Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman
Covent Garden Piazza is always a lively and dynamic part of London with a permanent throng of natives and visitors drawn to the spectacle of street entertainers, the wonderfully restored produce market and the glitz of the Royal Opera House, all under the imperturbable gaze of Inigo Jones St. Paul's Church, commonly known as the Actors' Church. For all around you is the Theatre land of London from Richard D'Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre with a small hotel attached to the Lyceum, The Strand , The Garrick and the Adelphi to name a few. Tonight I was going to a performance which would bring together three of my favourite things; London’s Underground which is the lifeblood of the City, The Transport Museum which gives a fascinating insight into the growth of London and the unique and indomitable figure of the Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, who died in 1984 but who is still remembered with great affection, having championed Victorian Architecture and Railways but not in a tedious way but as in his poetry and writing with an impish wit which belied the depths of his undoubted insight. Oh, and there is the slight complicating factor that I actually live and commute in Metroland in a part which is still rural!
Entrance to the Museum
John Betjeman described himself as a "poet and a hack", a sentiment typical of the wry self-deprecating wit that has earned him an indelible place in the affections of the British public. By his death in 1984, he was probably the 20th century's most popular Poet Laureate.
Born in 1906, Betjeman grew up in the suburbs of north London. At school his German name marked him out for the attention of bullies. He arrived at Oxford University with a teddy bear which gave his contemporary Evelyn Waugh the idea for Aloysius, Sebastian's teddy, in Brideshead Revisited. Betjeman was more concerned with his social life and writing for university magazines than his academic studies and failed to complete his degree.
Betjeman spent the Second World War working for the Ministry of Information and as a cultural attaché in Ireland (but by all accounts as a spy), where the IRA considered his assassination but decided against it as "a man who could give so much pleasure with his pen couldn't be much of a secret agent". Work for the Architectural Review fuelled a lifelong passion for unloved Victorian buildings, which Betjeman campaigned tirelessly to save, in later life becoming known as much for his architectural programmes; recognisable by his large waist and avuncular style. A statue of Betjeman stands at London's St Pancras station, which he fought to save. He developed an affection for the Irish people and the country which is reflected in his poetry;
“Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe's Stone Age race,"
IRELAND WITH EMILY
Betjeman campaigned strongly against the architectural vandalism of the 1960’s where disastrous architectural, town planning and transport mistakes were made, none more so than the destruction of the Euston Arch. Its demolition, with the rest of Euston Station was regarded as one of the greatest acts of Post-War architectural vandalism in Britain, the campaign to save it lead to the foundation of the Victorian Society and involved the indomitable Sir John Betjeman.
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/euston-arch.html
Whilst that battle was lost up the road the campaign to save St. Pancras Station was a turning point. The greatest threat to the station came in 1966 with plans to amalgamate King's Cross and St Pancras. However public opinion had been sharpened by the appalling demolition of Euston in 1962. John Betjeman took up the cause to protect the station and in 1967 the Government listed the station and hotel as Grade 1.
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/st-pancras-reborn.html
Tonight we are going to a presentation in my favourite London Museum, The Transport Museum at Covent Garden (http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/londons-transport-museum.html ) on Betjeman and Metro-Land co hosted by the Museum and the Betjeman Society in the Cubic Theatre under the Museum whose construction was somewhat delayed when they discovered a Saxon graveyard during the excavations. These are the perils of digging in this ancient city!
Map of Metroland
The talk is part of the Museum’s Suburbia exhibition and season which explores how public transport helped to create the myths and identity of suburbia and how it has featured in the cultural fabric of London and Britain over the last 100 years. The exhibition looks at how transport has shaped the suburbs and celebrates suburban lifestyle, architecture, design and popular culture through a series of unique displays. Mixing fun, fact and a little bit of fantasy to rejoice in a place that we collectively continue to love and hate.
Metroland Magazine for the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley
The talk on Betjeman and Metro-land was co-hosted by David Bownes, Head Curator of the London Transport Museum John Heald, Vice-Chairman of the Betjeman Society. It was trailed as an exploration of the suburban ideal, through the words of Britain's best loved poet, including rare archival footage, poetry readings and vintage promotional material celebrating Betjeman's beloved Metro-land.
Of all the works of Sir John Betjeman none has caught the public imagination more than Metro-Land, the BBC documentary which he made in 1973. It was Sir John's gift to romanticise the mundane: in this case a tube ride from Baker Street to Amersham, celebrating the north-west London suburbs created by the Metropolitan Railway between 1910 and 1933.
Metroland DVD
"Metro-Land" was the advertising slogan developed to entice workers from cramped homes in Central London out into the rural paradise of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It 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. In the company's advertising material, Metro-Land was certainly not a place where you were expected to go down with flu: posters and a magazine which carried the name Metro-Land depicted a sylvan landscape where ladies in hats picked flowers and drifted through sun-speckled meadows.
Baker Street
Harrow on the Hill
It was, of course, largely a con. The creation of Metro-Land destroyed the very thing - open countryside - which was used to advertise it. The speculative homes thrown up around the new stations bore few resemblances to the Tudor cottages depicted in the advertising materials: most were dreary semis, constructed at great haste and sold for as little as £400 each. Modern first-time buyers can only dream: that is equivalent to just £20,000 in today's money.
No developer would be allowed such free rein today. Indeed, the suburban sprawl created by the Metropolitan Railway did much to influence the creation of the post-war town and country planning system. A dozen years after the railway was subsumed into the newly-formed London Transport in 1933, the growth of Metro-Land was finally halted by the instigation of London's green belt.
See; http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/01/northern-heights.html
Metro-land may have lost its official standing only eighteen years after its invention, but the name had already entered the language as an almost generic expression of suburban life. A popular song called My Little Metro-land Home had been published in 1920. The word had even, through Evelyn Waugh's fictional character Margot Metro-land, appeared for the first time in the pages of a novel (Decline and Fall, published in 1928). Metro-land's characteristics were later to be affectionately evoked in the poems of John Betjeman such as The Metropolitan Railway (1954) and in his nostalgic BBC television programme Metro-land, made in 1973. Yet another perspective appears in Julian Barnes' first novel, Metroland (1980) where the writer draws on memories of his own suburban upbringing in the area in the 1960s. For Barnes 'Metro-land is a country with elastic borders which every visitor can draw for himself, as Stevenson drew his map of Treasure Island'.
In little more than half a century, Metro-land grew from being an ad man's creative invention into a more prosaic reality in the 1920s and 30s, a wistful post-war recollection from the 1950s onwards and finally a new land of personal imagination by 1980.
Metroland
The Song!
The houses
David Bownes and John Heald explored Betjeman’s fascination with Metro-Land with authority and affection and it is indicative of the respect with which Betjeman is held to this day, 25 years after his death, that there was not a spare seat in the Cubic Theatre. John Heald recited from Betjeman’s works with charm and affection at times looking and sounding uncannily like his hero. He also made a pitch for people to join the Society as it is “great fun” and indeed watching rare archive footage of Betjeman none present doubted the statement.
As for the late, great and much loved Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, he loved wild Cornwall and was buried there; he loved suburban Harrow. The two come together in his poem "Harrow-on-the-Hill", when dusk over the Metropolitan Line makes suburbs look like Cornish seas:
"There's a storm cloud to the westward over Kenton, / There's a line of harbour lights at Perivale."
For the story of the world’s first Underground Railway and a Great Railway Journey see;
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/01/great-circle-line-journey.html
Live in Metroland - The door catches on Metropolitan Railway carriages
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