06/04/2012

Love and Death In Metroland



Suburbs and suburbia have come up before in these columns, with Hatfield (Oxford Street)  and From Willesden to Cricklewood, usually in songs as a place to escape from. England has a particular version of surburbia, less well-known as a subject for songs – Metro-land, that area of Outer London, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire that grew up round the Metropolitan Line coming out from   Baker Street – the gateway to Metroland -  up to Amersham and Uxbridge. It sounds better than ‘suburbia’, a hint of Paris, a hint of  the countryside. It is meant to, for the term was coined by a PR department in 1915 in the attempt to get families to move out of London and commute in for work.  There was even a song of the time,  My Little Metro-land Home, conjuring up a semi-rural idyll on its sheet music cover:

It was always a  bit of a con. In the1920’s and 1930’s Metro-land looked back to an Edwardian  age that never really existed – and sometimes a good deal further back. A publicity blurb for Chorleywood  station in 1919 claimed you would walk straight into the 15th century. ( On the up side you would just miss the Black Death. On the down side you would not be able to get a cup of coffee or plate of chips anywhere). In the 50’s it looked back to a 30’s that never really existed.  In the 1990’s it looked back to a 50’s that never really  existed. The notion was made up of a number of things: mock Tudor houses, nuclear families, neat lawns and lawn tennis ,teashops and afternoon tea, little railway halts with wooden platforms,   a sense that places like Pinner or Chorleywood were really rather different from mere suburbia. John Betjeman wrote a number of poems about Metro-land, including Middlesex: "Daily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train. With a thousand Ta's and Pardons daintily alights Elaine".

It was never an obvious place to inspire pop songs, though some  artists did spend their formative years somewhere there. Elton  John, for example, grew up in Pinner in Harrow, an archetypal part of Metro-land with its mock-Tudor  ,annual  Pinner Fair dating back to the 1300’s and  Morris Dancers in ye olde High Street. I got a sense of what it must be like to grow up in such an environment when as a young child we had a couple of family holidays in a house-swapping exercise that was presumably a cost-saving measure, exchanging abodes with relatives who lived in Harrow. Even at that age I realised that we had got the poor side of the bargain: they got a week by the Dorset seaside in August, we got a week in the urban heat in Metro-land, too far out from the excitements of London's tourist sites to make them easily  accessible. Actually the highlight of one holiday was discovering an old treadle sewing machine in a bedroom and seeing how fast you could make the foot pedal go. It is no surprise that Elton John tended to the more flamboyant when he escaped such a setting. What characterised the notion of Metro-land as much as anything was respectability, the old fear of the lower middle class falling in to a social abyss.

However, it also meant a relative scarcity of songs about it. Even the Metropolitan Line, in fact, is less musically celebrated than others. The Northern Line is perhaps the best served here. There was Love on the Northern Line by  boy band Northern Line: “How was I to know what fate would bring to me, oh seeing you sitting there all  alone silently….. Tell me who would have thought I'd find love on the Northern Line “ (lyrics which raise doubts about whether Northern Line ever travelled on the Northern Line .Whenever  was anyone  able to sit down, never mind all alone?). There was also Robyn Hitchcock’s  52 Stations: “There's fifty-two stations on the Northern line, none of them is yours, one of them is mine”

For the Piccadilly Line there was a 1958 track by Jim Dale, Piccadilly  Line, a parody of Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line. (Despite a long and varied career taking  in pop singer, songwriter (Georgie  Girl),stage actor (Barnum) and narrating the Harry Potter audio-books in the USA, Jim Dale is still best remembered in the UK for his roles as an accident-prone romantic lead  in the Carry On films, forever innocently giving the likes of Barbara Windsor one as she invited a double-entendre.) The Bakerloo Line had the Eddy Grant-penned All Change On The Bakerloo Line, recorded by ska group The Pyramids (aka Symarip) in 1968, making the Bakerloo Line sound as if a permanent party was going on down there. (The  Pyramids, whose most successful single was Skinhead Moonstomp, recall an odd moment in UK  pop history, when white working-class skinheads  - some of whom voiced support for Enoch Powell and later the National Front-  championed  Jamaican ska and rock- steady music : the commercial success of artists such as Desmond Dekker and the Pioneers was partly due to popularity amongst skinheads. Shared links of class and an anti-police/authority culture perhaps explained part of this.It would be wrong in any case  to assume an automatic link between skinhead culture and right wing politics. In the mid and late 70’s, the Anti-Nazi League movement  in London and Manchester and elsewhere had support from Skins Against the Nazis groups.)  Even the Hammersmith and City Line got a mention in Carter USM’s Lean On Me, I Won’t Fall over: “I'll read your letter as I pass away the time, stuck in a tunnel on the Hammersmith and City line”. The Metropolitan Line though? Nothing really.

However, the song here from 1988, Love and Death in Metroland by Always, from the album Thames Valley Leather Club And Other Stories, seems a fitting one. Always was basically Kevin Wright, a singer/songwriter with echoes of Lloyd Cole , perhaps Ray Davies :very English, a  melancholic undertone, veering towards the whimsy at times, and songs  with  literary allusions  that dissect English culture. A style that suits Metro-land. ”There’s no escaping from this place, you’ll disappear without a trace”. Well, of course you will. It was an advertising concept -  it doesn’t really exist.

51 comments:

  1. Geoff, this is fascinating! I grew up in Amersham and had no idea I was living in "Metro Land"!!

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  2. Ha ha - Uxbridge and Amersham - "a hint of Paris, a hint of the countryside" - false advertising!:)

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  3. I guess it's because I'm American, but that station called Hatch End that you posted a photo of looks really cute and quaint, almost idyllic, with its ornate architecture and the fact it was built in 1911! I could see that station being at home in Paris, so I guess maybe I buy the Metroland as Paris advertising idea! Unless that particular station is known for being very pretty, and the others along that subway line you mentioned are less so.....

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  4. I think it might be a particularly fancy station, Martha. The wiki entry on it says: "Architectural critic and Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman was an admirer of Hatch End railway station and described it as "half-way between a bank and a medium sized country house" - Metroland."

    I think the Amersham station is more representative of what the (ugly) Metroland stations look like unfortunately! - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Amersham_tube_station_1.jpg

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  5. I feel like I've seen lots of places that look like that song sheet music cover, My Little Metro-land Home, when traveling in England, Geoff. I went to a place called Chalfont St Giles once, which was in Buckinghamshire, which you mention is part of Metroland, and it looked just like that song sheet! Here's one picture of it: http://www.englandthisway.com/places/chalfont-st-giles.php. So anyway, I think the semi-rural idyll might not have been a COMPLETE fabrication by advertisers.....

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  6. Apparently there was even an annual guide, also called Metro-land, published by the company from 1915 to 1932. It leisure travel and also published facts and figures for the commuter and would-be resident! I bet that would make fascinating reading!

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  7. You and your readers might like my Metroland site: http://www.metroland.org.uk/ !

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  8. Ha ha:) "On the up side you would just miss the Black Death. On the down side you would not be able to get a cup of coffee or plate of chips anywhere":)

    It's always a bonus when you just miss the plague.

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  9. "Morris Dancers in ye olde High Street" - I wasn't sure what Morris Dancers were.... And to be honest, even after watching a video, I'm still not sure! Here's a video, as I bet other Americans might not know! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2_NpHUiIdc

    Is is some kind of religious ritual, their dancing and stick-banging?

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  10. Poor Geoff, this made me laugh a lot, it's so tragi-comic though: "Actually the highlight of one holiday was discovering an old treadle sewing machine in a bedroom and seeing how fast you could make the foot pedal go"! Did you not have siblings who you could at least have a few adventures with?

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  11. Oh dear, poor Geoff, imagine your family holiday being in Harrow! I know Harrow well. And you grew up on the South Coast..... I can't imagine why a family that already lived in holiday-land would take a holiday in Harrow.... in August!!! You definitely got the bad deal, there.

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  12. Ha ha yes, imagine how ordinary Elton might have been if he hadn't been trying to escape from dreary, respectable Metroland!

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  13. Yes, that song All Change On The Bakerloo Line, definitely makes it sound like that subway line is truly rockin'! I'd expect a cocktail with my ticket after listening to this:)

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  14. Betjeman also has the poems Harrow-on-the-Hill ("When melancholy autumn comes to Wembley/And electric trains are lighted after tea"), and The Metropolitan Railway ("Early Electric! With what radiant hope/Men formed this many-branched electrolier"), plus Summoned by Bells where he remembers that "Metroland/Beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks".

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  15. “seeing you sitting there all alone silently" - "lyrics which raise doubts about whether Northern Line ever travelled on the Northern Line. Whenever was anyone able to sit down, never mind all alone?" I COMPLETELY AGREE. After commuting on the Northern Line for a decade, I can confirm that this boy band never rode on it!

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  16. Kevin Wright / Always has a bit of a Belle & Sebastian sound as well.....

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  17. I love the guitar part that concludes "Love and Death in Metroland"!

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  18. When Kevin Wright makes music it smells of England - love it or hate it, it's so English through and through!

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  19. I love Always/Wright's sentimental British style of wistful romanticism. Which he somehow combines with a brutal honesty and an intrinsic introspective display of real and genuine sadness as well as his aching suspiring for something more in life. He can transform the banal into something interesting, and really, really hit you with a maudlin (although not sappy), melancholy song when you’re not expecting it. His albums are historically defining must-haves in any collection, even if the world chooses to ignore their general existence, influence, and sheer brilliance of their esoteric brand of pop.

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  20. Here's Carter USM’s Lean On Me, I Won’t Fall over, that Geoff mentioned....... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp8gUUGMOFs - I could only find a live version.

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  21. Seeing as you mentioned Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line (which was parodied), thought I'd post it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_aIQ1_sAVg

    RIP to the KING OF SKIFFLE!!

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  22. Geoff, it's fascinating this idea that each era used Metroland to evoke a fantasy of a past era - as though the whole concept was constructed out of nostalgia and then maintained by it generation after generation. But while I understand what the people in the 1990s were looking back to in the 1950s (presumably the fantasy of neat lawns and solidly middle-class nuclear families with all their kitchen amenities), and what the people in the 1950s were looking back in the 1930s (presumably the fantasy of the rising middle class, technological discoveries, the exciting build up to war), I'm not sure what the people in the 1920s and 30s were looking back to in the Edwardian age - what was it (that never really existed) that the 1920s/30s were being nostalgic about with regard to the Edwardian age? What were they fantasizing about?

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  23. I am not sure Chalfont St Giles is strictly Metroland, Maggie, as it isnt on the Metropolitan Line - it does look a semi-rural idyll, though!-home to Milton's cottage
    Morris Dancing is a bit of a mystery to me, Desiree!Very English though!
    I think what the Metroland of the 20's and 30's was looking back to the Edwardian age for, Laura, was the kind of class certainty they imagined existed then, when suburban families had a domestic servant or two, war was a faraway affair and the future seemed assured.

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  24. Geoff, thought you might enjoy this posting from today's Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/huffpost-new-york-present_n_1417410.html - songs about NYC!

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  25. Thanks for the link-some good suggestions there

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  26. Geoff, there is also "Queensbury Station" by The Magoo Brothers, for another song about a place in Metroland......

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  27. Geoff did you ever see the TV show The Avengers from the 1960s? Metro-land was where it was set - complete with a railway station and quiet suburbia (where behind the facade, dark things were happening!).

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  28. Geoff, you've probably read it, but the Julian Barnes novel Metroland is very good - Christopher Lloyd travels on the Metropolitan line to and from London, and during a French lesson at one point he declares: "J’habite Metroland" ["I live in Metroland"], because it "sounds better than Eastwick, stranger than Middlesex".

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  29. I didn't realize Metroland real - mainly because I saw the Christian Bale movie called Metroland (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119665/), the tagline / advertising slogan for which was "Metroland is not a location - it is a state of mind"!

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  30. Don't forget the classic documentary by Betjeman, from 1973 called Metro-land, where he does a kind of guided tour of the Metropolitan Line from Baker Street to Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire, talking about the architecture of the suburbs and villages.... It's actually on Youtube in full: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIZlJgFgWk. He's pretty nostalgic about the 1920s and 1930s, as predicted by Geoff!

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  31. I read that the term Metro-land was invented in 1915 by the Metropolitan Railway's in-house copywriter James Garland, who according to legend was ill with influenza and sprang out of bed when he thought of the term! This is according to Alan Jackson’s book London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986).

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  32. There is also Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, with a character called Lady Metroland. Her husband, Viscount Metroland, takes his ‘funny name’ (as Paul Pennyfeather sees it) from a fantasy fiefdom of the London Metropolitan Railway.....

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  33. Constant Lambert in his Music Ho! A study of music in decline, from 1934, has a great but cynical description of Metroland - he describes "the hideous faux bonhomie of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of Metroland, singing obsolete sea chanties 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'".

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  34. I think Chalfont St Giles counts:) In this review of the reissued 1924 book put out about Metroland - http://www.southbankpublishing.com/9781904915003/reviews3.php - the reviewer notes: "The 1924 booklet touches on many of Metroland's historic links. Fleeing the Great Plague, John Milton took a cottage at Chalfont St Giles, where he completed Paradise Regained. When an American proposed to dismantle the cottage and ship it across the Atlantic, there was rebellion and it was saved for Metroland and the nation."

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  35. Great column! You might like my project Modernism in Metroland, http://www.modernism-in-metroland.co.uk/index.html, which tries to document and celebrate the Modernist and Art Deco buildings of the Metro-Land area and era. I first started this project after moving to South Harrow a few years ago. It began with me photographing some of the interesting local buildings, and grew as I found out more about both Modernist architecture and the concept of Metro-Land.

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  36. It's fascinating that Metro Land actually has no defined boundaries. I guess strictly it can be traced along the route of the original Metropolitan railway. But others seem to think it is a larger triangular shape from Baker Street station through the North West of London, and up to the counties of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. And actually the annually produced guide to this invented region, Metro-land, defined it as “a country with elastic borders that each visitor can draw for himself” - so it's not really supposed to even be a defined space, even in the fantasy!

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  37. I've just moved away from Ruislip - a station so unchanged it is used for filming to this day.

    The Metropolitan line is one of my favourite tube lines- from virtual countryside 10 min walk from Eastcote or Ruislip stations to the very centre of London in under half an hour! Wow! That's super now... in the 20s-30s it must have been a revelation.

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  38. I attended one of The London Transport Museum's Heritage days last September - where they run the original trains from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. This one was the Metropolitan line. Those days are well worth a visit, such a wonderful way to spend a day out, and a great way to get up close to some marvellous machinery... also, one can wear a hat and gloves in stylish surroundings! Here are some snaps of us on the day, dressed in 1940s clothes of course!

    http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VfbmnZcoHs4/Tm3imC-6yaI/AAAAAAAAAyI/4ye4YBzvE5c/s1600/Chris+and+Gem+stood+out.JPG

    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--DWtARCYHCk/Tm3h0QI3GUI/AAAAAAAAAx8/7KHhhYVDxGg/s1600/Chris+sat+1.JPG

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ryHzGUkWH80/Tm3iIChFJiI/AAAAAAAAAyA/hKFiysbR6o8/s1600/gem+gloves.JPG

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  39. Geoff, you're totally right that there are fewer songs about the Metropolitan Line than some other tube lines. For example, for the Circle Line, there is Day By Day, by Generation X: "Stranded in the jungle. Locked inside a tube. Hate your next door neighbour. He's got more than you. Going round and round. Day by day. On the Circle Line ..." The use of the Circle Line as a metaphor for the treadmill, going nowhere, no tomorrow.....

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  40. Don't forget before the poem George R. Sims during WW1:

    "I know a land where the wild flowers grow,
    Near, near at hand if by train you go,
    Metroland, Metroland".

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  41. Lady Metroland then reappears in Evelyn Waugh's book "Vile Bodies" as well!

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  42. Here's Robyn Hitchcock’s 52 Stations that Geoff mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjiWjzlAwPs

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  43. Thanks for the great photos, Gemma-very evocative.
    Thanks for all the links -thats a great quote from Music Ho!
    I never thought of the Avengers set in Metroland -but I can see how it fits.

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  44. I love the John Betjeman documentary, Metro-land, it is a television classic, lovingly reflecting the quirkier side of everyday Englishness. Sir John explored the extraordinary architecture to be found in London's commuter belt and met the ordinary people who lived therein. From mock-Tudor semis to the Harrow Women's Institute, his lilting prose exalted the eccentric and the commonplace.

    There was much to see. Middle England had reinvented itself, and Betjeman was on hand to celebrate the end result.

    Best of all, Sir John came to my village, Croxley Green, on the day of our annual village fete. He stood on a street corner close to my house to watch the carnival floats pass by. He watched my six foot something music teacher waiting proudly on the village green with the school orchestra stacked up behind. And he smiled benignly as the Queen of the Revels tried hard not to burst in fits of giggles during her coronation ceremony. I was only seven years old at the time and I don't appear on screen, but I was there, somewhere in the background, buying ice lollies and trying to win bottles of Cresta in the tombola. In his documentary Sir John lovingly chronicled my world, my childhood and my semi-detached roots.

    You can imagine my surprise on watching Metro-land for the very first time to see my own insignificant commuter backwater celebrated on screen. Here were roads I walked down and events I attended and even people I knew, immortalised on film, watched by millions. But surely there was nothing in Croxley Green worthy of Betjeman's scrutiny? This was just another dormitory suburb on the Metropolitan railway], overshadowed by neighbouring Watford and Rickmansworth. Why would anybody find my life interesting?

    If I'd been making a documentary about Croxley Green I might have visited the big house on New Road where Madame Tussaud sculpted her waxworks, and in whose former studio I attended nursery school. Or I might have headed down to the canalside where the John Dickinson paper mill manufactured world-famous Croxley Script watermarked notepape. Maybe even gone to the converted farm at the top of my road where barking Barbara Woodhouse trained dogs her way. But no, Sir John selected instead the village's annual carnival - the Croxley Green Revels - and delighted in its muted self-importance.....

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  45. [ctd because of word limit]

    One Saturday every summer, as in a thousand other villages across the country, the good people of Croxley Green came together in a festive celebration of community. Some decorated the backs of lorries with crepe paper and sat on the back dressed as cannibals, or hula dancers (or something else typically English) while others twirled batons and paraded along behind. The rest of us would watch and cheer as the procession passed by our doorsteps, before following the final float up to the mile-long village green where the main events of the day would unfold. At two o'clock precisely the mellifluous tones of an unseen Master of Ceremonies would echo around the central roped-off arena, announcing the almost thrilling programme for the afternoon. Maypole dancing, school recorder groups, maybe even a troupe of well-trained canines - all were highlights of an afternoon at the Croxley Revels in the 1970s, and probably still are today.

    Betjeman's documentary concentrates on the climactic moment of the day's proceedings - the crowning of the Queen of the Revels. She and her entourage process into the arena dressed in their glossy ceremonial robes, which look suspiciously as though they've been sewn together from a set of frilly curtains. These costumes were recycled every year, the scariest being the floppy black felt hat and bright blue cloak worn by the unfortunate page boy. He looks on, inwardly mortified, as Queen Jenny addresses her loyal subjects by smirking through a speech of perfect scripted blandness.

    I'm just pleased that Betjeman filmed Metro-land in 1972, back when I was an anonymous seven year-old obscured somewhere in the crowd. Had he visited a few years later he might have caught me taking a slightly more prominent role. I was never in the running for page boy, thankfully, but in 1976 I was press-ganged into taking part in the maypole dancing with several of my well-scrubbed classmates. We practised for weeks until we could skip and weave like professionals, then unleashed our honed artistic talents in front of an appreciative audience of parents and grandmothers. Thankfully no cine film or photographs of that performance remains.

    And yet, watching Metro-land all these years later, it strikes me now that Sir John Betjeman never once appears anywhere in the two minutes of footage of my village Revels. He provides a voiceover, no more, and a BBC camera crew probably shot the rest. The Poet Laureate never stood on the corner of Malvern Way watching the bagpipers pass by, nor graced our village green with his cheery presence. He picked out Croxley merely to shine a spotlight on the fake heritage of Metro-land, gently mocking our pseudo-historical pageant played out in former fields with no tradition of their own. The bastard. But I'll let him off, just this once.

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  46. And here's his comments about it

    "Onward, onwards, north of the border, down Hertfordshire way.
    The Croxley Green Revels - a tradition that stretches back to 1952.
    For pageantry is deep in all our hearts
    and this, for many a girl, is her greatest day"
    John Betjeman at Croxley Green ("Metro-land", BBC, 1973)

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  47. Here's Love on the Northern Line by the band Northern Line that Geoff wrote about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2an6PJOsDQ

    What a terrible song!:)

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  48. Geoff, it's really interesting, that moment you write about when white working-class skinheads championed Jamaican ska; a fascinating reminder about there not being an automatic link between skinhead culture and right wing politics.

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  49. In an attempt to fill in the four-or-so hour gaps that seem to proliferate my life at the moment, I’ve taken to hopping on tube lines and heading as far west as they’ll take me. My afternoons are being increasingly spent in such exotic places as West Ruislip, Ruislip Gardens, Chesham, Rickmansworth, Wembley, Harrow, and Ruislip Manor.

    I like this strange expanse of the Greater London map that lies between the spokes of Watford and Uxbridge.

    At present, the area’s best-known feature is surely Wembley Stadium. Leaving Wembley Park station, one is presented with a view that looks over towards the stadium – which, in my opinion, is a bit of a failure – but also towards the horizon behind it. It seems perilously close. The grey sky above seems a dome, drooping to meet the faux-utilitarian arch of The Home of Football.

    Climb down the steps to Wembley Way, and walk past the empty kiosks, with their promises of a “A Better Sausage” or “A Better Burger”. The immediate surroundings of the stadium are as you would expect, and probably impossible to judge architecturally when only you yourself (along with a few other silent matchstickmen) inhabit them. The view, again, is singularly threatening: a foreshortened view towards London, the BT Tower, Shard, and Canary Wharf tiltshifted into toytownism. Wembley is grey, intimidating, and unforgettable.

    Other parts of Metro-land are more welcoming. Greenford, beyond Wembley’s southward horizon, has green brownfields, and its own branchline, one of the last of its kind in Greater London. Chesham, beyond the M25 and the bounds of London itself, is utterly unremarkable: a redbrick-pavemented town centre, with obligatory M&Co, is pleasantly framed by hills– snow-covered on my visit.

    Chesham, however, is rather too Country Life for my tastes. As a northerner, I believe if you’re going to do countryside, do it properly: a judgement that obviously rules out the vast majority of the South. Moreover, it wears its place within Bucks far too prissily on its sleeve. What is wonderful about true Metro-land – the parts within London – is its placelessness.

    I have no sympathy with groups like the Association of British Counties – a pressure group seeking to restore the UK’s pre-1975 county borders – not least because they fail to recognise the banal nature of all county affiliation. For every Yorkshire loyalist in places like Saddleworth and Barnoldswick, I have found there are two who embrace their new county with myopic assurance: county loyalty is always peversely stronger along counties’ borders than in their supposed heartlands. This is surely the most stupid kind of regional belonging.

    The suburban inhabitants of Metro-land– those whom I have had the pleasure to have known – have virtually no such identity. Do they feel like they live in London? “Not really. I’ve got a couple of mates at UCL, so I go over and see them occasionally.” How freeing it must be to have no socially acceptable answer to the awful question: “Where do you come from?”

    I catch the train back into Paddington: the city reappears much too quickly. Metro-land: the ur-suburb, the home of the quietly dispossessed.

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  50. That is a fascinating recollection of Croxley Green..
    Re the reference above to the kiosks advertising Better Burgers as you go down Wembley Way, until a few years ago one of these was run by the late Carlo Little, asked to be the first Rolling Stone drummer.

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  51. The poem actually reads "Gaily into Ruislip Gardens......"
    not Daily!

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