'Metro-land'

Every single little dream

Is a rafter or a shingle

We can paint the house with laughter

When we build a little home.

It's not a palace nor a poorhouse,

But the rent is absolutely free,

This is my house but its your house,

If you'll come and live with me.

With a carpet on the floor,

Made of buttercups and clover,

All our troubles will be over,

When we build a little home.

     Earlier this year, the 26th of February to be exact, the BBC quietly marked the fiftieth anniversary of that wonderful documentary 'Metro-land' made by that admirable combination of the then Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman and producer & director Edward Mirzoeff. The result, as one would expect, is a delight. For A N Wilson, Betjeman's biographer, it was 'too good to be described simply as a 'programme''.

     I've outlined before, in my post about their 1974 documentary 'A Passion for Churches', the history of the Betjeman & Mirzoeff's collaboration. (That really does sound like the name of a firm of solicitors or even, maybe, a rather posh shoe shop!); but just to recap. The two of them began working together on three programmes BBC2 documentary series 'A Bird's Eye View' in the late 60s, and 'Metro-land' represents the continuity of their collaboration and, one must feel, their friendship. 

     'Metro-land' was, apparently, conceived (in a very civilised fashion) over lunch in Wheelers, the well-known London fish restaurant. Originally the documentary was intended to be an exploration of the suburb in general but it was decided to concentrate on one area of suburbia in NW London that was served by the Metropolitan line out of Baker St.  This was chosen not only as a sort of paradigm of suburban living, but because of the unique way the suburbs in that part of the capital developed in the interwar period with the railway company effectively acting as property developer. (It was the advertising department of the Metropolitan Railway who coined the term 'Metro-land'.) Compared to 'A Passion for Churches' this is a straightforward linear narrative. Sir John takes the train from Baker St tube station to the end of the Metropolitan line in distant Buckinghamshire, stopping off along the route for a little exploration, both historical and contemporary. And a lot is crammed into those 50 odd minutes. Our first call is at an earlier suburb: St John's Wood. It can, in fact, claim to be one of the earliest, dating from the end of the 18th century - all villas strung out along tree lined avenues. Rus in urbe. We then proceed to stop off at Neasden, Harrow, Wembley, Moor Park before we come to the end of the line at Amersham. We visit Grimsdyke (1870-72), at Harrow Weald, by Richard Norman Shaw; the great Baroque house Moor Park which is now the club house of a golf club; the Orchard (1900) by Voysey at Chorley Wood and High and Over (1929-31) by Amyas Connell. We meet the man behind the Neasden Nature Trail and the chap with a full scale cinema organ in his house.  And although, as I've said, a lot is squeezed into those fifty minutes, the pace is calm and unhurried. The camera is left to linger in telling ways.
     I couldn't help but feel, watching Sir John standing in one of the avenues of, I think, Harrow Garden Village which was the Metropolitan railway's Flagship development that 1973 is a long way away from today. What has become of those neat front gardens, bursting with roses? Probably paved over for extra parking. If not I imagine the roses have long gone for the sake of easy maintenance and the wooden window frames painted in such jaunty colours lost to upvc. 

     Indeed they have.

     One of the joys of this documentary and, indeed, its contemporaries, is that it contains no introduction as such - Betjeman does not tell us he's 'on a journey'. As the writer Gareth Roberts wrote in a recent article for 'The Spectator' an awful lot of programmes these days are essentially all, or nearly all, padding. It really is amazing how the producers of, say, 'Strictly' or 'The Masked Singer' manage to stretch things out as they do, rather like a 1940s housewife eeking out a meagre meat ration. I remember watching a recent documentary about gardens - by a well known tv gardener - and there were three consecutive introductions. He was on that 'journey' as he repeated told us.  With 'Metroland' we just jump straight in.  The audience is treated, properly, as adults.  Sink or swim.  Neither do Betjeman or Mirzoeff feel the need to repeat ad infinitum what they are doing.  And neither is Sir John vain enough to make the documentary about himself.  I can think of a number of presenters of BBC arts/history documentaries, all male I might add, who really are demons for this. 

     The suburbs and the 'semi' (the semi-detached house) have come for a lot of criticism over time some of it valid and some it just downright snobbery; the most obvious example here in the UK is the play 'Abigail's Party' of 1977, which the playwright Dennis Potter described in a 'The Sunday Times' review as "based on nothing more than rancid disdain, for it is a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes".  For good measure, try this example, which I inadvertently and fortuitously found last night while flicking through a small book on interior design* published by 'Good Housekeeping' magazine in the early 70s:

'Sophisticating your semi

   Moving into a 1930s 'semi' is enough to make anyone's ideas shrivel up on the spot. It is daunting to know all the neighbours have got floral carpet in the halls, three-piece suites in the living rooms, and dressing tables in the upstairs bay windows. But there's no reason why you shouldn't go out on a limb and create a very sophisticated interior with, say, bitter chocolate carpet in the hall and up the stairs (perhaps with off-white walls, plenty of modern prints, stainless steel spot-lights and, if you can, afford it, some new dead-simple banisters) With modern seating units in the living room, grouped into a square 'conversation' area, instead of set at an angle around a ghastly mottled fireplace. With built-in storage in your bedroom instead of the cumbersome and space-consuming wardrobe, chest of drawers, and dressing table trio. And with crisp roller blinds at the bay window instead of frilly, knickerbocker drapes.'

    Well, there writes somebody eager to escape their upbringing, and no mistake. At least the author has a strong opinion; read 'Good Housekeeping' these days and your brain will turn to mush.

     Oh, I suppose it is easy to mock the suburb and the 'semi', and indeed there has been a long history of that too from 'Diary of a Nobody' to the satirical magazine 'Private Eye' with its one time near obsession with Neasden. And then there the numerous sit-coms set in suburbia whether it's 'George and Mildred' or 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin'. The best, perhaps, was 'The Good Life'. All that said the suburban type, which was originally developed with the slightly elitist Garden Suburb and was popularized and commercialized with the spread of Metro-land, has turned out to be a particularly successful and popular urban type - certainly a damn sight more successful and popular than that proposed by the Post-War professionals. And I have to admit at this point to a certain ambiguity: rather liking the houses (at their best they can be rather good) having grown up in one not in the orbit of some British city but a small pretty nondescript Lincolnshire market town, but hating the suburban form. I think I would find it too quiet a place for me to live. I need more human interaction. 
     And then there's the issue of style. The suburban-semi is based on the Vernacular architecture of the southeast of England, as reinterpreted by the Arts and Crafts architects such as Sir Edwin Lutyens, or the earlier Queen Anne and Ye Olde Englishe Revival such as Richard Norman Shaw.  I suppose, if one was being particularly mean, you could call it a process of bastardisation. The problem for me is that with the success of Metro-land the semi, as a sort outlier of a particular vernacular architecture tradition, began its inexorable march across the UK and nowhere was safe. Tile hanging, red tiled roofs, pebble dash (that is wet dash) spread like a rash over the entire country. There are to be found here in South-west Wales. Local vernacular materials and traditions tended to be ignored. At the least the builder of my old house, who was my great grandfather, provided it with a pantile roof in the local tradition.

Steam took us onward,

Through the ripening fields,

Ripe for development,

Where the landscape yields,

Clay for warm bricks,

Timber for post and rail,

Through Amersham to Aylesbury and the vale.

In these wet fields the railway didn't pay,

The Metro stops in Amersham today.

*'Doing Up Your Home', written by Shirley Green; part of the 'Good Housekeeping Family Library' series, General Editor Isabel Sutherland. 

'A Passion for Churches'

     'I was eight or nine years old when I used to come here, to the Norfolk Broads on the river Bure, sailing and rowing with my father and I think it was the outline of that church tower, of Bylaugh against the sky, which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've been past since I've wanted to stop and look in.'

     Back in 2015, you may remember, the bf and I went on holiday to Horsey in flattest N E Norfolk. On our last full day of holiday we went out into the Broads, walking along the Fleet Dyke until we stood opposite the scanty remains of St Benet's Abbey. A small homage to Sir John Betjeman, the Poet Laureate, and the documentary film maker Edward Mirzoeff and their collaboration of 1974 the BBC documentary film: 'A Passion for Churches' (subtitled 'A celebration of the C of E with John Betjeman'). Previously they had worked together on three episodes of 'A Bird's Eye View' between 1969 & 1971, and most famously 'Metro-land' of 1973. Their final work together was, I believe, 'The Queens Realm - A Prospect of England', 'an aerial anthology with verse chosen by Sir John Betjeman'. It consisted of clips garnered from 'A Bird's Eye View' series accompanied by music and poetry read by the likes of Janet Suzman and Michael Horden; the whole thing tied together Betjeman's narration. It formed part of the BBC's cultural offerings for the Silver Jubilee Year of 1977, along with Huw Wheldon's 10 part series 'Royal Heritage' which Wheldon co-wrote with the historian J H Plumb. They certainly knew how to celebrate a jubilee back in the day. In 1979 Mirzoeff collaborated with Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green on documentary film 'The Front Garden'.

     Anyway, my first encounter with 'A Passion for Churches' was in 1984, when, following the death of Sir John, I caught a glimpse of this wonderful film on the BBC tribute to the late Poet Laureate. There were, I think, three sequences shown and two have remained with me: there was the visit to the 'Golden Church' of Lound (in Suffolk, but part of the Diocese of Norwich) where between 1912 & 1914 the church architect Sir J N Comper worked his magic, and, more importantly to our family, the Mother's Union garden party in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, where we believed we could espy my paternal grandmother amongst the crowd. 

     Judging by Eddie Mirzoeff's account in The Oldie the filming process seems to have been a picaresque affair, with an ever shifting cast of characters, such as Penelope Betjeman and the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, popping up and needing to be dealt with.  However the result of the collaboration of poet and film maker is something quite sophisticated and complex. The nearest equivalent would be a novel by Barbara Pym where the profound is both hidden and revealed to us through the medium of the domestic and mundane. The churches seem to be mainly chosen from N and NE Norfolk. The churches to the W and SW are largely omitted, though this partly because the churches of the Norfolk fenland are in the Diocese of Ely. 

     The title itself is a pun of a gentle sort, referring to both Betjeman's love of church architecture and the passion of Christ - that his death and burial; the implication being that the churches themselves were undergoing a death, or martyrdom (the Latin passio is used to describe the martyr's death), as faith was beginning in earnest 

     'its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind'.

     Perhaps the best way of understanding this film is to think of it as cable or yarn made of a number of individual threads entwining together: the celebration of the church architecture of the diocese  and a plea for conservation; the celebration of the parish life of the diocese - PCC meetings, church fetes and the like, in which we see the preparations for Easter. Connected with that there is a linear exploration of the spiritual journey of the individual parishioner through the 'Passage Rites' such as Baptism and Marriage, the sacraments by which we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ, through the portal of death to the resurrection - of which the joy of Easter Day, with which the film ends, is a foretaste.

*  *  *  *  *

     I think a lot about Norfolk these days - that land of lost content - from this Infernal City that is a place of of exile and a place of eclipse. The very gutter. 
     I love the county. My paternal grandparents were from Foulsham, my maternal grandmother from Melton Constable. (My maternal grandfather was the odd-one-out here being a Yellow Belly.) Growing up I used to visit so many times. Hopefully I will return soon.

Into my heart an air that kills  
  From yon far country blows:  
What are those blue remembered hills,  
  What spires, what farms are those?  
  
That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,  
The happy highways where I went  
  And cannot come again.

Holiday VII: St Benet's Abbey and the Ranworth Rood Screen

   On the final full day of our holiday we went west into the Broads.  We parked up at the rather suburban looking South Walsham Broad and walked along the Fleet Dike to see the ruins of St Benet's Abbey.  The remains of abbey were a favourite with Romantic artists such as Cotman, and were included in John Betjeman's 1974 documentary, 'A Passion For Churches', which was as much about Norfolk as it was the diocese of Norwich. (Produced and directed by Edward Mirzoeff, who was also responsible for Betjeman's 'Metro-land' of 1973.) Quite good reasons then for a long, cold muddy trek into the marshes!

     "I hear a deep sad undertow in bells which calls the Middle Ages back to me. From Prime to Compline the monastic hours echo in bells along the windy marsh and fade away. They leave me to the ghosts which seem to look from this enormous sky upon the ruins of a grandeur gone. St Benet's Abbey by the river Bure, now but an arch way and a Georgian mill. A lone memorial of the cloistered life."

   We then stopped off at the 'Fairhaven Woodland and Water Gardens', the creation of Major Henry Boughton.  Major Boughton was the younger brother of the 1st Lord Fairhaven, who lived at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire mentioned elsewhere in this blog and where the bf works.

   Our final visit of the day was to Ranworth and one of the great pieces of English late Medieval art, the Ranworth Rood Screen.  I'm tempted to call it a prime example, along with the Despencer Retable, of the 1st Norwich School; certainly it was painted locally.  The importance lies not only in its design but that so many of the painted panels survived the Reformation in such good nick.  A marvel.