The Fields Beneath (16 page)

A correspondent to
St Pancras Notes and Queries
at the end of the nineteenth century remarked that ‘The name [St John’s Park House] still remains on the gate posts, but the house, which lay back from the road, was pulled down many years ago. I am told that it was very old, belonging probably to the seventeenth century.’ The land this house stood on was part of the Chomondley estate at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, so here, we have a very strong hint, was one of the vanished ‘gentleman’s houses’ of Kentish Town at a far more distant date. A second-hand car dealer’s now occupies this particular segment of malleable London clay.

One of the early nineteenth-century schools still stands. This was Southampton House Academy, once run by a Captain John Bickerstaffe, slightly to the south of the Gordon House, on the Kentish Town side of what was then a cart track and is now Gordon House Road. It has lost its side wing and its once-spacious playground to the North London Railway bridge that crosses the Highgate Road here, and the word ‘Academy’ has been erased from its facade. But it is still ‘Southampton House’ (alias 137 Highgate Road) and still possesses its fine, pillared doorway and fan-light. After a shadowy period in the 1960s, when the GCL believed themselves about to pull down the whole run for road-widening, and it was inhabited by squatters, it has now been rescued: its inside has been gutted and reorganised into modern units of accommodation while its outside has been restored to a careful simulacrum of its former looks.

Poets’ widows, artists, boarding schools – actors too: poor Clun, who established his wife and children in Kentish Town, at a safe distance from his mistress in London, and died because of this, was the forerunner of a number of Kentish Town actors. A late eighteenth-century one, John Palmer, was famed for his impersonation of none other than Dr Stukeley, by then dead but not forgotten. King says that the Kemble family lived for a while not far from Bateman’s property; and shows a four-square house close to the road uncannily like, yet not quite like, the present ‘Croft Lodge’ which is owned by the Sainte Union Convent School. The next house down, now gone, described as a ‘pretty villa’, was lived in for years by Joseph Munden, a well-known comedian of the early nineteenth century and a leading local light; he chaired a Harmonic Society which met at the Assembly House. Another comedian, Charles Matthews, renowned for comic monologues, lived at the same period about half a mile to the north on the other side of the road, on the edge of Millfield Lane. Did they visit each other for uproarious tea-parties? George Daniel, in a book called
Merrie England
, described Matthews’s house as ‘a pleasant thatched cottage at Kentish Town, rising in the midst of green lanes, flower-beds, and trellis-work, fancifully wreathed and overgrown with jasmine and honeysuckles …’ But Daniel’s own fancifully wreathed and overgrown description probably need not be taken too literally. He was writing at a time when the vanished gardens of London represented Lost Youth, Lost Eden, ‘Merrie England’ indeed, a debased and popularised version of Traherne’s ‘orient and immortal wheat’. Only labourers’ cottages were still thatched at that period, and Matthews would not have lived in one of those, since they were still (rightly) considered comfortless dens full of ‘low fever’. Anyway the small picture of the ‘cottage’ (in reality rather spacious) which appears in Howitt’s
The Northern Heights of London
shows a tiled roof with pretty barge-boarding under the eaves. Howitt, writing in 1869, spoke of the house as still standing then but as if he fully expected that within a few years terraces of drab bricks would march all over it – ‘the engulphing ruin of the advancing tide of population. What the last generation saw we see only in isolated fragments – a stump, a piece of ancient wall here and there. What we see our children a very few years hence will see no more.’ But in fact this gloomy prophecy, however accurate in general, did not in this particular case come to pass. Parliament Hill Fields, with the ponds which Millfield Lane faces, were finally secured as part of Hampstead Heath in 1889 and the ‘engulphing ruin’ was consequently arrested. Millfield Lane today, complete with a house which I rather think is Matthews’s somewhat altered, is one of those curious pockets of land (like parts of Hampstead, or Black-heath) which are not really like the country but which preserve a townsman’s
idea
of the country at a particular date, and which therefore develop a special interest in their own right.

In the late 1820s both the Southampton residence and another large house on Highgate Hill, the country seat of a one-time Lord Mayor, were demolished – a sign of London’s inexorable advance, not yet fully visible from their windows but perhaps perceptible in the smoke and smuts which increased in the atmosphere from year to year. On the site of the latter house St Michael’s church, Highgate, was built, and Highgate Old Cemetery was laid out on the house’s gardens, incorporating a cedar of Lebanon that once stood on its lawns and now is the centre-piece to the famous catacombs. The opening of one of the London Cemetery Company’s big new grounds here was in itself significant of an inexorable progression. As we have seen, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St Pancras, then known as in-the-fields, became a popular burial place, despite persistent tales of body-snatching. Another two burial grounds, nominally the property of St George’s, Bloomsbury and of St Giles (once ‘in-the-fields’ itself) were added on to the St Pancras churchyard in the later part of the eighteenth century, but even so by the first part of the nineteenth century the ground had, like the City grounds of old, become so stuffed with corpses that it was difficult to fit new ones in. Horrid tales were told in the 1840s of residents in the workhouse nearby seeing partially decomposed bodies dug up and shovelled unceremonially onto bonfires, and of the unpleasant stench of burning, putrified flesh. In any case the area – the old St Pancras manor – was by then inexorably set on the downward path into urban industrialisation. In 1822 the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company had established its works a little to the south of the church, and the same year St Pancras New Church, Inwood’s Grecian effort, was opened in the New Road, just over the border in upper-middle-class Bloomsbury. After this, the old church was seldom used, and it must have seemed as if it might be only a matter of time before it disappeared from the face of the earth. It was derelict for a while – just as it had been hundreds of years earlier – but after St Paul’s relinquished its long control over it in 1845 it was extensively rebuilt and reopened. No more burials took place in it after the early 1850s and indeed in the late 1860s a large section of the ground was lost to the Midland Railway (see Chapter 9). The era of the new, big cemeteries further out had come in the 1830s: Highgate, Kensal Green and Nunhead were then the acme of hygienic modernity, their green expanses as yet uncluttered with stones and impeccably gardened. In their turn, these overspill new towns for the dead were also to become semi-derelict places of Gothic gloom; in our own century new lands have had to be sought still further out, in Finchley or Southgate. Today, Highgate cemetery is shut for burial and subject to vandalism – the St Pancras churchyard story repeating itself. Such are the patterns of urban development (but see page 19).

What has been called ‘the full declension – meadow land to slum’ (Dyos) does not usually occur in one generation. It did in Somers Town, and more strikingly in Agar Town (see below) and in some parts of west Kentish Town when that came to be developed in the 1840s, but classically the progression is from farm-building and scattered cottages, to ‘gentleman’s seats’, to the individual villas of aspiring gentlemen, to rows of terraced housing for the commercial middle classes, to the same housing multi-occupied by the working classes. Similarly, for land that manages to remain unbuilt the progression is from unenclosed open country, to arable fields, to meadows to provide hay for the approaching town, to small ‘gentleman’s dairy farms’ or private gardens, to market gardens and cemeteries. With cemeteries, a dead end is reached, so to speak. One of the ironies of the legislation on the subject that took place in the later nineteenth century, in an attempt to ensure that the bones of the dead should be better respected than they had been in St Pancras, is that today the dead have far more security of tenure than the living. A cemetery is the one place that no individual or authority can redevelop – short of a special Act of Parliament and wholesale exhumation. At the most, it may be turned into a garden or playground, but it cannot be built over. Chance, and the determination of early nineteenth-century public health pioneers, took the garden of Ashurst’s one-time mansion house and stuffed it with the flesh of dead Londoners, many of them distinguished. Today, the Duke of St Albans’ garden to the west of it is covered with suburban houses and could, in another hundred years, be occupied by something quite else again – but in their plot the dead Londoners remain, with or without their distinction, immoveable, by their unseen presence turning the land into a petrified wilderness. Many of the tombs now overgrown and collapsing were originally endowed with a sum of money to assure their upkeep ‘for ever’ – sums of money which time and inflation have now rendered derisory, as obsolete as the monies left by pre-Reformation inhabitants of the district for masses to be said for their souls ‘in perpetuity’.

In its early, pristine and prestigious years, Highgate cemetery coexisted not only with the Duke of St Albans’ Property towards Highgate (soon to become the Holly Lodge Estate, home of the redoubtable philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts) but with the closing era of another
ferme ornée
down the hill in what was still then considered part of Kentish Town – later to be euphemised into ‘Highgate Rise’. This was the erstwhile Bateman’s Folly, till 1831 the property of Phillip Hurd, rich lawyer, vestry-man and bibliophile. He planted a grove of oaks, stocked with deer, and his dairy, piggeries, poultry yard etc. were said to be of the most up-to-date kind. A correspondent to a local paper later in the century marvelled in the same breath over Hurd’s deer and his illuminated manuscripts, as if both belonged to the mythic and remote past where Kentish Town was concerned. The estate was later sold to Miss Burdett-Coutts, the adjacent landowner, and part of St Alban’s Road and Villas were built on it
c.
1850.

But what of the real farmers in these years? Their time was running out. Much of the land was still there, behind the houses, let for grazing, but the old farm houses themselves were disappearing. St John’s and Mortimers had gone. In 1831 the current William Morgan left the Old Farmhouse, Hewett’s House and ceded his land to the ground landlord, Christ Church, Oxford, declaring that if he continued farming he would end either in gaol or in the workhouse. Clearly farmers then tended towards the same sanguine optimism which characterises them today, but it does seem that Morgan had been less successful than his father and grandfather were: the house was said to be in a very dilapidated state (see pages 64–5).

Crosby, the water-colourist, records that the barns and grasslands pertaining to the farm were rented by a Mr Silversides, a butcher of London with a ridiculously suitable name. Butchers at that date still butchered their stock themselves: they had not yet been emasculated into retailers. Indeed, in those days before refrigeration, all animals were commonly preserved ‘on the hoof’ until the latest possible moment. They were still killed at Smithfield, and flocks of sheep and cattle were to be seen being urged through the streets near the City in the early morning as they had been from time immemorial. Later, the Metropolitan Cattle Market was established a little further out, in Islington, just over the border from Kentish Town, with the result that herds continued to parade through Kentish Town for decades. The beasts were unloaded from railway trucks at the goods yards that developed in the 1860s behind Highgate Road, and were driven along Leighton Road towards Islington. This still occurred within living memory and is, I believe, the basis for most of the wild stories told by elderly residents about there having been ‘farms in Kentish Town’ in their youth. Nearly all the so-called ‘old farm buildings’ surviving today are in fact bits of railway stabling and stock sheds. Talking to old people in the course of compiling this book, I was again and again told ‘Cows were grazed at Gospel Oak when I was a girl’, or ‘It used to be all fields around here, dear; I remember before such-and-such a street was built.’ Reference to a map of the period shows this not in fact to have been the case. Every street in central Kentish Town was there before the birth of the oldest person now living – indeed large parts of the district are now so old that they have reached the rebuilding stage; the crop of houses has been sown anew. What appears to be significant about these ‘reminiscences’ (which are regularly reproduced by gullible local newspaper editors) is not their objective truth but the fact that people of all ages
wish
to believe that they are true. The desire to disinter the fields that lie sleeping underneath, or to believe that these fields still exist in the safety of memory, is a very widespread one.

Kentish Town did, however, retain some grazing land, and some cows to graze it, into the 1860s. Most famous of the nineteenth-century cow-keepers in the area was Brown, whose dairy occupied a strategic site in the junction of the roads at Camden Town (the site of the workhouse till 1817) and whose cows grazed on west Kentish Town until that area began to be laid out as a building estate in the 1840s. (Building booms in the area, as in England as a whole, succeeded one another at roughly twenty-year intervals: between 1816 and 1826, in the early 1840s, and in the 1860s after the Midland Railway had come.) Brown’s Dairy in its early days was a no-nonsense place of scrubbed deal tables and wooden forms, but in its latter years it developed a certain self-conscious allure: ‘the interior of the shop was handsomely fitted up, and contained some elegantly carved oak frame work with costly embossed and engraved plate glass, the work of an eminent west-end firm and manufactured expressly for the premises. Large glass cases of gaily feathered stuffed birds, including cranes, humming birds, parrots and toucans, enlivened the windows …’ Outside was a rockery and a crenellated facade, in debased Strawberry Hill gothic, the whole edifice being known as ‘the Cows’ Cathedral’. In other words, it had developed all the
folie de grandeur
of a late Victorian public house, even to the engraved glass, but such was the nostalgic appeal of milk as opposed to beer and spirits that the very same people who were quick to stigmatise the rebuilt taverns of Kentish Town as ‘gin-palaces’ long regarded Brown’s as a proof of Kentish Town’s continuing – if tarnished – rustic virtue.