Metroland
Planners,
architects and builders are not the only ones who create cities. The suburban
landscape of north-west London owes its existence, largely, to the imagination
of the Metropolitan Railway’s marketing department.
One hundred years
ago, in the summer of 1915, the railway’s publicity people devised the term
“Metroland” to describe the catchment area of villages stretching from Neasden
into the Chiltern Hills. The railway had bought up huge tracts of farmland
along this corridor in the decades before the first world war, and it was ripe
for development. All they needed was a sales pitch.
The first Metroland
booklets were filled with illustrations of idyllic cottages and dainty verses
about “a land where the wild flowers grow”. A semi-rural arcadia was offered to
Londoners sick of crowded conditions in the city. The campaign proved a roaring
success. After the war, the white-collar workers who sought space and greenery
flocked to the north-west of the city.
Over the next 20
years, the railway’s development company and its building partners unrolled
commuter estates from Neasden out into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
Fields were filled with endless avenues of mock-Tudor “country” villas:
semi-detached dwellings with steep roofs, bay windows and half-timbered gables.
The Metropolitan’s PR people had accidentally invented
23 and 24 Leinster Gardens
Leinster Gardens is a
street in Bayswater, London. It has two false façades at numbers 23 and 24,
constructed in the late 1860s, at the time of the original steam engine-hauled underground
railway that had a short section exposed to the surface in the space between
residences at numbers 22 and 25.
Locomotives were fitted with condensers to reduce fumes, but "venting
off" was still needed in open-air sections to relieve the condensers and
keep the tunnels free from smoke. In this up market area, the railway company
hid this unsightly practice from residents. The false façade also maintained a
continuous frontage along a prestigious terrace. The façade is 5 feet (1.5 m)
thick, behind which is a ground level opening above the rail line. The façade
includes 18 blackened windows and front doors with no letter boxes.
In the 1930s, a hoax was played on guests who were sold ten-Guinea tickets
to a charity ball at Leinster Gardens, only to turn up in evening dress to
discover the address was fake.
Metroland
One hundred years
ago, in the summer of 1915, the railway’s publicity people devised the term
“Metroland” to describe the catchment area of villages stretching from Neasden
into the Chiltern Hills. The railway had bought up huge tracts of farmland
along this corridor in the decades before the first world war, and it was ripe
for development. All they needed was a sales pitch. 
Over the next 20
years, the railway’s development company and its building partners unrolled
commuter estates from Neasden out into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
Fields were filled with endless avenues of mock-Tudor “country” villas:
semi-detached dwellings with steep roofs, bay windows and half-timbered gables.
The Metropolitan’s PR people had accidentally invented
