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 A Number 7 tram |
Poetry in motion
on the No7 tram
Dan Carrier joins John Betjeman (and architecture critic Jonathan Glancey) on a Kentish Town ride
CHURCHES were “bread and wine” to John Betjeman according to a book by Jonathan Glancey, the Guardian’s architecture critic, providing inspiration for his work and spiritual nourishment for his soul.
Glancey has pulled off a clever trick. There is little left to discover about Betjeman – his biography is well trodden and his writings provide insight into the poet laureate. But through Betjeman’s letters, Glancey has shed new light on how churches influenced his poetry.
As Glancey puts it: “He used the buildings he loved as inspiration for so many of his well-known verses. Betjeman was to become the laureate of church poetry.”
He used religious architectural phrases for book titles: Old Lights for New Chancels and New Bats in Old Belfries where both published works.
Betjeman spent his honeymoon taking his wife Penelope on a cycling tour of churches in East Anglia, and he became a church warden at Uffington in Oxfordshire.
He learnt to ring bells: a fitting skill for the poet according to Glancey. “[They] are themselves a kind of lyrical and haunting vernacular verse flung out across the length and breadth of Britain,” he notes.
But this book is not just a critique of Betjeman’s relationship with church architecture and what it can tell us about his writing.
Instead, Glancey has prefaced each chapter with a letter from Betjeman – to friends, societies, associations, church bodies – which highlights an area of interest and provides Glancey with a base for a commentary.
They both share the same fear for the architecture of the past.
Glancey says: “The future of churches, whether floating ship-like on wind-whipped marshes or lining city streets in Portland stone, is not guaranteed.
“In an age of declining Christian worship, new uses need to be thought of for many churches. Demolishing them means damaging skylines and demeaning townscapes.”
Such statements show how Glancey has been influenced by Betjeman.
He writes: “JB wrote hundreds of letters hoping to save churches from extinction. He was as much concerned with the townscapes as he was with their spiritual credentials.”
One letter stands out, and it places churches within the area they serve as opposed to considering them individually. It’s from Betjeman to his friend Coral Howells, dated April 20, 1971, and in it he provides a detailed description of Kentish Town from the top of the Number 7 tram.
Here is an extract: “I can remember the horse tram, open on top, and I longed to clutch one of those bobbles that hung down temptingly from the plane trees.
“Hampstead Heath then had buttercups, daisies and dandelions in the grass at Parliament Hill Fields. Daniels was a kind of Selfridges and it was on the corner of Prince of Wales’s Road.
“There was a cinema on the same side and there I saw my first film, very early animated pictures,
it was called the
‘Electric Palace’. My father, who was deaf, liked going to silent films and took me with him. Opposite Kentish Town underground station was a Penny Bazaar and next to that was Zwanziger, which always smelt of baking bread.
“Here too was the tram stop for the last stage of the route north. Then there was an antique dealer and picture framer called Yewlett and a public house. My father visited the former but not the latter.
“Then there were some late-Georgian brick houses with steps up to their front doors, then
the always-locked parish church of Kentish Town (that was the one I referred to in the poem – [Parliament Hill Fields]). It was rebuilt in Norman style in 1843 by JH Hakewill and seems to have no dedication. It was very Low.
“Then came Highgate Road station with a smell of steam and rare trains which ran to Southend from a terminus at Gospel Oak.
“Then there were some rather grander shops with a definite feeling of suburbia; Young the chemist – Young had a collie dog; Pedder the oil and colourman; and French for provisions; the Gordon House, grim behind its grey walls.
“I remember thinking how beautiful the new bits of Metroland Villas were in Glenhurst Avenue, and my father telling me they were awful.
“Then there were the red-brick gloom of Lissenden Gardens. I was born at 52 but moved to West Hill as a baby so cannot recall the flats.
“I could go on like this forever, but I must stop or I shall arrive at 31 West Hill. It was very countrified. My greatest thrill was to walk with my father down a place in Kentish Town called Faulkner’s Lane. I then thought it was a slum, but now realise it was charming Middlesex Cottages. It was a little village south of the Great Eastern and on the east side of Kentish Town Road. I remember going with my mother to visit a ‘poor family’ in Anglers’ Lane, Kentish Town. The only toys the children had to play with were pieces of wood from a bundle of kindling.”
What makes this book particularly interesting is the use of the correspondence. Glancey has scoured archives to find interesting references to “JB”.
Betjeman wrote guide books for Ward Lock’s Shilling Series and Glancey has uncovered his introductory letter.
“I think it would be a good idea if the guide books, instead of following the public taste, should lead it,” he writes to the publishers, who have been issuing the guides since the Victorian period.
An undergraduate at Oxford at the time, his letter has the cockiness of youth: he unpicks the language used by the current guide writers and mocks them – “he describes many of the entertainments and playing fields of the town as ‘excellent’. They rarely are...”
He goes on to sing the praises of the parish church in Leamington, showing, according to Glancey, an early sign of his infatuation with the English church.
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