The Subterranean Railway (30 page)

Harrow Garden Village, an estate built for the Metropolitan by a council engineer turned developer, E.S. Reid, was described in his frequent advertisements in
Metroland
as having ‘the particular advantage of being self-contained and where you choose a house on
this estate, you may rest assured that you will be surrounded by other E.S. Reid houses’. In other words, don’t worry about the riff-raff coming to spoil the estate – as Reid’s advertising copy put it: ‘you will not have a nasty cheap mass-production house anywhere near you to lower the value of the property’. In fact, Reid was making a rather fine class distinction. According to a history of Metroland, ‘this was the first estate which was built with the lower middle-class house owner in mind’.
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Reid was, of course, building mass production houses but, to be fair, they were of a good standard; even today estate agents sometimes use the term ‘Met houses’ in publicity blurbs.

Chalk Hill, Wembley Park, was said to be ‘in a picturesque locality within close touch of London, yet in open country’. This was part of the largest area of development stimulated by the Metropolitan. Wembley, the site of Watkin’s ill-fated tower (see
Chapter 6
), had not been the subject of much development during the Edwardian period but with the good transport links it was ripe for a major scheme. The catalyst was the Empire exhibition of 1924, which had been long in gestation. The idea for such an exhibition had been mooted as far back as in the early 1900s to use British pre-eminence in the world economy – which in reality was already waning – to market its wares in the face of increasing foreign competition.

The organizers of the exhibition chose Wembley as the site for much the same reason as, seventy-five years later, the Millennium Dome was built on derelict land well served by the Underground. The wider purpose of the exhibition was, as the organizers put it, ‘to strengthen the bonds that bind the Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughter Nations … to enable all who owe allegiance to the British Flag to meet on common ground … it is a family party, to which every member of the Empire is invited, and at which every part of the Empire is represented’. Pavilions representing each colony were built at a cost of £10m. It was an imperial Disneyland, aiming to show Britain at the height of its global power with pavilions from every corner of the Empire which, at the time, encompassed a quarter of the world’s
population: Fiji to East Africa, New Zealand to Canada. Yet the very necessity of such an exhibition, intended to stimulate development of an ailing economy, showed that the Empire was already in decline.

The sports stadium was completed in 1923 in time for the famous ‘white horse’ cup final at which a crowd well exceeding the capacity of 100,000 – some estimates suggest twice that figure – turned up.
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Over 100,000 people also, came to the opening by King George V of the main exhibition a year afterwards on 23 April 1924. Two days later on Whit Monday, despite an unofficial strike by Underground workers, almost three times that number visited the show, with each adult paying the quite substantial entrance fee of one shilling and sixpence. The Metropolitan not only catered for the sightseers visiting the exhibition – when its workforce was not on strike – but had played a key role in the building of the site, which used a staggering 200,000 tons of concrete in the construction of the pavilions. One of the Metropolitan’s electric locomotives was displayed in the Palace of Engineering, the most impressive of the pavilions, which was six and a half times the size of Trafalgar Square and at the time the largest concrete construction in the world. The Indian exhibits were housed in a replica of the Taj Mahal next to an artificial lake, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) displayed a collection of pearl necklaces insured for a million pounds, and Canada produced a life-size statue of the Prince of Wales, made of butter. The most popular attraction was the Queen’s Dolls’ House, a complete mansion built to the scale of one inch to the foot.

The exhibition was so successful, with 17 million visitors in 1924, that it was kept open for a second year, during which it attracted about half that number. But as with the Millennium Dome, the exhibition was intended to be the catalyst for a long-term development of the area with both housing and industrial sites. As a result, Wembley became one of London’s most successful areas in the inter-war years. The pavilions were dismantled,
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leaving basic infrastructure on a site that was perfect for the type of lighter manufacturing business that was becoming the engine of the UK economy, replacing the declining
coal and steel industries of the north. London had long been the largest manufacturing region in the country, despite the popular image of the north, but now the concentration was even greater, with two thirds of the jobs created between 1923 and the outbreak of the Second World War being sited in the capital.

Wembley and Metroland were thus part of a wider pattern which included both the transformation and expansion of London. The inner city was losing its population, partly as a result of better transport links which enabled people to live further out, but also because the growing number of offices pushed up rentals which made living in town uneconomic for most people. The suburbs had to accommodate both people moving from the city and the huge number of incomers attracted to London by its prosperity and rapid economic growth. While the population of inner London declined by almost half a million between 1901 and 1937, during that time the suburbs grew by 2.5 million. The population of the Greater London reached 8 million, representing its apogee in terms of the proportion of Britain’s people living there. London became the engine of growth for the whole economy, and this was greatly facilitated by the Underground’s incursions into the suburbs. Indeed, London as a whole fared much better than the rest of the country during the difficult years of the twenties and thirties, which explains why Metroland could keep expanding during that period with barely a break even at the height of the Depression.

Given that many of these newcomers were required for manual or blue collar jobs, they could not afford to buy their own homes and needed council housing which, for the first time, started to be built in large numbers. After the war the government had been panicked by social unrest and the demand for ‘homes for heroes’ into passing the Addison Act in 1919, which allowed local authorities to build housing subsidized by grants from central government. The London County Council was at the forefront of building these homes, which were required to be of a high standard with indoor bathrooms and
good space standards, and started work in 1920 on big estates in Roehampton, Catford and Becontree, the largest council development in Europe. The Addison Act itself was short-lived, but with the introduction of similar measures, the peak year for the construction of subsidized council housing was 1927.

After that, however, the private sector predominated as the LCC faced all kinds of opposition in its attempts to create further developments. The local authorities in the outlying districts were disinclined to give permission for houses to be built for these ‘immigrants’ from central London and, indeed, many of these potential tenants could not afford to move outside the central area because they were unable to pay the fares into central London where they had to work. Because of this problem, the LCC specified that this housing should be allocated only to more affluent tenants who could afford the relatively high rents as well as the travelling costs. The local authorities even refused to build sufficient schools, which meant hundreds of the new children from London roamed the streets when they should have been receiving an education.

The focus towards private housing had been stimulated by government intervention, too. For a time, under a law introduced by Bonar Law’s Conservative administration in 1923, a cash grant was available to house-builders amounting to £75 per house, about 15 per cent of the cost of a three-bedroom house with a bathroom. Therefore, not only did government subsidies smooth the way for the construction of the tube extensions (as we saw in
Chapter 11
), but they also helped accelerate the growth of the housing around them.

The other catalyst for the growth of owner occupation and the related spread of Metroland was the burgeoning building societies. Helped by a favourable taxation policy which gave building society accounts an advantage over other forms of investment, from the early 1920s the societies began to overflow with money available to lend for mortgages, and mass house-builders emerged, ready to use this source of finance. The two worked together to underwrite the initial
cost of acquiring homes so that the first-time buyer was able to obtain a house through a down payment of a mere 5 per cent, rather than the previous 20 per cent. That partly explains how, even through the long Depression that followed the 1929 economic collapse, Metroland was able to continue to grow.

After the Empire Exhibition, Wembley and the area around the next station on the line, Preston Road, were soon transformed. According to a history of the suburbs, the land around Wembley Park had been largely rural before the Exhibition but now, once it had ended, ‘housing estates began to grow along the roads and up the slopes of Barn Hill and Chalk Hill to the north of the Metropolitan Line’.
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The 1926
Metroland
pamphlet lauded the merits of Wembley Park, which, ‘after its blaze of fame, has now settled down to the everyday activities of a residential suburb. It grows fast and the look of newness is very noticeable as one passes through on the railway.’

Preston Road station had a rather colourful history. It had first opened as a halt to cater for the competitors in the shooting events of the 1908 Olympics Games, because the nearby hamlet of Preston contained the grounds of the Uxendon Shooting Club. The club, together with the twenty-seven local inhabitants, had successfully petitioned the Metropolitan Railway to build the station which, on the other side, also served the Harrow Golf Course. In 1926, visitors could consider buying a house costing between £1,025 and £1,185 on ‘a self-contained estate in the best part of Preston [which clearly had already grown somewhat] only eight minutes from the station’. As ever, the houses were ‘carefully planned and soundly constructed’ and ‘of artistic merit and varied design, in an orchard setting of particular charm’. Harrow Golf Course, which in 1928 had 400 members, soon gave way to masses of smaller houses, while the north side of the line became the Woodcock Hill and Woodcock Dell estates, with much higher class accommodation.

The attractions of golf were a recurring theme for luring people onto the Metropolitan. In the aftermath of the war, the advertising stressed
that the railway was ‘the short cut to the nearest golf course. From his office he can step in at any of the Met stations close by, and be taken in a few minutes by electric train to the links without a change. The train service is rapid, inexpensive and luxurious.’ Later, the game was an important part of selling Metroland. The 1926
Metroland
booklet, for example, said of Wembley Park: ‘Golf is plentiful at the very doors of Wembley park. There is a very good course on the pleasant slopes of Uxendon Hill; within five minutes by rail, two or three other courses can be reached.’

And so on went the development. There are countless such tales of estates springing up as much of the Middlesex countryside – including some more of its golf courses – disappeared under tarmac and housing. The most ambitious development was on the open fields between Pinner and Northwood where, in 1930, two developers proposed building a completely new suburb. The name for the station, Northwood Hills, was chosen from entries to a competition run by a local paper and it was designed by Charles Clark in the ‘suburban villa’ style used for all the new Metropolitan stations of that period. Northwood Hills opened in December 1933 but it was still a huge building site according to one new commuter: ‘I arrived at the station and stepped into mud of the most adhesive quality I have seen or felt.’
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But clearly he had no regrets: ‘Yet, I was to find that residing in a suburb adds a thrill and a zest to life. It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to.’

The Metropolitan’s most prestigious development was not in its suburban heartland but in the heart of London. In 1925, Selbie gave the go-ahead for the construction of Chiltern Court over Baker Street station, consisting of half a million square feet of shops and luxury flats. This was not really a development with any railway connection but, for form’s sake, Selbie had told the board that the wealthy tenants of the 180 flats (there were thirty maids’ rooms, too) would be able to use the railway to travel to their City offices during the week, and at weekends they could travel on the Metropolitan to their golf clubs (golf again!) and country homes. Designed by Clark, the building was so
celebrated that initially Harrods showed an interest in the commercial space on the lower three floors, while on the ground floor the splendid Chiltern Court restaurant had room for 250 diners. Opened in 1929, the building quickly filled up with early tenants, including the likes of the writers Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells, and the Metropolitan must have been delighted at the £40,000 in annual rental income for an outlay of £500,000, which, as one history notes, ‘was a far higher rate of return than could be made from running the railway’.
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Even today, Chiltern Court remains one of the most luxurious blocks in that part of London.

The most exclusive of the developments out in Metroland was at Moor Park. This was formerly known as Sandy Lodge, a little halt opened in 1910 which the Metropolitan provided for the eponymous golf club built by Francis Markes, a businessman attracted to the site by the sandy soil. The basic halt, with no facilities, had been put up for just £555 using old sleepers, on the basis that the golfers would provide revenue of at least £350 per annum in ticket sales, but it is not clear whether that target was ever reached. After the war, Lord Leverhulme, the founder of the massive Lever Brothers, detergent and food manufacturers, bought Moor Park, the nearby classical mansion completed in 1679, and sought to encourage tasteful development in the distant parts of the estate furthest away from the house. This exclusive housing ‘combining the facilities of London with rural amenities’ was Britain’s first gated development, with barriers across the approach roads to discourage passers-by from entering the estate. The housing was much grander than any other in Metroland, sitting in huge plots reached by long tree-lined drives and tennis courts. It was sold as an estate ‘where City men could live a life of luxury in the grounds of an historic old English Park and yet be just 40 minutes away from Baker Street by fast electric expresses’.