Metro-land

Metro-land (or Metroland – see note on spelling, below) is a name given to the suburban areas that were built to the north-west of London in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex in the early part of the 20th century that were served by the Metropolitan Railway ((also known as the Met)[a]).

It reached Hammersmith in 1864, Richmond in 1877 and completed the Inner Circle in 1884,[5] but the most important route became the line north into the Middlesex countryside, where it stimulated the development of new suburbs.

Harrow was reached in 1880, and the line eventually extended as far as Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire, more than 50 miles (80 kilometres) from Baker Street and the centre of London.

[12][c] Robert Selbie, then General Manager, thought in 1912 that some professionalism was needed and suggested a company be formed to take over from the Surplus Lands Committee to develop estates near the railway.

[15] Published annually until 1932, the last full year of independence for the Met, the guide extolled the benefits of "The good air of the Chilterns," using language such as "Each lover of Metroland may well have his own favourite wood beech and coppice – all tremulous green loveliness in Spring and russet and gold in October.

[19] From about 1914 the company had promoted itself as The Met, but after 1920 the commercial manager, John Wardle, ensured that timetables and other publicity material used the term Metro instead.

The Metro-land guide, although partly written to attract walkers and day trippers, was clearly primarily intended to encourage the building of suburban homes and create middle-class commuters who would use the Metropolitan Railway's trains for all their needs.

The 1924 Metro-land guide describes Wembley Park as "rapidly developed of recent years as a residential district", pointing out that there are several golf courses within a few minutes journey of it.

[27] The term ‘Metroland’ (often seen now without the hyphen - see Note on spelling, below) has become shorthand for the suburban areas that were built in north-west London and in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex following the Metropolitan branches.

The architect Hugh Casson regarded Harrow as the "capital city" of Metro-land,[32] while Arthur Mee's King's England described Wembley as its "epitome".

A number, including Wembley Park, Croxley Green (1925) and Stanmore (1932), were designed by Charles W. Clark (who was responsible also for Chiltern Court) in an Arts and crafts "villa" style.

These were intended to blend with their surroundings, though, in retrospect, they arguably lacked the panache and vision of Charles Holden's striking, modern designs for the Underground group in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Drawing no doubt on "Metro-land, a guide for ramblers", published by British Railways Southern Region shortly after the Second World War, it referred to the "Rambleland" stations of Surrey and Sussex.

[40] The sentimental and somewhat archaic prose of the Metro-land guide ("the Roman road aslant the eastern border ... the innumerable field-paths which mark the labourer's daily route from hamlet to farm")[41] conjured up a rustic Eden – a Middle England, perhaps[42] – similar to that invoked by Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister three times between 1923 and 1937) who, though of manufacturing stock, famously donned the mantle of countryman ("the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone").

"[44] A more cynical view, that sought to contrast illusion with changing times, was offered in 1934 by the composer and conductor Constant Lambert who "conjure[d] up the hideous faux bonhomie of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of Metroland, singing obsolete sea chanties [sic] 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'".

Writer and historian A. N. Wilson reflected how suburban developments of the early 20th century that had been brought within easy reach of London by the railways, "merely ended up creating an endless ribbon ... not perhaps either town or country".

[46] Of the surrounding landscape, Country Life itself has observed that, in its early days, it offered a rose-tinted view of the English countryside ... idyllic villages, vernacular buildings and already dying rural crafts.

[50] In 1932 Northwick Park was said to have grown over the previous five years at the rate of 1,000 houses annually and Rayners Lane to "repay a visit at short intervals to see it grow".

Described much later by The Times as the "hymnologist of Metroland",[52] Betjeman reached a wider audience with his celebrated documentary for BBC Television, Metro-land, directed by Edward Mirzoeff, which was first broadcast on 26 February 1973 and was released as a DVD 33 years later.

[54] Lycett Green noted of the planning of this trip that among the fine details considered were which filling to have in the baguettes on the train through Metro-land and how long it would stop on the track so that the poem "Middlesex" could be read over the tannoy.

Metro-land (notably west Hertfordshire) formed the backdrop for the 1960s ABC TV series The Avengers, whose popular imagery was deployed with a twist of fantasy.

The archetypal Metro-land subjects (such as the railway station and the quiet suburb) became the settings for fiendish plots and treachery in this series and others, such as The Saint, The Baron and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), all of which made regular use of locations within easy reach of film studios at Borehamwood and Pinewood.

A. N. Wilson observed that, although semi-detached dwellings of the kind built in the inner Metro-land suburbs in the 1930s "aped larger houses, the stockbroker Tudorbethan of Edwardian Surrey and Middlesex", they were in fact "pokey".

Rarely does community flourish", while the American Lewis Mumford, wrote in the New Yorker in 1953 that "monotony and suburbanism" were the result of the "unimaginative" design of Britain's post-war New Towns.

[57] When the editor of the Architectural Review, J. M. Richards, wrote in The Castles on the Ground (1946) that "for all the alleged deficiencies of suburban taste ... it holds for ninety out of a hundred Englishmen an appeal which cannot be explained away as some strange instance of mass aberration", he was, in his own words, "scorned by my contemporaries as either an irrelevant eccentricity or a betrayal of the forward looking views of the Modern Movement".

[61] Thus, the central character of Metroland (1980), a novel by Julian Barnes (born 1946) that was filmed in 1997, ended up in Paris during the disturbances of May 1968 – though, by the late 1970s, having thrown off the yearnings of his youth, he was back in Metro-land.

Metroland recounted the essence of suburbia in the early 1960s and the features of daily travel by a schoolboy, Christopher Lloyd, on the Metropolitan line to and from London.

This was put down to the "attractions of Victoriana", which, like suburbia itself, championed at the time by Betjeman's Metro-land, was coming back into fashion; however, it appeared to have just as much to do with couples following each other round in order to maintain extramarital affairs.

A less benign view of Metro-land was offered in the mid noughties by the detective series, Murder in Suburbia (ITV 2004-6), which, though set in the fictional town of Middleford, was also filmed in Northwood and other parts of North West London.