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The cover of the Metro-Land guide published in 1921
Metro-land (or Metroland) is a name given to the suburban areas that were built to the north-west of London in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex in the early part of the 20th century that were served by the Metropolitan Railway.
The railway company was in the privileged position of being allowed to
retain surplus land; from 1919 this was developed for housing by the
nominally independent Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited (MRCE). The term "Metro-land" was coined by the Met's marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide.
It promoted a dream of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a
fast railway service to central London until the Met was absorbed into
the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.
Metropolitan Railway
Map of "Metro-land", from the 1924 Metro-land booklet published by the Metropolitan Railway
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Metropolitan Railway electric locomotive and train (c.1928)
The Metropolitan Railway
was a passenger and goods railway that served London from 1863 to 1933,
its mainline heading north from the capital's financial heart in the City to what were to become the Middlesex suburbs. Its first line connected the mainline railway termini at Paddington, Euston and King's Cross
to the City, and when, on 10 January 1863, this line opened with
gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives, it was the world's
first underground railway. When, in 1871 plans were presented for an underground railway in Paris, it was called the Métropolitain in imitation of the line in London. The modern word metro is a short form of the French word. The railway was soon extended from both ends and northwards via a branch from Baker Street. It reached Hammersmith in 1864, Richmond in 1877 and completed the Inner Circle in 1884,
but the most important route became the line north into the Middlesex
countryside, where it stimulated the development of new suburbs. Harrow was reached in 1880, and the line eventually extended as far as Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire,
more than 50 miles (80 kilometres) from Baker Street and the centre of
London. From the end of the 19th century, the railway shared tracks with
the Great Central Railway route out of Marylebone.
Electric traction was introduced in 1905 with electric multiple units
operating services between Uxbridge, Harrow-on-the-Hill and Baker
Street. To remove steam and smoke from the tunnels in central London,
the Metropolitan Railway purchased electric locomotives, and these were exchanged for steam locomotives on trains at Harrow from 1908.
To improve services, more powerful electric and steam locomotives were
purchased in the 1920s. A short branch opened from Rickmansworth to
Watford in 1925. The 4-mile (6.4 km) long Stanmore branch from Wembley
Park was completed in 1932.
Metro-land
Metro-Land was characterised by the construction of Tudor Revival suburban houses (pictured: North Wembley, top, and Kenton, bottom)
Unlike other railway companies, which were required to dispose of
surplus land, the Met was in a privileged position with clauses in its
acts allowing it to retain land that it believed was necessary for
future railway use. Initially the surplus land was managed by the Land Committee, made up of Met directors. In the 1880s, at the same time as the railway was extending beyond Swiss Cottage and building the workers' estate at Neasden,
roads and sewers were built at Willesden Park Estate, and the land was
sold to builders. Similar developments followed at Cecil Park, near Pinner and, after the failure of the tower at Wembley, plots were sold at Wembley Park.
Robert Selbie, then General Manager, thought in 1912 that some
professionalism was needed and suggested a company be formed to take
over from the Surplus Lands Committee to develop estates near the
railway. The First World War delayed these plans however, and it was 1919, with the expectation of a housing boom,
before the MRCE was formed. Concerned that Parliament might reconsider
the unique position the Met held, the railway company sought legal
advice. The legal opinion was that although the Met had authority to
hold land, it had none to develop it, so an independent company was
created, although all but one of its directors were also directors of
the railway company. The MRCE went on to develop estates at Kingsbury Garden Village near Neasden, Wembley Park, Cecil Park and Grange Estate at Pinner and the Cedars Estate at Rickmansworth and create places such as Harrow Garden Village.
The term Metro-land was coined by the Met's marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide, priced at 1d. This promoted the land served by the Met for the walker, the visitor and later the house-hunter.
Published annually until 1932, the last full year of independence for
the Met, the guide extolled the benefits of "The good air of the
Chilterns," using language such as "Each lover of Metroland may well
have his own favourite wood beech and coppice – all tremulous green
loveliness in Spring and russet and gold in October." The dream promoted was of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway service to central London.
From about 1914 the company had promoted itself as The Met, but
after 1920 the commercial manager, John Wardle, ensured that timetables
and other publicity material used the term Metro instead.
Land development also occurred in central London when in 1929 a large,
luxurious block of apartments called Chiltern Court opened at Baker
Street,
designed by the Met's architect Charles W. Clark, who was also
responsible for the design of a number of station reconstructions in
outer "Metro-land" at this time.
A few large houses had been built on parts of Wembley Park, south-west of the Metropolitan station, as early as the 1890s. In 1906, when Watkin’s Tower closed, the Tower Company had become the Wembley Park Estate Company (later Wembley Ltd.), with the aim of developing Wembley as a residential suburb.
Unlike other railways, from an early date the Metropolitan
Railway had bought land alongside its line and then developed housing on
it. In the 1880s and 1890s it had done so with the Willesden Park
Estate near Willesden Green station, and in the early 1900s it developed
on land in Pinner, as well as planning the expansion of Wembley Park.
In 1915 by the Metropolitan Railway’s publicity department had created the term Metro-land.
It was used as the new name for the company’s annual guide to the
places it served (known as Guide to the Extension Line prior to 1915).
The Metro-land guide, although partly written to attract walkers
and day trippers, was clearly primarily intended to encourage the
building of suburban homes and create middle-class commuters who would
use the Metropolitan Railway’s trains for all their needs. It was
published annually until 1932, but when the Metropolitan became part of
London Transport in 1933 the term and guide were abandoned. By then
North-West London was well on the road to its reputation for
suburbanisation.
The 1924 Metro-land guide describes Wembley Park
as "rapidly developed of recent years as a residential district",
pointing out that there are several golf courses within a few minutes
journey of it.
Over the years during which the guide was published, large
numbers of Londoners moved out to the new estates in North-West London.
Some of these estates were developed by MRCE, a company that Robert H.
Selbie, the Metropolitan Railway’s General Manager, set up in 1919. It
would eventually build houses along the line, from Neasden reaching far
out as Amersham.
One of the earliest of these MRCE developments was a 123-acre one at Chalkhill, within the bounds of what was Repton’s Wembley Park.
MRCE acquired the land shortly after it was created and began selling
plots in 1921. The railway even put in a siding to bring building
materials to the estate.
The term ‘Metroland’ (usually seen now without the hyphen) has
become shorthand for the suburban areas that were built in North-West
London and in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex following the
Metropolitan branches. It had become immortalised well before the guide
stopped being published. A song called "My Little Metro-land Home" had been published in 1920, and Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall
(1928) has a character marrying a Viscount Metroland. She reappears,
with the title Lady Metroland, in two more of Waugh’s novels; Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934).
The British Empire Exhibition
further encouraged the new phenomenon of suburban development.
Wembley’s sewerage was improved, many roads in the area were
straightened and widened and new bus services began operating. Visitors
were steadily introduced to Wembley and some later moved to the area
when houses had been built to accommodate them.
Between 1921 and 1928 season ticket sales at Wembley Park and neighbouring Metropolitan stations rose by over 700%. Like the rest of West London, most of Wembley Park and its environs was fully developed, largely with relatively low-density suburban housing, by 1939.
Absorption of the Met
On
1 July 1933 the Metropolitan Railway amalgamated with other Underground
railways, tramway companies and bus operators to form the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), and the railway became the Metropolitan line
of London Transport. The LPTB was not interested in running goods and
freight services and the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) took
over all freight traffic. At the same time the LNER became responsible
for hauling passenger trains with steam locomotives north of
Rickmansworth. The lines north of Aylesbury to Verney Junction and Brill
were closed; last train to Brill ran on 30 November 1935 and to
Quainton Road and Verney Junction on 2 April 1936. Quainton Road
continued to be served by the LNER. For a time, the LPTB used the "Metro-land" tag: "Cheap fares to Metro-land and the sea" were advertised in 1934 but the "Metro-land" brand was rapidly dropped. London Transport introduced new slogans such as "Away by Metropolitan" and "Good spot, the Chilterns".
Steam traction continued to be used on the outer sections of what had become the "Metropolitan line" until 1961. From that date Metropolitan trains ran only as far as Amersham, with main line services from Marylebone covering stations between Great Missenden and Aylesbury.
Defining Metro-land
The town of Harrow, referred to as the "capital city" of Metro-land
The Metro-land guide insisted that Metro-land was "a country
with elastic borders that each visitor can draw for himself". Indeed, to
the extent that the principal features of Metro-land were not unique to
the Metropolitan, it has been invoked more generically: for example, by
Kathryn Bradley-Hole writing about Gunnersbury Park, and by the London Evening Standard, which, in 2009, under the heading, "Down the line into Metroland", identified High Barnet (Northern line), Loughton (Central line) and two Metropolitan suburbs, Amersham and Rickmansworth, as "top locations with an easy commute". Even so, Metro-land was quite firm that, so far as the Buckinghamshire Chilterns were concerned, its "Grand Duchy" was confined to the hundred of Burnham: "the Chilterns round Marlow and the Wycombes are not in Metro-land".
The architect Hugh Casson regarded Harrow as the "capital city" of Metro-land, while Arthur Mee's King's England described Wembley as its "epitome". In 2012 a writer for Country Life, referring to plans to build a new high-speed rail link ("HS2")
through the Chilterns, dismissed the style of development around
Aylesbury as not "so much suburban as just sub, there being no urbs.
However, the spirits lift when, down the road, you reach Waddesdon. You
hardly need to be told you're in Rothschildland", the latter tag an
allusion to Waddesdon Manor, the estate managed by the Rothschild family and owned by the National Trust.
Slogans and references
The
Metropolitan’s terminus at Baker Street was "the gateway to Metro-land"
and Chiltern Court, which opened over the station in 1929 and was
headquarters during the Second World War of the Special Operations Executive, was "at the gateway to Metro-land". In similar vein, Chorley Wood and Chenies, later described by John Betjeman as "the essential Metro-land", were "at the gateway" of the Chiltern Hills (of which Wendover was the "pearl").
Literature and songs
Croxley Green (now Croxley) station (C. W. Clark, 1925)
Before the end of the First World War George R. Sims
had incorporated the term in verse: "I know a land where the wild
flowers grow/Near, near at hand if by train you go,/Metroland,
Metroland".
By the 1920s, the word was so ingrained in the consciousness that, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Decline and Fall (1928), the Hon Margot Beste-Chetwynd took Viscount Metroland as her second husband. Lady Metroland's second appearance in Vile Bodies in 1930 and A Handful of Dust in 1934 further reinforces this.
Metro-land further entered the public psyche with the song My Little Metro-land Home (lyrics by Boyle Lawrence and music by Henry Thraile, 1920), while another ditty extolled the virtues of the Poplars estate at Ruislip with the assertion that "It's a very short distance by rail on the Met/And at the gate you'll find waiting, sweet Violet".
Queensbury and its local surroundings and characters were cited in the song "Queensbury Station" by the Berlin-based punk-jazz band The Magoo Brothers on their album "Beyond Believable", released on the Bouncing Corporation label in 1988. The song was written by Paul Bonin and Melanie Hickford, who both grew up and lived in the area.
In 1997, Metroland was the title and setting for a movie starring Christian Bale
about the development of the relationship between a husband and wife
living in the area. The movie was based on the novel of the same name
written by Julian Barnes.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark recorded a song Metroland on the English Electric
album. It was released as a single, with the video showing the singer
dreamily gazing out from a train at an idealised sub-urban landscape.
"Live in Metro-land"
In 1903 the Metropolitan developed a housing estate at Cecil Park, Pinner,
the first of many such enterprises over the next thirty years. Overseen
by the Metropolitan's general manager from 1908 to 1930, Robert H
Selbie, the railway formed its own Country Estates Company in 1919. The
slogan, "Live in Metro-land", was even etched on the door handles of
Metropolitan carriages.
Some stations, such as Hillingdon (1923), were built specifically to serve the company's suburban developments. A number, including Wembley Park, Croxley Green (1925) and Stanmore (1932), were designed by Charles W. Clark (who was responsible also for Chiltern Court) in an Arts and crafts
"villa" style. These were intended to blend with their surroundings,
though, in retrospect, they arguably lacked the panache and vision of Charles Holden's striking, modern designs for the Underground group in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Imitators
Nearly
70 years later the Chilterns Conservation Board was advertising
"Chilterns Country – countryside walks from rail stations" (2004).
Drawing no doubt on "Metro-land, a guide for ramblers", published by
British Railways Southern Region shortly after the Second World War, it
referred to the "Rambleland" stations of Surrey and Sussex.
Spirit of Metro-land
The sentimental and somewhat archaic prose of the Metro-land
guide ("the Roman road aslant the eastern border ... the innumerable
field-paths which mark the labourer's daily route from hamlet to farm") conjured up a rustic Eden – a Middle England, perhaps – similar to that invoked by Stanley Baldwin
(Prime Minister three times between 1923 and 1937) who, though of
manufacturing stock, famously donned the mantle of countryman ("the
tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the sound of
the scythe against the whetstone").
As one historian of the London Underground put it wryly, "the world of
Metroland is not cluttered with people: its suburban streets are empty
... There are, it seems, more farm animals than people."
A more cynical view, that sought to contrast illusion with changing times, was offered in 1934 by the composer and conductor Constant Lambert who "conjure[d] up the hideous faux bonhomie of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of Metroland, singing obsolete sea chanties [sic]
with the aid of the Week-End Book, imbibing chemically flavoured
synthetic beer under the impression that he is tossing off a tankard of
'jolly good ale and old' ... and astonishing the local garage proprietor by slapping him on the back and offering him a pint of 'four 'alf'".
Town v. country
With similar ambiguity, Metro-land
combined idyllic photographs of rural tranquillity with advertising
spreads for new, though leafy, housing developments. Herein lay the
contradictions well captured by Leslie Thomas in his novel, The Tropic of Ruislip (1974): "in the country but not of it. The fields seemed touchable and yet remote". Writer and historian A. N. Wilson
reflected how suburban developments of the early 20th century that had
been brought within easy reach of London by the railways, "merely ended
up creating an endless ribbon ... not perhaps either town or country". In the process, despite Metro-land's promotion of rusticity, a number of outlying towns and villages were "swallowed up and lost their identity".
Influence of Country Life
Wilson noted that the magazine Country Life, which had been founded by Edward Hudson as Country Life Illustrated
in 1897, had influenced this pattern with its advertisements for
country houses: "If you were a stockbroker or a lawyer's wife ... you
could perhaps afford a new Tudorbethan mansion, with an oak staircase and mullioned windows and half-timbered gables, in Godalming or Esher, or Amersham or Penn". Of the surrounding landscape, Country Life itself has observed that, in its early days, it offered
a rose-tinted view of the English countryside ... idyllic villages, vernacular buildings and already dying rural crafts. All were illustrated with hauntingly beautiful photographs. They portrayed a utopian never-never world of peace and plenty in a pre-industrial Britain.
Growth of Metro-land
By the 1930s the availability of mortgages with an average rate of interest of 41⁄4 per cent meant that private housing was well within the range of most middle class and many working-class pockets.
This was a potent factor in the growth of Metro-land: for example, in
the first three decades of the 20th century the population of Harrow Weald rose from 1,500 to 11,000 and that of Pinner from 3,000 to 23,000. In 1932 Northwick Park was said to have grown over the previous five years at the rate of 1,000 houses annually and Rayners Lane to "repay a visit at short intervals to see it grow".
Sir John Betjeman
In the mid-20th century the spirit of Metro-land was evoked in three "late chrysanthemums" by Sir John Betjeman
(1906–1984), Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death:
"Harrow-on-the-Hill" ("When melancholy autumn comes to Wembley / And
electric trains are lighted after tea"), "Middlesex" ("Gaily into
Ruislip Gardens / Runs the red electric train") and "The Metropolitan
Railway" ("Early Electric! With what radiant hope / Men formed this
many-branched electrolier"). In his autobiographical Summoned by Bells (1960) Betjeman recalled that "Metroland / Beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks".
Betjeman centenary: commemorative plaque unveiled by Candida Lycett Green, Marylebone station, 2 September 2006
Described much later by The Times as the "hymnologist of Metroland", Betjeman reached a wider audience with his celebrated documentary for BBC Television, Metro-land, directed by Edward Mirzoeff, which was first broadcast on 26 February 1973 and was released as a DVD 33 years later. The critic Clive James, who judged the programme "an instant classic", observed that "it saw how the district had been destroyed by its own success".
To mark the centenary of Betjeman's birth his daughter Candida Lycett Green
(born 1942) spearheaded a series of celebratory railway events,
including an excursion on 2 September 2006 from Marylebone to Quainton
Road, now home of the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre.
Lycett Green noted of the planning of this trip that among the fine
details considered were which filling to have in the baguettes on the
train through Metro-land and how long it would stop on the track so that
the poem "Middlesex" could be read over the tannoy. The event was in the tradition of earlier commemorations of "Metro-land", such as a centenary parade of rolling stock at Neasden in 1963 and celebrations in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Uxbridge branch.
Avengerland
Metro-land (notably west Hertfordshire) formed the backdrop for the 1960s ABC TV series The Avengers,
whose popular imagery was deployed with a twist of fantasy. The
archetypal Metro-land subjects (such as the railway station and the
quiet suburb) became the settings for fiendish plots and treachery in
this series and others, such as The Saint, The Baron and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), all of which made regular use of locations within easy reach of film studios at Borehamwood and Pinewood.
Escaping Metro-land
Some
abhorred Metro-land for its predictability and sameness. A. N. Wilson
observed that, although semi-detached dwellings of the kind built in the
inner Metro-land suburbs in the 1930s "aped larger houses, the
stockbroker Tudorbethan of Edwardian Surrey and Middlesex", they were in
fact "pokey". He reflected that
as [the husband] went off to the nearest station every morning ... the wife, half liberated and half slave, stayed behind wondering how many of the newly invented domestic appliances they could afford to purchase, and how long the man would hold on to his job in the Slump. No wonder, when war came, that so many of these suburban prisoners felt a sense of release.
Post-war attitudes
By
the end of the Second World War architects in general were turning
their backs on suburbia; the very word tended to be used pejoratively,
even contemptuously. In 1951 Michael Young,
one of the architects of the Labour Party's electoral victory in 1945,
observed that "one suburb is much like another in an atomised society.
Rarely does community flourish", while the American Lewis Mumford, wrote in the New Yorker in 1953 that "monotony and suburbanism" were the result of the "unimaginative" design of Britain's post-war New Towns. When the editor of the Architectural Review, J. M. Richards, wrote in The Castles on the Ground
(1946) that "for all the alleged deficiencies of suburban taste ... it
holds for ninety out of a hundred Englishmen an appeal which cannot be
explained away as some strange instance of mass aberration", he was, in
his own words, "scorned by my contemporaries as either an irrelevant
eccentricity or a betrayal of the forward looking views of the Modern Movement".
John Betjeman admired John Piper's illustrations for Castles on the Ground,
describing the "fake half-timber, the leaded lights and bow windows of
the Englishman's castle" as "the beauty of the despised, patronised
suburb". However, as the historian David Kynaston observed sixty years later, "the time was far from ripe for Metroland nostalgia".
Julian Barnes: Metroland
Valerie Grove,
who conceded that Metro-land was "a kinder word than 'suburbia'" and
referred to the less spoilt areas beyond Rickmansworth as "Outer
Metro-land", maintained that "suburbia had no visible history. Anyone
with any spirit ... had to get out of Metro-land to make their mark".
Thus, the central character of Metroland (1980), a novel by Julian Barnes (born 1946) that was filmed in 1997, ended up in Paris
during the disturbances of May 1968 – though, by the late 1970s, having
thrown off the yearnings of his youth, he was back in Metro-land. Metroland
recounted the essence of suburbia in the early 1960s and the features
of daily travel by a schoolboy, Christopher Lloyd, on the Metropolitan
line to and from London. During a French lesson, Christopher declared, "J’habite Metroland"
["I live in Metroland"], because it "sounds better than Eastwick [the
fictional location of his home], stranger than Middlesex".
In real life, some schoolboys had made similar journeys for more hedonistic reasons. Betjeman recalled that, between the wars, boys from Harrow School had used the Metropolitan for illicit excursions to night clubs in London: "Whenever the police raided the Hypocrites' Club or the Coconut Club, the '43 or the Blue Lantern there would always be Harrovians there".
Social mobility: Tropic of Ruislip
Between Metro-land’s heyday before the Second World War and the end of the 20th century, the proportion of owner-occupied dwellings in England, already rising fast from the mid-1920s, doubled from a third to two-thirds. In Tropic of Ruislip, Leslie Thomas’s humorous account of suburban sexual and social mores in the mid-1970s (adapted for television as Tropic,
ATV 1979), the steady flow of families from council housing on one side
of the railway to an executive estate on the other side served to
illustrate what was becoming known as "upward mobility".
Another sign was that, by the end of the book, "half the neighbourhood"
of Plummers Park (probably based on Carpenders Park, on the outskirts
of Watford) had moved south of the River Thames to Wimbledon or nearby Southfields. This was put down to the "attractions of Victoriana", which, like suburbia itself, championed at the time by Betjeman’s Metro-land,
was coming back into fashion; however, it appeared to have just as much
to do with couples following each other round in order to maintain
extramarital affairs.
Another glimpse of Metro-land in the 1970s was provided by The Good Life, the BBC TV comedy series (1975-8) about suburban self sufficiency. Though set in Surbiton, the programme's location filming was carried out in Northwood, an area reached by the Metropolitan in 1885. A less benign view of Metro-land was offered in the mid noughties by the detective series, Murder in Suburbia
(ITV 2004-6), which, though set in the fictional town of Middleford,
was also filmed in Northwood and other parts of North West London.
Note on spelling
The form Metroland is now in common use, but the "brand" was hyphenated as Metro-land or METRO-LAND.
Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman (in "Summoned by Bells") and Julian Barnes
all dispensed with the hyphen, though Betjeman's documentary of 1973
correctly used "Metro-land", as that was the form always employed by the
Metropolitan Railway in its brochures and on the trains themselves.
