When the poet John Betjeman first saw the semi-detached mock Tudor houses, so familiar to us now, that were mushrooming across England in the 1930s he was not a fan and made it known in a talk given on the radio.
“This new world lives in ill-shaped brick horrors, for which it has had to pay through the nose. Many of these horrors, built with no regard for one another, dropped higgledy-piggledy in the loveliest places – for all the world like huge slices of cake dropped on the tops of hills by some mad celestial picnic party – these little brick horrors are poisoning England… You have all seen houses built with sham-Tudor beams and red roofs in districts where red is unknown and beams were never exposed.”
“Town Tours”, West of England Service, 24 June 1937
Veterans of the First World War had been promised homes fit for heroes but it was a decade later that speculators began to take advantage of fairly lax planning regulations (in 1932 land-use planning restrictions applied to only about 75,000 acres) at a time when money could be borrowed at very low interest rates. It became more common to take out a mortgage and buy your own home. In Greenford this would have been most evident along the newly created Greenford Road, many of the houses in it were built from about 1929, along with pubs, shops and a cinema, the Red Lion relocating from its original site in Windmill Lane.
Within a few years, following the start of the Second World War, Betjeman was more forgiving.
“I like suburbs: nothing is ugly. Bicycling in the suburbs of a great city, I see a strange beauty in those quiet deserted evenings with the few remaining children showing off in the evening sunlight, laburnums and lilac weeping over the front gate, father smoking his pipe and rolling the lawn, mother knitting at the open window, the little arcade of local shops, the great outline of the cinema, the new bricks pinker than ever in the sunset, the sham-Tudor beams, the standard roses, the stained glass in the front doors, the pram in the hall, the drainpipes running zigzag down to the side door. Now that the hedges are growing up and the trees are giving a greenness to it all I see a beauty in it.”
“Some Comments in Wartime”, Home Service, 4 July 1940
The role of gardens in the softening of suburbs that appalled Betjeman when new seems to me to have been underestimated. In dreaming of life in a better place, in a house with a design inspired by nostalgia for a more romantic and decorous England, the new home owner must have considered gardening to be part of that dream. The commuter, returning home through their front garden, with its patch of lawn and a sunray gate in the hedge or wall, lived that suburban idyll when they spent their summer evenings working in the back garden or the greenhouse. Gardening contributed to a sense of community in many of the new estates. The Horsenden Allotments and Gardens Association was founded in the 1920s and is typical of the local organisations that grew up to support gardeners and allotment users in the new suburbs.
Within a few years it was back gardens that played an essential role for many, a means to supplement what was available in shops with vegetables, and a place for one of the three million Anderson shelters that were built. The eponymous character of Robert Greenwood’s 1941 novel wartime novel, “Mr Bunting At War”, having worked his way through government advice on blackout regulations and recycling, now turns his attention to the garden, which has up until then been a less than serious hobby:
“It occurred to him, as he finished his after dinner cup of tea, that it was time Laburnum Villa began to dig for victory. Now was the season, according to the gardening articles, to prepare the soil and make it friable, a word Mr Bunting had at first taken for a misprint, but later discovered in the bijou dictionary. His old boots in the cupboard, mentally assigned for salvage, would do excellently for gardening. This was in itself a cheering thought, and he assumed them in the spirit of a soldier girding on his weapons to have a crack at Hitler.”
There was a considerable need for amateur gardeners to grow vegetables, as farmers had switched their crops to enable the production of animal feed and bread, and the government began to encourage them – especially women – to exploit what ground they had, a garden (the lawn perhaps given over to potatoes), an allotment, even window boxes, to grow what they could. Anyone who knows a keen vegetable grower today may benefit (or suffer) from gluts of particular crops but in war time surplus vegetables were given away to works canteens and similar institutions.
When those who had been in the armed forces returned to their homes they grew the beautiful and symbolic rose “Peace”, then, as the years went on, flamboyant “Piccadilly” and neon “Superstar”. The lawn was restored, and the privet hedge trimmed to perfection once again. Gradual changes in the approach to gardening and a growing awareness of its environmental impact were reflected in programmes such as “Gardeners’ Question Time” and “Gardeners’ World”, beginning in 1947 and 1968 respectively. However, it has taken a very long time, in my opinion, for the true value of front and back gardens to be recognised as the havens they can become for small mammals, amphibians, insects and birds, and this has happened at a time when it may be too late for their loss to be slowed or stopped altogether.
There was a time when the early gardeners of those sham-Tudor houses would have owned a car but still have used public transport or walked short distances. Mr Bunting might have asked “Is it worth getting the car out?” They once stayed in garages tucked down the passages between semis, but now they take up the space once filled with lawns, roses and privet, the garage relegated to the storage of other things or rebuilt as an extension of the house. The price we are paying for this change is becoming evident as periods of heavy rainfall become more common and the sewers struggle to cope with all the extra run off.
It was around ten years ago that I stood up to my ankles in rainwater opposite Greenford Station, during a memorable deluge. It must have been at least fifteen years ago that I watched from an upstairs window as water flooded past the house, and wondered if we should move precious and irreplaceable things upstairs. But even in the 1990s, not long after we moved in, there was a two week period when it rained continuously for a fortnight, slowing to a gentle drizzle for a few minutes every now and then, before pouring down again. When it finally stopped I stood in wellies on the saturated lawn and watched the water rise over my feet. I didn’t think it could get any worse.
In those days I was thrilled by the presence of the hedgehogs that ambled across the lawn, and frogs that made me scream with fright as they leapt out from the pots in the shady corner that I was watering. It looked like a scene from a Busby Berkeley movie. It took me a while to realise that what I had taken for pieces of old hosepipe were in fact bits of slow worm. Once there was even a toad. If I stood still long enough I would begin to see Art Deco shield bugs on brambles and iridescent insects that seemed to have been designed by Lalique. Dramas were played out every day, the vixen who found our garden safe enough to sunbathe in with her cubs, the green woodpecker’s discovery of an anthill, noisy starlings treating a shallow dish of water like a lido, the violent death of a pigeon attacked by a sparrowhawk.
We had neighbours who had moved there during the war, who filled their shed with the apples and pears from the trees they had planted, their freezer filled with blackberry and apple pies. Our homes had been built on farmland and orchards, a survival of that time may have been the tiny tree in their garden that left fairy tale red and white apples scattered across their lawn. Their car, while they still had one, lived in their garage.
In our case it was commuter parking, because of our proximity to a station, and the lack of our own garage that led us to use the scruffy tarmacked area in the front garden, laid at the least possible expense by a previous owner. It was often difficult to find a space in the street, let alone near the house. Eventually the council introduced Controlled Parking Zones, a system in use today, which meant an annual payment for the right to park in our street. We wondered what to do about the tarmac, it would cost a fortune to dig it out and gravel seemed too awkward to retain in that space. In the end nature made a decision for us. The tall golden Achillea I planted in front of the house decided it preferred a drier location and self seeded into it. “Coronation Gold” or Gold Plate” (I cannot remember the variety) began to grow from the cracks in the broken and uneven layer, its ferny sage scented leaves emerging every year, and other perennials have moved in with it, including gentians of some kind. It is only ever watered by the rain. Our street is on the route of the Capital Ring. A walker approaching it from an angle where the hedge hides its base roared with laughter as he realised what it was growing in. A sheltered south-facing heat trap, the lawn is alive with grasshoppers and the occasional cricket in the summer. For a while some kind of bee took up residence under the house, and we watched as they queued up to enter, like airplanes waiting to land at an airport.
I think of all this and try to imagine the degree of pragmatism that would persuade anyone to remove all that and replace it with a parking space.
There have been a series of changes over the last fifteen years or so that have made that choice easier for those less fond of gardening. As mentioned, there is now a charge for on-street parking in CPZs, the requirement for planning permission for dropped kerbs has been removed, a garden waste collection charge was introduced by Ealing Council, and there has been an increase in the number of buy-to-let properties. I believe that the deterioration of bus services and the increasing cost of using public transport has encouraged car ownership, it makes no difference that the cars surrounding me as I sat on a bus from Greenford Station were powered by electricity – it was still a traffic jam.
Because all those cars need a home we are now coping with the effects of voluntary desertification, as home owners and landlords opt for soakaways that clog easily or porous paving that will never be porous enough and the removal of any shrubs and lawns that would prevent Greenford’s transformation into an “urban heat island”. “Peace”, “Piccadilly” and “Superstar” have ended up in a skip along with all the other roses. Even the fairy tale apple tree was removed by new neighbours. Yet vegetation absorbs vibrations, noise and pollution. According to the UK Green Building Council “Vegetation cools the air around it through the evaporation of water.” Those meticulously kept privet hedges may have seemed unnatural but they have played an important part in maintaining reasonable summer temperatures and provided a habitat. Somehow wildlife adapts to gardening routines – a maintained hedge in Uneeda Drive remained home to a noisy flock of sparrows until it was torn out. Where do they live now?
In the last year the area has become the focus of attention for those interested in rewilding, the area of Horsenden Hill known as Paradise Fields has even been honoured by a visit from London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, to look at a project to introduce beavers. It has been suggested that their presence will alleviate the problem of run off that has sometines rendered the path to Greenford Road impassable after heavy rain. I believe this is quite a burden for their little shoulders and suspect that any reduction in surface flooding has more to do with the substantial grooves cut into the ground around it that were visible before the area was closed off to allow them to settle in, flood prevention by any other name (unless beavers have learned to use earth moving equipment). Images of Mr Khan gazing with childlike wonder in their general direction have appeared in the national press in recent months, and I am sure that they will remain part of his legacy, but as mammals that have not been seen in Greenford for four hundred years are made welcome, the humble hedgehog, resident here continuously for thousands of years, is left to fend for itself. They were once so abundant in Greenford that some streets were littered with the corpses of the ones that couldn’t outrun traffic. I last saw a hedgehog several years ago in Middleton Avenue, within sight of Greenford Flyover and its many cars.
The disinclination to put off car owning voters is not the sole preserve of our current Mayor and his party. Other political candidates have courted car owners with determination, angry on their behalf over Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). They will never suggest that those who are also home owners should act responsibly when it comes to the reinstatement of front gardens. I’ve found that runoff is rarely mentioned now – the keyword is “diversity”. So the meagre effort by Ealing Council to reverse the trend is to encourage the owners of these parking spaces to add a couple of plant pots and enter a competition. There are no serious calls to display responsible, less selfish behaviour. Scattering the seeds of annuals around the base of street trees will never make up for the destruction of a front garden. I’m not interested in whatever animals now lurk in Paradise Fields as a consequence of the thirty thousand pounds provided by the Mayor. I am not a child to be distracted with puppies and kittens when there is something so serious as the destruction of treasured habitats happening around me every day.
I often hear people say, for a range of reasons, that they don’t recognise where they live anymore. It may be down to rising levels of crime, antisocial behaviour, tower blocks or immigration. In my case I now avoid walking the length of my street if I can, if I can’t I tend to look at the pavement, because it is too painful to see that one front garden after another has been lost to paving. As the publicly funded process of rewilding goes on in one part of Greenford, dewilding continues in the rest of it. That doesn’t seem much of a legacy.
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”
“Big Yellow Taxi”
Joni Mitchell
Text © Albertina McNeill 2024 with the exception of quotations. Do not reproduce without written permission on each occasion. All rights reserved. Do not add text or images to Pinterest or similar sites as this will be regarded as a violation of copyright.
SOURCES
“Trains and Buttered Toast”- Selected Radio Talks, John Betjeman, edited by Stephen Games
“Mr Bunting at War”, Robert Greenford, 1941, Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics
“Beavers being reintroduced to London as part of rewilding project” Ross Lydall, 20 March 2023
“The Wartime Kitchen and Garden”, Jennifer Davies, BBC Books, 1993
RHS Greening Grey Britain Front Garden Summit, Greening Great Britain, Royal Horticultural Society
Positive Greenford 