Feature: Kentish Town - The Fields Beneath: The History of one London Village. By Gillian Tindall
Published: 31 March, 2011
by DAN CARRIER
Gillian Tindall talks about her groundbreaking social history of Kentish Town – The Fields Beneath – first published 35 years ago and now reissued
IT was carved into a grimy lintel above the front door of a squat on Prince of Wales Road: The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath.
Author Gillian Tindall saw the legend, and it prompted her to pen a history of the area which, in the 35 years since it was first published in 1977, has become a classic.
The Fields Beneath is reissued this year with a new introduction by the author. It is not an updated tract, but Gillian now has the benefit of hindsight to consider why her book on a small area in the sprawling metropolis came to define a genre of urban social history.
Gillian still lives in the Kentish Town home in which she wrote the book, and she says her work was prompted by her sense of place as a writer.
She had recently completed a biography of George Gissing and was looking for her next topic. She found it on the pavements outside her front door.
“Is place important? For example, what would have happened to Thomas Hardy if he had lived in Birmingham, or the Brontës had been in Brighton?,” she wonders.
“People ask questions about the characters in books but not the settings – and the settings are crucial and important. After writing this, I realised how important a sense of place was to me.”
Her home town had everything a social historian could want, providing a fine example of the development of urban Britain.
“There were places you could not do this story, from Domesday to the present: for example, if I had happened to be living in Kingston, it would not have been the same,” she says. “South London was boggy and flat and then suddenly in the 18th and 19th centuries, around Southwark, there was growth. With Kentish Town you can track its development from its country origins up to today.”
Gillian drew on a historical archive that was the hobby of furniture magnate Ambrose Heal. And while there were good records for Gillian to draw on, another element came into play from her research: where exactly is Kentish Town?
The geographical position has often shifted, dictated by religious worship, plagues, railways and the sales patter of estate agents.
“The Black Death changed the face of the area: the centre of the parish and the old church, which was further south, was abandoned,” says Gillian.
In the Middle Ages Kentish Town stretched from the top of Tottenham Court Road through to Highgate. After about 1860, it got an unsavoury reputation for grime and parcels of surrounding land were coming up with new names: Parliament Hill, Highgate Rise, Dartmouth Park, Brookfield, Holloway, Camden New Town.
All were used to avoid the unfashionable moniker.
The two most crucial stages in the area’s development was the 16th and 17th centuries and the Industrial Revolution. From the 1600s it became a rural retreat for the wealthy: then there was a 30-year period in the 1800s which saw pastures and market gardens covered with homes and the railways. Speculative builders, knocking up houses for the respectable middle classes, were soon sub-dividing them into flats for the urban poor.
“There was a period between 1860 and 1950 when no one wanted to admit living here at all,” says Gillian.
Yet now it’s back in fashion: “People have homes in Parliament Hill Fields and say they live in Kentish Town,” she says.
So where is Kentish Town today?
“I use the two railway viaducts at either end of Kentish Town Road and Highgate Road as markers,” she says.
Gillian also believes her book describes a place we still recognise: “Kentish Town has not changed as much as people think since I wrote the book. It was predicted that it would either become horribly gentrified like Chelsea or turn into an urban jungle. Streets around my home in Leighton Road are not as gentrified as people assume: the council bought up street properties and while some have been [lost] because of Thatcher’s right to buy, it still has a social mix.”
• The Fields Beneath: The History of one London Village. By Gillian Tindall. Eland Publishing £12.99