by Tom Fort
Of course there has been loss. Of course a heavy price has been paid for our material comforts. Troutbeck is a little like Robin Hood’s Bay, pretty much detached from its past and from the impulse that brought it into existence in the first place. Superbly preserved in terms of its fabric, cherished and nursed as it never was before, watched over by the local council’s conservation officers who come down like avenging angels on anyone who dares interfere with an old barn door or even contemplates a PVC window or a satellite dish, Troutbeck has become an installation rather than a village, a facility, an amenity.
What cannot be taken away from it is the glory of its situation. To the south-west the valley is open, showing the gleam off the waters of Windermere with the blue outline of the Langdale Pikes beyond. To the east rises Applethwaite Common, where the Garburn track cuts over to Kentmere. Wansfell and Idle Hill, dark and rugged, block the way to the west, while northwards the road climbs steadily and steeply to the Kirkstone Pass, where Parson Sewell had the famous inn rebuilt in the 1840s. Along the side of the valley is the village itself, sombre grey stone mixed with bright whitewash, the low cottages overshadowed by the sycamores and oaks beside the lane. Higher still the crooked little fields with their wandering stone walls give way to bracken and heather and stone outcrops.
When the sun shines, the meadows dropping down below Troutbeck to its stream glow a brilliant green. The beck is thickly treed along its banks, but where the sunlight breaks through, it strikes the stony bed and turns it gold.
In 1615 an early George Browne, well known for his quarrelsome and litigious character, challenged the King’s right to take fish from the Troutbeck. He installed a weir and helped himself to ‘kipp trowtes and salmonds . . . in great abundance about 400 in number.’ The ‘kipp trowtes’ were the big lake trout of Windermere which migrated late in the year to spawn in the stream. They are not seen these days, but trout there certainly are. I saw them darting between the sunbeams, their flanks flickering, and I was heartened that the beck still deserved its name.
20
SWALLOWED UP
Three Mile Cross, Berkshire
‘Go on, ’ave a go.’ The one urging me on was Snowy, one of a quartet of white-haired stalwarts of the Three Mile Cross Bowling Club gathered on a soft June morning for a spot of chat and gentle ribbing and the rolling of a few bowls. I stepped cautiously on to turf as smooth as satin. Snowy pointed at the jack, pressed the bowl upon me and gave me a few tips as to how I should proceed. I crouched and sent the shiny black missile on its way. To my amazed delight it came to rest about six inches from the jack. ‘Not bad,’ one of the other old bowlers said. Snowy bowled and finished further away than me. Old timers’ abuse rained down on him.
I asked Snowy about the village. ‘Ain’t a village no more, is it?’ he growled. He’d come in 1959. There were seven pubs then, he said. I think this must have been an exaggeration – an inflated abundance of licensed premises is a common feature of the village viewed in a golden haze of nostalgia – but there were certainly three, of which one, the Swan, survives today.
Three Mile Cross, pre-1914
A decade after Snowy’s arrival in Three Mile Cross a different Golden Age was reaching its zenith, that of British road construction. The M4 motorway was nearing completion, having thrust its noisome way around the village’s northern flank and severed it from Reading. Another decade on and the M4 was joined by the A33 Swallowfield bypass, a spanking-new dual carriageway immediately to the west of Three Mile Cross connecting booming Reading with booming Basingstoke.
The old Reading–Basingstoke turnpike road had gone straight through Three Mile Cross, and had been the source of whatever prosperity and importance it had ever possessed. The road connected a string of villages south of Reading and by the time of Snowy’s migration to Three Mile Cross, it was doing duty as a major trunk route, a role for which it was wholly unsuited. The traffic jams were appalling and the residents of all the villages along it hated it, so the construction of the M4–A33 axis brought relief. But Three Mile Cross got the worst of the deal. Caught between the two new roads, it had its life and identity squeezed from it.
*
I left the haven of the bowling club to investigate further. The old village is strung out along the turnpike road, with offshoots along the lanes leading east towards Shinfield and west towards Grazeley. There are no fine buildings, but there are a few nice eighteenth-century cottages left, keeping company with Victorian villas and twentieth-century additions, and the Swan looks not that different from the way it did a couple of centuries ago.
The land between the original village and what is now the A33 used to be fields, but over the past twenty years or so has been progressively gobbled up by housing. The south side of the road to Grazeley was built over first. Now the triangle on the north side has been similarly transformed into an estate called Mitford Fields, the name in honour of Miss Mary Mitford, the celebrated chronicler of life in Three Mile Cross almost two hundred years ago.
I cycled slowly around Mitford Fields at mid-morning on a working day in school termtime. Except for the odd straggler, it was deserted; it was as if it had been evacuated after a warning of imminent chemical or nuclear attack. Pedalling along the main thoroughfare, Tabby Drive, I passed Fawn Drive, Elk Path, Caribou Walk and Sika Gardens (but no Muntjac Meadow or Red Deer Rise, which was slightly disappointing). I quickly lost my bearings, a common experience in the modern housing estate, where straight lines and right angles are anathema. This was the conventional interlocking maze of curves and irregular ovals and cul-de-sacs with houses arranged in clusters interspersed with units of garages, rectangles of marked and unmarked car-parking spaces and ‘green spaces’ in the form of play areas, patches of turf and beds with thick coverings of bark around council-approved varieties of ornamental trees, shrubs and perennials.
Two of the major housebuilders – Bellway and Bovis – shared the spoils at Mitford Fields. The Bellway portion contains a selection of their standard homes, the names given a literary flavour: the Yeats and Wilde have two bedrooms, the Scott three, the Christie (presumably Agatha), the Cookson and the Carver (?Raymond) four, the Shelley, Wordsworth and Dickens five. Bovis favour names suggestive of harmony, comfort and middle-class respectability. At Mitford Fields may be found the two-bedroom Amberley and Camberley (but no Ramberley or Shamberley); the four-bed Canterbury, Albany, Beaumont and Thatcham (‘stunning’); the five-bed Melville, Gaskell (‘offers stylish family living’) and Wallace.
On the Bovis site plan the different models are colour coded – green for the Wallace, apricot for the Amberley and so on. But the ‘affordable housing’ provision stipulated by the local authority in the conditions for planning permission do not have a designated colour or brand name. They are left an anonymous white, which suggests that they are there on sufferance.
One or two of the house-type names on Bovis’s Mitford Fields estate crop up at other Bovis developments around the country – the Canterbury, for instance, and the Amberley. But the company’s inventiveness in the matter of nomenclature is considerable. Knights Mount in Hampshire, for example, boasts the three-bedroom Sheringham, Chilworth, Southwold and Beaulieu, the four-bed Montpellier, Salisbury, Hersley and Austin, and the five-bed Chester. At Windmill View, near Petersfield, the Chester, Sheringham and Salisbury mix it with the five-bed Arundel and Dorchester, the four-bed Andover and Selsey and the three-bed Durrell. Speed north to Bedfordshire and Saxon Grove, and you will find the familiar Canterbury and Sheringham alongside the Olney, the Lavendon, the Malmesbury, the Wimborne, the Chellington and more besides. Shoot across to Eden Park near Rugby and you may encounter the six-bed Baxterley together with the Rowington, the Bickenhill and the Alveston.
Too much choice? An excess of diversity? Rest assured. There is no choice. There is no diversity. All these houses are the same. The homes built by Bovis are the same as those built by Bellway which are the same as those built by Taylor Wimpey, Barratt, Pers
immon and the rest of the volume builders.
Of course I do not mean that they are exactly the same. Some have slate roofs and some have tiled roofs. Most are red-brick, but some have rendered frontages. Some have some pebble-dashing or cladding or panelling. Some have brown window frames, some have white. Some have porches, some don’t. Some have dormer windows, some don’t. Different-coloured bricks in different patterns can be a feature, or not. Some are one storey, some two, some three.
But these are variations on a single, simple theme, embraced by housebuilders great and small across the land. Our estate dwellings are clones, bricks-and-mortar equivalents of the children produced by the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre in Huxley’s Brave New World. Spawned from a 3-D printer linked to a database located in some cultural and geographical non-place, they belong nowhere and everywhere. They spread a deadening uniformity that repudiates regional difference and denies any glimmer of individuality. Like our cloned town centres filled with the same chain outlets selling the same products from Wick to Penzance, our estates offer no clues as to where they are. The occupier of a Bovis or Bellway home in Somerset could be beamed across to one in Northumberland and notice no material difference.
The big companies have one defence to the charge that the houses they build are banal, derivative and characterless, and that is that their customers like them and want to live in them. It is the same defence offered by the supermarkets to justify their efforts to hegemonise food retailing and strangle local food shops. Of course people want these houses – first and foremost because there are precious few alternatives, and secondly because they are warm and comfortable and convenient.
That is not the point at all. The strength of demand is irrelevant to any debate about whether or not this is the best model for mass housebuilding. So too are the opinions of the volume builders. They have devised this model because it suits them. It requires nothing from them in terms of decent design or sympathy for place or setting. They do not have to employ architects; all they need is a bank of design blueprints to dip into. The scale of operations makes huge savings possible through bulk buying of materials and labour. With profits for the ten biggest builders up by a third to £2.4 billion in 2015 they are not likely to look kindly upon any challenge to their way of doing business.
But a challenge there should certainly be, because these companies are peddling a grand deception. The Bellway Homes brochure for Mitford Fields states that ‘Three Mile Cross is a story of thriving village life and a sought-after gem of a location.’ This is highly fanciful, to put it charitably, and the implication that moving into a house on the estate will somehow provide a route into vibrant community life is a ridiculous misrepresentation. Snowy, stalwart of the bowling club, is spot on. This is not a village any more and Mitford Fields – with no shop, no pub, no church, no school, no sports club – is no more or less than an agglomeration of brick boxes bolted on to its side.
And the planners have much more in store for this ‘gem of a location’. The local authority, Wokingham Borough Council, have given permission for an estate of 172 homes on the land immediately to the east of the bowling club green. The winners of these spoils are Taylor Wimpey, who are also set fair for several hundred more houses a little way to the south, at Spencers Wood. Croft Gardens, the brochure warbles, ‘is modern village living in a growing community with its streets and pathways set in open space nestling in the village of Spencers Wood, where Berkshire village life is a tradition with some family businesses dating back 100 years . . .’
The council’s officers refer to Croft Gardens as ‘a sustainable urban extension to the existing settlement’ which is PlanningSpeak for ‘we are happy to see Spencers Wood swamped in new housing.’ In all, Wokingham Borough Council is favourably disposed towards the construction of 2500 new houses over the next ten years around Three Mile Cross, Spencers Wood and Shinfield. It has in effect surrendered the entire area to an alliance of developers on the grounds that its location between the M4 and the A33 is not much use for anything else, and that by concentrating new housing there, it can relieve the pressure on other villages more worthy of being protected.
Which is bad luck for Three Mile Cross, not that anyone seems to care very much.
*
By a neat twist of fate the old cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford lived and wrote her bestsellers about village life now contains the offices of Woolf Bond Planning, a firm of planning consultants specialising in trying to cajole or bully reluctant local authorities into granting planning permission for large housing developments on greenfield sites. The building, now called The Mitfords – why the plural? – is very smartly turned out in gleaming whitewash, which it certainly was not when the celebrated authoress arrived to live there in 1820. She described it to a friend as ‘a messuage or tenement . . . it consists of a series of closets, the largest of which may be about eight feet square which they call parlours or kitchens or pantries . . . behind is a garden about the size of a good drawing-room . . . on one side a public-house, on the other a village shop and right opposite, a cobbler’s stall.’
She was then thirty-three. Miss Mitford she was and Miss Mitford she remained: an only child, servant and slave to her parents, in particular her parasitic monster of a father. It was entirely due to his pathological selfishness, snobbishness, profligacy and addiction to high living and gambling that the three of them should have been reduced to finding refuge in Three Mile Cross at a rent of £20 a year. Their previous home had been very splendid: Grazeley Court, on the other side of what is now the A33. It had been rebuilt and renamed Bertram House by Dr Mitford in a characteristic burst of folie de grandeur which exhausted the residue of what had once been his wife’s considerable fortune as well as the £20,000 (worth around £1.5 million today) which his daughter had won with a ticket on the Irish Lottery.
The family’s finances were in a desperate state when they arrived in Three Mile Cross. Miss Mitford set about repairing them in one of the few ways open to a woman at the time, with her pen. Encouraged by a friend from Reading with literary connections, she began submitting articles to the London magazines. In 1822 the Lady’s Magazine published a sketch entitled ‘Lucy’ about the Mitfords’ maid. She followed this with two helpings of ‘Boarding School Recollections’ and then, in December 1822, with ‘Our Village’. This, in a revised form, became the opening chapter in the first volume of Our Village, published in 1824. Four more volumes appeared between 1826 and 1832, and they were followed in 1835 by Belford Regis – a thin disguise for Reading, Berkshire – and Country Stories in 1837.
By then Miss Mitford had established herself as a kind of national treasure. By locating herself so precisely in a particular place and by describing events, scenes and characters that were recognisable to everyone, she was able to give her multitudes of readers the impression that she was talking to them about a world they all knew and shared; that she was their personal friend. She became a celebrity; visitors to that part of Berkshire would be driven out to see her humble residence, even – if they were in luck – to take tea with her. She earned well, but whatever she earned her father contrived to spend. After her mother’s death in 1837, she became his nurse as well. He was as demanding an invalid as he was a devious and insatiable spender of her money. Poor woman, night after night she was required to read to him and sit playing cribbage into the small hours, and only when he was ready to sleep was she free to write.
By the time this egotistical leech breathed his last in 1842, Miss Mitford’s own health had been broken by the years of toil and anxiety. She was wracked by rheumatism, a condition not helped by the decay of her famous cottage. ‘The foundations seemed mouldering like an old cheese with damp and rottenness,’ she wrote. ‘The rain came dripping through the roof and streaming through the walls. The hailstones pattered upon my bed through the casements and the small panes rattled and fell to pieces every high wind . . . the poor cottage was crumbling about us.’
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p; She clung on until 1851, when she was persuaded to move to a more comfortable cottage a mile or two away at Swallowfield, where she died in 1855. One of her visitors towards the end of her life was the energetic Rector of Eversley, Charles Kingsley. He found ‘the little figure rolled up in two chairs . . . packed round with books up to the ceiling . . . with clothes on, of course, but of no recognised or recognisable pattern . . . and somewhere at the upper end of the heap, gleaming under a great deep globular brow, two such eyes as I never perhaps saw in any other English woman . . . and such a tongue, for the beautiful speech that came out of that ugly face. She was a triumph of mind over matter, of spirit over flesh.’
*
Admirers of Miss Mitford’s stories assert that she was the first to reveal and do justice to the daily lives of ordinary country people. It is true that she was not at all like Jane Austen, who set her fictions in comparable places but had no interest whatever in how the agricultural working class lived. Miss Mitford focussed on the labourers, servants, gardeners and traders who lived around her in Three Mile Cross. She certainly did her best to bring out their dignity and humanity by chronicling the small things of life: an act of kindness or eccentricity, a cricket match, the hunt, haymaking, a walk in the woods, gathering primroses or nuts, going to the races.
There have also been valiant attempts to recruit her into a ‘rural realism’ school of writing, as a gentler female ally of William Cobbett. In a valuable book called The Rural Tradition, Professor W. J. Keith claimed that close reading of her work revealed ‘the darker side of her rural picture . . . there is shadow as well as sunshine in Three Mile Cross.’ He instanced her references to the agricultural depression, absentee landlords, the savage game laws and – most tellingly – an extended passage about the Captain Swing riots and what she called ‘the awful impression of that terrible time’. Professor Keith conceded that she may have ‘over-emphasised the idyllic circumstances of village life in her time’ but insists that ‘she is never misleading’.