Underground, Overground (23 page)

Buses could not cover the distances involved; as for walking, that was becoming passé. In 1846 Charles Pearson had complained that the poor man was chained to the spot, lacking ‘the leisure' to walk. But people still
did
walk across London at that time, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they trudged. In
London: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd writes: ‘Workers walked to the City from Islington and Pentonville, but now they came in from Deptford and Bermondsey, Hoxton and Hackney, as well. It has been estimated that, in the 1850s, 200,000 people walked into the City each day.' Ackroyd identifies the last man to have walked every London street as the poet and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who died in 1859.

If anyone walked every street of modern-day London, they'd probably have a television programme made about them. In
Bleeding London
(1997), a novel by Geoff Nicholson, a character takes three years to walk every street, blackening them out in his
A to Z
as he goes. I read about this novel in
Walk the Lines
(2011), by Mark Mason, who did not himself walk every street in London but conquered his own ‘horizontal Everest' by walking
the length of every Underground line. The book conveys a fascination with the Underground, and with the sights that can be glimpsed by not being on it. For example, ‘Round the corner on Hyde Park Gardens a van bears the logo, “Stephen Fry Plumbing and Heating Limited”.'

The period from 1930 to 1950 was one of continuous suburbbuilding. In
London: A History
(2009) Jeremy Black writes: ‘The sprawl was aided by lax planning regulations, as well as the break-up of estates, in part due to death duties, … the low price of land, and the post-war agricultural depression which encouraged farmers to sell land in order to survive.' The picture is blurred by the changing definition of Greater London. During the interwar period the term meant the area covered by the Metropolitan Police District, a bigger territory than ‘Greater London' as administered by the Greater London Council, which would succeed the London County Council in 1965. But by the first measure, the population of Greater London increased from about 7.5 million in 1911 to 8.7 million in 1939 which second figure, as Black notes, represented ‘about a fifth of the nation's population'. As the suburbs expanded, the population of the centre contracted by half a million, partly because the salubrious suburbs became available with railways to serve them, and partly because office developments pushed up rents. The whole of central London began to be what the City had already become: a place to enter and depart from in diurnal rhythm. As Mr Aked observes in
A Man from the North
, by Arnold Bennett: ‘Why, the suburbs are London! It is alone the concussion of meeting suburbs in the centre of London that makes the city and the West End interesting.'

A new type of commuter was emerging. Whereas in the late nineteenth century, he had commuted by steam railway from a terraced house in a district we would now consider ‘inner-city' – such as Islington, Hackney, Brixton – and had called himself a ‘clerk', he was now an ‘executive' and came in by electric train from
a semi in Harrow, Hendon, Epsom or Sidcup, his former house having been given over to multiple occupation by poorer people displaced from the central slums. The first type of commuter had been sneered at in
The Diary of a Nobody
(1892), by George and Weedon Grossmith, in the person of Mr Charles Pooter, husband of Carrie, ‘After my work in the City, I like to be at home. What's the good of a home if you are never in it? “Home Sweet Home”, that's my motto.' But John Betjeman preferred Pooter to the commuters of later years. His poem ‘Thoughts on
The Diary of a Nobody
', concludes:

Dear Charles and Carrie, I am sure,

Despite that awkward Sunday dinner,

Your lives were good and more secure

Than ours at cocktail time in Pinner.

The electrification of the main-line railways to the south of London fuelled this growth, but the Underground was also very complicit, as we are about to see. Where the train lines went, the house builders followed. The cut-and-cover lines had already invaded the countryside; now the Tubes would do the same. Even with the additional fare revenue they brought, these expansions would not have been justified in purely commercial terms, but now the context was more grandiose. Under Frank Pick and Lord Ashfield – as we are now going to have to start calling Albert Stanley – the Underground would become an instrument of social policy. London would counteract economic depression by continuing to manufacture the most important product of all: itself.

The first Tube to invade the countryside would be the Bakerloo. In 1913, as noted, it had arrived at Paddington. By 1915 it had reached Queen's Park, where it emerged from its tunnel to run alongside the newly electrified lines of the London & North
Western Railway, and from early 1917 it shadowed these as far north as Watford Junction. So the Bakerloo went from being 2½ miles long to 14 miles long and – as they say in the shipping forecast – it rather ‘lost its identity' at the northern end, having become entangled with a main-line railway. (The Metropolitan would also go to Watford – in 1925.)

The Bakerloo service would be cut back to Stonebridge Park in 1982, before crawling back north towards the present terminus of Harrow & Wealdstone. But enough of this yo-yoing. The point is that by the inter-war years this alliance of Tube and main-line had done its work in helping make north-west London. ‘Helping', that is, because another enterprise would be equally important in the same neck of the woods, and in this case Stanley and Pick were not involved.

We have seen that the Metropolitan escaped into its Extension Railway, or what it liked to call its ‘country branch', by creating those two mouseholes at Baker Street. The aim was to develop suburban traffic beyond the reach of competition from those annoying buses. But there would be an incidental bonus for the Met …

It built its branch in normal railway fashion. That is, the Metropolitan bought the land either by compulsory purchase or by an arrangement with the landowners whereby it might – for the mutual convenience of buyer and seller – buy more than was strictly needed for the route. Railways usually
would
buy more than was needed in order to gain wriggle room – to dodge objections to any given kink of the route. The normal rule is that, after construction of the line, these surplus lands are sold back to the original vendors, so they can profit from the increased values a railway brings (which Frank Pick once estimated as a
quadrupling of value). But as Stephen Halliday writes in
Underground to Everywhere
, ‘thanks to some strong advocacy in Parliament by the supporters of the Metropolitan Railway, the Acts which had set up the company allowed it to retain such surplus land in its own possession.' Whereas the other lines triggered property development by third parties, the Met became a property developer
itself
, creating settlements that were in turn expanded by third-party developers.

The countryside that would be developed is shown in flickering black-and-white footage taken from a Met train riding along the Extension Railway in 1910. From the perspective of 2012 the landscape is beautiful: trees, thatched roofs, country inns. By Edwardian standards it was nothing special, but on what John Betjeman called ‘these mild home county acres' the Metropolitan would create Metroland, a series of Tudorbethan havens for the office toilers of London, destroying the mildness of those acres in the process, of course.

Between 1919 and 1932 a booklet called
Metro-land
was published annually in order to promote the lifestyle and houses of Metroland. (I can't be doing with that hyphen.) They were written with a strangulated lyricism. Metroland was a ‘verdant realm' set on ‘gentle, flower-decked downs'; houses were ‘homesteads' (and they were set on ‘estates', at least until the London County Council began to build its own ‘estates' for London's poor, thus giving the word a downmarket association). The houses in the booklets were shown with large gardens, demonstrating the influence of the turn-of-the-century Garden City Movement. The railway, with its ‘fast and luxurious electric trains', was somewhere distant on the horizon, whereas the vibrations of the trains had cracked Mr Pooter's garden wall in his earlier, more central suburb of Holloway. Actually, most of the Metroland houses were cheap semis, costing about £400 (£20,000 in today's money), but they offered a new way of living: owner occupation.
This was promoted by the Conservative government from 1923 – by means of a subsidy to builders and tax breaks for building societies – in order to meet a housing shortage and alleviate economic depression. The booklet of 1922 included a poem speaking of Metroland as soothing ‘town tired nerves, when work-a-day is o'er'. It was a place, ‘Where comes no echo of the City's roar'. But that is just what did come, and some writers – especially George Orwell in his novel
Coming Up for Air
(1939) – would denounce the Metropolitan for its destruction of the countryside. Others seemed more interested in the social comedy.

In 1973 John Betjeman's television documentary
Metroland
was first broadcast. It begins, ‘Child of the First War, Forgotten by the Second', but the documentary itself would revive the memory of Metroland for the generation that came after. Here was a late-middle-aged man passing on a childhood memory. In
Betjeman
(2006) A. N. Wilson writes, ‘If it is true that in death all the scenes of a past life flash past before you, then this television poem by Betjeman – it is too good to be described as simply a “programme” – took him back through the suburban outskirts of London he had known and loved and love-hated since boyhood.'

Television presenters are supposed to look at the camera, but Betjeman would look sidelong, intriguingly evasive, and the documentary is full of ambivalence. In essence, Betjeman's poetry and prose reveal that he loved the inter-war suburbia of Metroland more than the suburbia it had evolved into by the 1970s, but he loved the countryside more than either. He begins in Neasden, where the cheapest Metroland homes were built. He meets a keen birdwatcher and gives him plenty of rope with which to hang himself. The birdwatcher declares, ‘There are something like 400 varieties of house sparrows within a half a mile of my home.' Betjeman's aim is to show us the Seventies' heirs of the ‘clerks turned countrymen' who originally bought
into the Metroland vision. In more desirable Pinner, he observes the residents of quite expansive villas cleaning their cars while ‘Crazy Horses' by The Osmonds blares from a transistor. Early adverts for Metroland mentioned that the properties had ‘running at the back of the houses so that a car may be kept', and later there was ‘space so that a garage may be built'. The proximity of nearby roads was boasted of immediately after mention of the nearest station – this from a company that regarded the car as an instrument of leisure rather than as a rival to the train. At still smarter Moor Park, where there is a famous golf club, Betjeman swings at a ball and completely misses. With typical archness, he says, ‘One of the joys of Metroland was the nearness of goff to London' (it was important to leave the ‘l' out of golf if you wanted to advance in inter-war society), and one early map of Metroland reduced suburban life to its caricature essence, the key indicating ‘Metropolitan Railway', ‘Roads', ‘Golf Courses'.

Metroland developments became smarter and leafier the further they were from central London. Approaching the end of the line, Betjeman says, ‘The houses of Metroland never got as far as Verney Junction. Grass triumphs, and I must say I'm rather glad.' Yet he was obviously susceptible to the genuine charm of the project. There is gentility as well as mock-gentility in the brochures, innocence as well as mock-innocence in lines such as

Land of love and hope and peace,

Land where all your troubles cease

…

Waft, O waft me there

(from a poem, written by George Robert Simms, in the 1919 brochure). Betjeman was particularly attached to early electricity (the Met was electrified to Rickmansworth by 1925, it will be recalled). Electricity made everything a treat, and so, from
his poem ‘Middlesex': ‘Gaily into Ruislip Gardens/Runs the red electric train', or, from ‘The Metropolitan Railway', ‘Early Electric! With what radiant hope/Men formed this many-branched electrolier'. That poem is subtitled ‘Baker Street Station Buffet', and I wonder if it wasn't Baker Street, the ‘worn memorial' of Metroland and HQ of the Met, the place where its dreams were plotted, that Betjeman really loved.

Metroland
– the documentary – begins in the restaurant of Chiltern Court, the block of luxury flats that has surmounted Baker Street station since 1929. It was a veritable epicentre of Underground-ness. Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells lived there, as did Underground poster artist E. McKnight Kauffer – and the presenter of
Opportunity Knocks
, Hughie Green, who had a giant model railway in his flat. If you board a Met train about to travel along the ‘Extension Railway' from Baker Street into the modern-day Metroland, you may notice a left-behind poster on the platform advertising ‘Chiltern Court – London's Newest Restaurant', which is not
quite
true. The Chiltern Court restaurant was a fittingly camp jumping-off point for Metroland. It was a place of pomaded tail-coated waiters, of ‘perfect cuisine' and ‘faultless service'.

Betjeman sits there at the beginning of his film. ‘Are we at the Ritz?' he asks.

No. This is the Chiltern Court Restaurant … Here the wives from Pinner and Ruislip, after a day's shopping at Liberty's or Whiteley's, would sit waiting for their husbands to come up from Cheapside and Mincing Lane. While they waited, they could listen to the strains of the band playing for the
thé dansant
before the train took them home.