, suburban and tube railways in a more rational manner, something of which London is still, today, in considerable need. Had this project been carried through, Kentish Town railway station and Kentish Town tube station would no longer be sitting absurdly side by side opposite the Assembly House with no connection between them. The North London railway line would have been put underground for most of its length, and would in effect have become a branch of the Underground corresponding physically to the District Line and appearing on the Underground map. (Instead it is today the ‘Secret Railway’, a line of few trains, semi-derelict, and only kept open at all through constant agitation by the parents of children who use it as a cross-route to various schools within the borough.) The other great obsession of the 1944 Plan was the need for new ringway roads through London, a subject that has been furiously debated ever since. GLC road planners of recent years, locked in perpetual battle with militant residents’ associations, must have thought with wistful nostalgia of the days when their predecessors could airily announce that the Euston Road ‘would’ become part of the A Ring Road while the B Ring ‘would’ cut across Camden Town. Also proposed was a ‘Parkway’ connecting Primrose Hill with Parliament Hill, and a new ‘green lung’ between Camden Road and Agar Grove. Such ideas are of the kind which sound attractive on first hearing, but which, on analysis, prove to be based on the belief that the ideal human habitat is Welwyn Garden City and that urban habitats of a totally different order should be altered to conform as far as possible to this ideal, and that the urban areas through which these parkways, lung etc. would be carved were somehow non-areas that did not count. Both these misconceptions dominated town planning for the next twenty-five years and are not extinct today. Even in the early 1970s Camden Council (which superseded St Pancras Borough Council with the GLC reorganisation in 1966) were still demolishing streets of houses to create ‘green spaces’ (sacred phrase!) often in places where they were not particularly useful or where the surrounding traffic management schemes had rendered the roads too dangerous for children or elderly people (the chief users of gardens) to cross. A classic example of this type of planning misjudgement will be found adjacent to Hawley Road.

  Confronted with this Plan, St Pancras Borough seems to have felt a vague unease, a conflict between the idea that anything so splendidly forward-looking must be applauded and the lurking suspicion that they did not actually want a higher authority to try to turn them into Welwyn Garden City – a project which even the most sanguine of them must have suspected was doomed to failure. The good qualities of an urban environment as a place to live, work and play are quite other than the good qualities of a garden suburb, and if you attempt to change the town habitat too drastically you risk losing its essential qualities without gaining those of another type of place. But it was not till 1962 that an American, Jane Jacobs, wrote The Death and Life of American Cities, suggesting what large numbers of humbler people like Montagu Slater and the local shop-keepers had known all along: that an environment of streets and alleys can be a friendly one, catering adequately for most of the needs of the inhabitants. The Plan contained a sop-sentence or two about ‘retaining and encouraging the life of the communities’, but there was no suggestion how, in the presence of the new bisecting road schemes, this was to be achieved. The response of the Borough Council was to shuffle their feet and suggest ‘various modifications’ – including the abolition of the ‘green lung’ and the shifting of the B Ring Road out of the heart of Camden Town to the southern part of Kentish Town, an area where it long lurked in spirit. (Indeed this phantom road, resurrected by the GLC in the 1960s as the Motorway Box, effectively blighted for years the prospects of the streets in its neighbourhood – Jeffries Street, Ivor Street, the tops of Camden Street, Royal College Street and St Pancras Way, one of the oldest and most architecturally homogeneous corners of the district. At least the question mark over their future in the 1950s and 1960s saved these streets from being demolished for a new estate.) In the catalogue to an exhibition of its own in 1947, entitled ‘St Pancras of the Future’, the Council stated: ‘It will be seen that, if it is possible to carry out the provisions of the County of London Plan, St Pancras tomorrow will differ widely in appearance from St Pancras today and offer better amenities to its inhabitants. It is for us, as citizens of London and residents and workers in St Pancras, to help to turn the proposals into realities.’

  The same booklet contained the information that in 1939 (the last years for which figures were available) almost half the houses in the borough had been occupied by more than one family. What such statistical pronouncements hid was the fact that these houses, many of them three storeys high plus basement, had never been intended to house one small nuclear family apiece even when new. Typically they had sheltered in addition servants (sometimes four or five of these in a large house such as those on the Camden Road), extra relatives, or lodgers. But to speak of house-sharing as if it were an unmitigated evil was the standard prelude to the Council’s inevitable next remark about its plans for building self-contained flats: ‘In order to gain open ground space, each block of flats will be built as high as each site will reasonably allow.’

  It is painful now to reflect on the docility with which people accepted this and other arbitrary dictates about their future way of life. ‘They’, the Council, were felt to know best, and anyway the building of new homes was a sign that peace was here, wasn’t it? Not much building had taken place after the First World War, despite promises, and this had been a source of resentment. An interesting example of the patriotism of the period combined with a sense of regret at destruction is to be found in the preamble to
Grosch’s reminiscences, quoted in the preceding chapter: ‘Personally, I should like to see some effort made to preserve one or two rows of these streets and houses in which lived a people who did a very great deal to make, and hold, that Empire of which we are so proud today.’

  That was written in 1947, the very year that the first large chunk of the Empire (India) detached itself. But what is interesting about Grosch’s remark is not so much its backward-looking flag-waving but its calm concept of a future in which everything in his native district would be swept away in the interests of progress. If public opinion had reached such a point that people accepted this awesome prospect as a matter of course, no wonder local councils believed they could do absolutely anything they liked, with arbitrary powers greater than those of any private landlord. They could, and did – in London’s East End, in Birmingham and parts of Manchester. They did not go quite so far in Kentish Town. But it was a close thing. The exhibition of 1947 blandly laid out plans for property that was to be demolished in ten years, in twenty years and in thirty years, with no apparent perception of the social shifts and changes that might take place in that period and the consequent impossibility of predicting decay with any accuracy. The future, it was felt, was on the point of arriving, and once it had arrived it would be there for good, unchanging and unchangeable.

  Even when the actual future became the present and took (as it was bound to) a different form from that predicted, the static, mythic future with cloud capp’d glass towers, filled with contented socialist workers and set on billowing greensward, was not displaced from the imaginations of architects, planners and politicians. In 1962 when, after a spell in eclipse, Labour regained power in St Pancras, the cherished visions of the immediate post-war period were at once put into execution as if nothing had happened in the 1950s to render them obsolete.

  What had in fact happened was an unprecedented shift in the public estimation of the value of inner London housing property. The visions of the post-war planning generation (concepts which themselves dated back to the early Fabian movement) were all constructed on the basic assumption that urban properties started life as desirable, became steadily less desirable over the course of several generations and finally declined to a state of near worthlessness. To purchase them compulsorily at the ‘end of their life’ would not therefore pose any great financial problem for the local authority or be met (of course) with any opposition, since the inhabitants would be only too grateful to be moved out. House property was a wasting asset, as the descendants of Victorian speculative builders would tell one another, sadly creeping round unmodernised properties for which they could ask only minimal rents. What neither they nor the local authority foresaw was that, from the middle 1950s onwards, house prices in hitherto despised inner suburbs began mysteriously to climb.

  The trend started in Islington, where a complex of Georgian squares had indeed been overlooked for too long, but as it spread to Primrose Hill, Fulham and Camden Town around 1960 and to Kennington and Kentish Town a year or two later, a bemused public and a number of delighted estate agents began to realise that though the architecture was an important factor in this reassessment of worth, the crucial factor was a house’s position. The very nearness of these areas to central London, which for all the earlier part of the century had been a disadvantage in most buyers’ minds, had become the selling point. While it would be untrue to say that no one, any longer, cherished dreams of a country cottage in Mill Hill, it became apparent that a substantial section of the upper and middle classes were now prepared – even eager – to live in the very areas from which their parents and grandparents had departed for greener fields.

  The reasons for this radical shift have not to date been adequately explained, but a number of factors can be suggested. It would be simplistic to suppose that previous generations had just failed to notice the convenience of living near to town and near to buses, tubes and shopping centres, and that it only needed a few pioneers to point the way for light to dawn. The truth must surely be that, between the later nineteenth century and the 1950s, the disadvantages of the old inner areas were marked enough to outweigh the advantages. An important consideration during this period was, simply, the dirt of life near the centre. We tend now to forget – and many people approaching adulthood have never known – the sheer filth of London in the days when every household was warmed by one or more coal fires and all trains were steam. In Camden and Kentish Towns the train smoke alone from all the shunting yards must have ensured that the districts remained unattractive to middle-class families. It is surely no coincidence that these districts began to appeal again to the middle classes around 1960, precisely at the time when the steam trains were being withdrawn for good and when the clean air legislation that followed the ‘smog’ scare of the late 1950s was beginning to have a real impact on people’s heating arrangements.

  Socially, too, the situation had changed somewhat, even before the moneyed ‘outsiders’ began to arrive. To be working class in the late 1950s was to be enjoying a new prosperity and new health and welfare amenities of which previous generations had never dreamed. In a nutshell, the working classes no longer seemed ‘different from us’ to the young middle-class generation who were themselves enjoying a less sheltered and privileged life than many of their parents. Servants, in the traditional sense, had disappeared. The gulf between the young working-class wife pushing her small (planned) family in a pram, and the young upper-middle-class wife pushing her family in a similar but often rather smaller pram, was genuinely less than it had been at any earlier times. The schools, playgrounds and doctors’ surgeries of traditionally working-class areas no longer filled the emancipated middle-class parent with forebodings about germs and swear words.

  Other factors are harder to pin down. It is said that the revival of a taste first for Georgian and then for Victorian architecture has had much to do with the way the inner suburbs have become visible again: the ‘leprous, peeling facades’ and ‘Victorian monstrosities’ of the 1920s and 1930s observer had by 1960 become ‘delightful period properties’. But did this shift of view help to provoke the rediscovery of the Victorian districts, or did the fashion for all things Victorian which reached its chic peak about 1970 actually stem, in part, from the fact that people had already sought out Victorian town architecture for other reasons? A taste for urban stucco rather than suburban mock-timbering is the superficial expression of something much deeper – a rejection of the rural idyll in favour of a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan one, fashionably egalitarian. Over large parts of southern England the country village, in its traditional form, had died, killed off by various things including the influx into it of moneyed refugees from places like Kentish Town. It was the children and grandchildren of those refugees who returned, with a new if disguised romanticism, to seek another village – a village in the city.

  Obviously the country’s prosperity in those never-had-it-so-good years, however misguided and illusory it now seems in retrospect, meant that there was far more money available for house purchase than there had been in the depressed inter-war period, and this in itself tended to have an inflationary effect on concepts of value. Prices for small terraced houses will only rise from £500 to £1000 to £2500 to £7000 to £15,000 and upwards in the space of a decade or so if the money is in fact there. It was this same prosperity that produced the municipal redevelopment bonanza. Ironically, the beginning of the 1960s, when prices really began to rise steeply, was just the time when councils like St Pancras began to set the machinery in motion for long-cherished schemes, regardless of the fact that some at least of the supposed ‘slums’ due to come down were now valuable, well-modernised properties. Private interests and municipal attitudes were thus set on an inevitable collision course.

  In 1964 a Town Planning Consultant’s Report was issued for west Kentish Town, the old Southampton Estate. Today, it makes curious reading. A certain sophistication had crept in since the days when domestic heaven was supp
osed to lie at the top of a tower block with acres of space around it. High rise blocks had already come in for a lot of criticism, though it took the collapse of Ronan Point block in East London in 1968 to provide pig-headed local planning officers with a face-saving excuse for changing their policy. The authors of the 1964 plan appear to have been aware of the dangers of having ‘ground that belonged to everybody and nobody … an anonymous expanse of building blocks having neither front nor back, beginning nor end … the recognised urban values thrown out with the bathwater.’ And yet the comprehensive redevelopment plan they produced was, in many respects, a recipe for just that. Virtually the whole of west Kentish Town was to be demolished and replaced with blocks of varying heights, most of them not set along road systems. Many of the minor streets were to disappear altogether. In the Crimea area tower blocks were to be constructed. The basically ruthless and high-handed attitude to the landscape of people’s lives is betrayed by the remark ‘Of the old streets only Kelly street is worth preserving …’ In other words the criteria for ‘slum clearance’ had stealthily shifted over the years from ‘Is this in such bad condition it needs knocking down?’ to ‘Is this of sufficient architectural interest to be worth making out a special case for keeping it?’ Somewhere along the line the declared purpose of local authority redevelopment had been lost.