A Good Parcel of English Soil Read online

  There, where the tapering cranes sweep round,

  And great wheels turn, and trains roar by

  Like strong, low-headed brutes of steel –

  There is my world, my home; yet why

  So alien still? For I can neither

  Dwell in that world, nor turn again

  To scythe and spade, but only loiter

  Among the trees the smoke has slain.

  Five years later, in his novel Coming Up for Air, Orwell would explicitly denounce the Metropolitan Line for its destruction of the countryside. But this was a more ambivalent, rueful elegy, acknowledging the irrevocable changes that industrialization had bought not just in the landscape, but in his outlook. A Metropolitan consciousness, once acquired, can’t be magically wiped clean and the watcher restored to pastoral innocence. And I think I would have sympathized with the poem’s feelings, if I hadn’t spent the two previous years witnessing roaring trains and windworn trees cohabiting rather amicably in Metroland’s edges.

  In the 1970s there was plenty of soaring concrete. But air pollution was already declining and the trees and feral vegetation were luxuriant. Forty years on, I’m astonished by how little the place has changed. ‘Yellow water lilies drooping like balls of molten wax’, I’d written in 1973, and so they still were, in crystal-clear water. Naturalized buddleia, from China, is growing next to impeccably native iris. A grey wagtail loops across the cut towards the weir in the exact same place it had four decades ago. What is different is the influx of people, especially boat people. The gentrification of Chorleywood has seeped south, picking up a few bohemian and dissident shades on the way. An old bargeman’s cottage with a glass-walled Bauhaus-style extension sits not a hundred yards from the narrowboat Pisces, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Affordable boating for the community’. A pair of cormorants perform synchronized underwater dives in front of a lawn decked out with a geodesic climbing frame. There are fisherman’s day-boats, floating weekend hideaways, houseboats done up in hippie baroque. Iain Sinclair, tramping the canal a mile or so further north in his circumnavigation of the M25, London Orbital, spotted a boat with the strapline ‘Viscount Sasha, International Physiotherapist to the President of the USA’. The most eccentric I come across has a map of the entire solar system tricked out in transfers on the windscreen.

  As I head towards Ricky, there are blackcaps, which the poet John Clare called ‘the March nightingale’, singing from every patch of scrub. In the 1920s, Metroland brochures fêted real nightingales as one of the area’s great attractions: ‘The song of the nightingale for which the neighbourhood is renowned … the network of translucent rivers traversing the valley, render Rickmansworth a Mecca to the city man pining for country and pure air.’ Nightingales were extinct here as breeding birds by the 1960s but are commemorated in one of the street names in the Cedars Estate. When I reach Stocker’s and Springwell Lakes (two of the now flooded gravel pits) I see that they too have become a kind of commemoration of birds and are fully fledged nature reserves. Years back I saw my first red-crested pochard here, a winter vagrant from eastern Europe with a lurid crimson bill that made it the oddest, most plastic-looking wild duck I had ever seen, and rather appropriate bobbing on a man-made lake. What I didn’t know then was that the links between the pits and Metroland were more than simply geographical. The sand excavated from the Colne valley beds was the raw material for the houses and avenues of the new estates. (One story from Wembley Park in the 1920s has a touch of black comedy. The building contract was originally with the disastrously named Cyclops Construction Company, which had difficulty getting labourers and raw materials out of London and went into liquidation. The Metropolitan Company itself took over the supply of sand from the Colne valley pits.)

  I bypass Chorleywood and head towards my old retreats north of the line near Latimer, only this time I’m coming in from the south, via Chenies. Latimer is a bijou village, in which many Metro-edge rustic comedies and melodramas have been acted out. The exotic animals from Bertram Mills Circus were taken to winter quarters here, next to fields full of English dairy cows. On the Chesham shuttle line just to the west, a van loaded with hay from a nearby field tumbled down an embankment just in front of a homebound train. (The service was severely disrupted but no one was injured.) And by the side of the road I used to reluctantly follow home to Berkhamsted after my escapes to the Mediterranean ambience of the Chess valley, there is still a curious wooden board masking the spiked fence round a group of half-timbered cottages (authentic eighteenth century, not Metroland mimics). Lord Chesham ordered the board to be put up in the early 1920s, when his favourite dog died after being impaled on the fence. It’s still there, a backhanded tribute to the power of the squirearchy that Metroland did so much to weaken.

  But there is something hearteningly new here. Loitering in the trees by the edge of the Chess are a few little egrets, looking like starched shawls rather casually tossed into the fuzzy alder branches. Egrets began colonizing Britain in the 1990s and first reached the watery places of Metroland a decade later. They are a new generation of suburban settlers, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, tempted north by global warming.

  From here to the Met’s current terminus at Amersham the landscape is pure Chilterns, the hanging beechwoods and sunken lanes and skewed pastures in which, for most of my adult life, I spent the time when I wasn’t slumming in the edge-lands. Except that I’m increasingly aware, as I was back in Moor Park, of posters in cottage windows, nailed to trees, propped up in fields, all protesting at the imminent arrival of the High Speed Rail-Link, HS2, between London and the North. (Though only in the extreme western shires of Metroland could anyone get away with the poster I saw in one paddock: SCRAP HS2. SPEND THE MONEY ON THE ARMED FORCES.) I realize that, with the inexorable topographical logic of transport systems, its proposed route has been shadowing the Met all the way from the point it breaks out into open country, west of Northwood. HS2 will slam through the Harefield woods, loop just south of Chorleywood and Little Chalfont and thunder on towards Great Missenden. It’s a folly, a commercially motivated enterprise whose real-world economic and environmental credentials have been well discredited. Yet oddly, it shares characteristics with both the Met and the M25. Like the Met, it trades in potential customers’ dreams; and true to the spirit of the moment, these are now not of finding space but of saving time – about 20 minutes, it’s reckoned, on the London to Birmingham leg, a journey which could be avoided altogether by businesspeople working on their iPads in the comfort of their Metro-pads. Like the M25, it promises a trip which is not a journey, with a real destination, but pure, ephemeral, disembodied travel.

  Dear Amersham on the Hill, the end of the line, the settlement the Met conjured into existence half a mile above the old town, which the brochure of 1916 preposterously compared to ‘the picturesque buildings of the times of Shakespeare and Sir Christopher Wren’. It is the only place in Metroland where, in my thirties, I succumbed to the unalloyed suburban aura that so enchanted Betjeman. While he relished poignant late afternoons at the Chiltern Court restaurant above Baker Street station, I mooned about on winter’s evenings 25 miles down the track in the real Chilterns, hanging out in Amersham’s lamp-lit 1930s shopping centre, and bound for Ken’s Beijing Chinese restaurant next to the railway bridge, an oriental eatery tucked inside what seemed like an old English cottage.

  Early Electric! Sit you down and see,

  ’Mid this fine woodwork and a smell of dinner,

  A stained-glass windmill and a pot of tea,

  And sepia views of leafy lanes in PINNER, –

  Then visualize, far down the shining lines,

  Your parents’ homestead set in murmuring pines.

  from ‘The Metropolitan Railway’,

  John Betjeman

  In the closing sequence of his film, Betjeman stands at the top of Amersham on the Hill, next to an architect-designed, 1930s ‘moderne’ house called High and Over, and laments how the frumpier, l
ate-phase Metroland development had ruined its lofty view towards the Chalfont woods. ‘The end of high hopes and overambition,’ he sighs, ‘and perhaps the end of England too.’ Then he is at the final frontier of the great project’s ambition, leaning on a gate and gazing down a rough track that is all that remains of the extension from Verney Junction that might, had Sir Edward Watkin got his way, have headed off to the North through the immortalized Oxfordshire countryside of Lark Rise to Candleford five miles away. ‘The houses of Metroland never got as far as Verney Junction. Grass triumphs, and I must say I am rather glad.’

  Grass has triumphed, not just here, but all the way back down the track, and it is the proper answer to our national poet’s pessimism about the end of England. By ‘grass’ Betjeman didn’t mean the tidy lawns he’d witnessed being given their Sunday manicure in Pinner. He meant turf, the ground-base of pre-rail trackways, the obstinate growth that prospers the more you trample it, the slang for the patch you live in. ‘Turf’ teases the edges of Metroland from Chesham to Neasden. It’s there in the sucking mud of the Welsh Harp, the ivy climbing the M25’s support pillars, the terns’ nest-islands in the Rickmansworth gravel pits, the feral line-side ash trees at Eastcote that still echo its 1920s ‘farm-yard atmosphere’. And turf, in this sense, has given the citizens of Metroland a glimpse of the inventiveness and resilience of real nature.

  The creation of Metroland did destroy swathes of ordinary farming countryside west of London. But it provided the chance, at least in its western reaches, for large numbers of people previously cooped up in dismal city terraces to experience a kind of sub-rural life. (Chorleywood West is reputed to have the highest indices of social satisfaction of any town in England.) The snobbish fun that was poked at them and their lifestyles (and still is, occasionally) might be more fairly aimed at the sentimental fantasies put out by the Metropolitan Railway’s propaganda machine. You could even say that they have the best of both kinds of green world: the tidy rose garden and the rampaging rosebay.

  And now, out in the Amersham borderlands, they have been gifted with something rather magical and magnificent that even Selbie at his most profuse could not have predicted, and which, in a way, is a parable about the whole idea of Metroland. In the late 1980s the Nature Conservancy Council reintroduced the red kite, one of Europe’s most charismatic birds of prey, to a patch of the Chilterns about twelve miles west of Amersham. The birds, fledglings brought over from colonies of wild birds in Spain, prospered. They went on to breed, and began to spread beyond their release site, west into Oxfordshire and north and east into the hill country on both sides of the Met Line.

  Red kites were once common across Britain, in countryside and city alike. They’re scavengers, and before the days of municipal sanitation, they played a crucial role in clearing meat debris and edible garbage from the streets. Their sociability made them the beneficiaries of the UK’s very first bird protection laws, back in the Middle Ages. But with the development of the keepered shooting estate in the late eighteenth century, they became rebranded as predatory vermin, and were shot, poisoned, gin-trapped and strangled, until by the end of the nineteenth century they were extinct in England.

  The decision to reintroduce them was made for two reasons. The first was one of common justice, to bring home a once honoured and grossly abused British citizen. The second was more controversial. The red kite is captivatingly beautiful, especially in flight, and tolerant of human company, as it had been in the Middle Ages. It was thought that a reintroduction in the Chilterns, where, in true Metroland style, wild and inhabited land is intimately intertwined, might be good for humans and birds alike.

  The gamble worked. The birds thrived. As their population built up, they became more conspicuous. They now float over the Met Line and the M25. They throng above town centres, and, at dusk, at their communal roosts in the woods. They’ve become the region’s totems and transformed its attitude towards wildlife. Playgroups have been named after them. Traffic slows down when there are constellations overhead. And the well-heeled citizens of the Chilterns, far from quaking when these five-foot-wing-span, hooked-beak distillations of the wild venture into their gardens, have been putting whole chickens (and, it’s mischievously rumoured, fillet steaks) on to their bird tables to tempt them in. A live kite in the garden beats a concrete statuette of Flora any day.

  There have been grumbles from some conservationists about the damage such a convenience-food diet may be doing to the birds’ constitutions (probably partly justified); and, more puritanically, that the affection of the public is in some way corrupting the kites’ essential wildness, taming them, putting them in an invisible cage. But I’ve watched these birds closely for more than 20 years and I don’t believe their wildness has been compromised one iota. A party wheeling over a likely garden at teatime may look a little like a gathering of opportunist street buskers, but you know that an hour later they will be about their imperious private business again. These are the notes I wrote one early spring in the Chilterns, after watching kites all day:

  They could have been any birds in the distance, drifting in the grey sky. Then they lifted up, flexed, soared, two taut crossbows against the leafless ridge-woods. They glided towards me – no hurry, just riding the wind, sliding across the eddies. They came close, and I could see the rufous plumage ruffling on their bodies and tails. They were calling, but the wind carried their cries away from me. I drove further south, up on to the plateau. There were kites everywhere. They were sporting over the villages, lifting on gusts that took them sailing clean over cottages, then down to the level of the bird-tables. When I stopped for lunch in a pub I could see them through the windows, arcing across the hedges, huge and buoyant, using their forked tails as rudders. Outside I watched one close to as it turned into the wind. It raised its wings – as relaxed as a dancer’s arms or a half-full jib-sail – and gathered the wind in, folded it into itself. It was so poised, so effortlessly muscular, that I could feel my own shoulders flexing in sympathy.

  The red kite’s mastery of flight is so total that I have seen a bird playing with a windblown feather, repeatedly flying up with it in its bill, then letting it fall and catching it close to the ground. And their easy intimacy with humans means that they regularly steal household bric-a-brac to line their nests – kids’ toys, disposable plastic gloves, a pair of tights and, in the case of one particularly leery bird, several pairs of ladies’ knickers grabbed from washing lines. And it’s here that some ancient echoes begin to sound. Four hundred years ago, when red kites would have swarmed around east London and the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare has Autolycus, the streetwise con man in The Winter’s Tale, warn: ‘When the kite builds, look to your lesser linen.’

  Now the Chiltern kites are edging eastwards, back towards their old epicentre, along a route that roughly corresponds to that of the Metropolitan Line. They’re seen regularly over Chorleywood and Moor Park golf course. They’ve been spotted high over Regent’s Park, close to where Lord’s station once stood. Doubtless they have passed over the 800-year-old Smithfield meat market – the medieval kite’s choicest foraging ground – just a few hundred yards north of Farringdon, the original eastern terminus of the Met Line – as in January 2006, one arrived, pursued by a mob of crows and magpies, in a back garden in Hackney. The owner thought it was an eagle and called the police.

  Unlike the citizens of Metroland, well used by now to cemetery foxes, feral grapevines on the embankments and tank traps from the Cretaceous era, Londoners are not quite ready for mighty birds of prey on their home turf. The original idea of Metroland was predicated on the essential difference between city and countryside. But what it showed instead was their seamless compatibility, their willingness to develop social and natural ecotones. And the kites are carrying the torch for this idea back into the heart of the city.

  Further Reading

  Julian Barnes, Metroland (London, Robin Clark, 1981)

  John Betjeman, Collected Poems, 3rd edn (London,
John Murray, 1970)

  Clive Foxell, The Metropolitan Line: London’s First Underground Railway (Stroud, The History Press, 2010)

  Leslie Hepple, and Alison Doggett, The Chilterns (Chichester, Phillimore and Co., 1992)

  Alan Jackson, London’s Metropolitan Railway (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1986)

  Alan Jackson, London’s Metro-land (Harrow, Capital Transport, 2006)

  Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside (London, Collins, 1973)

  Richard Mabey, Home Country (London, Century, 1990)

  Richard Mabey, Nature Cure (London, Chatto & Windus, 2005)

  Andrew Martin, Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube (London, Profile, 2012)

  George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (London, Secker & Warburg, 1968)

  Iain Sinclair, London Orbital (London, Granta, 2002)

  Tiresias, Notes from Overground: Man is Born Free, and is Everywhere in Trains (London, Paladin, 1984)

  The TV documentary Metro-land, written and narrated by John Betjeman and directed by Edward Mirzoeff, was first broadcast on BBC One on 26 February 1973.

  Penguin Lines

  Choose Your Journey

  If you’re looking for…

  Romantic Encounters

  Heads and Straights

  by Lucy Wadham

  (the Circle line)

  Waterloo–City, City–Waterloo

  by Leanne Shapton

  (the Waterloo & City line)

  Tales of Growing Up and Moving On

  Heads and Straights

  by Lucy Wadham

  (the Circle line)

  A Good Parcel of English Soil

  by Richard Mabey

  (the Metropolitan line)

  Mind the Child

  by Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company

  (the Victoria line)

  The 32 Stops