unknown, unvisited. It is Islington, a different borough with different schools, shopping centres and communication-systems. The very names of its roads are unfamiliar, even to those who live only a few minutes walk away. It is known that Dr Crippen murdered his wife among those roads, but that is all.
In this way, by subtle and variegated signs that go unperceived by the stranger, the inhabitants of any urban area define and colonise their particular bit of territory. Only to the uninformed eye, or the jaundiced eye of a commuter passing through districts that are not his own and never stopping there, is a townscape a ‘formless morass’. London may be, as Chesterton said, a collection of submerged villages, but to the inhabitants they are not even fully submerged. People’s attachment to ‘their’ street may be just as tenacious and appreciative as the attachment of a smallholder to his particular fields, of a hunting tribesman to a known area of scrub and woodland. The instinctive allegiance which primitive man gives to a natural habitat (large trees, hills, streams, etc.), urban man transfers to man-made landmarks, but the essential nature of that allegiance remains the same.
Yet town planners have persistently ignored this component in human life and, in ignoring it, have done obscure violence to it. In their rationalistic cosmopolitanism, they have failed to grasp that just because you transfer the descendants of ploughmen to paved streets, or turn villages into urban areas, you do not in fact alter human beings; they will still make their villages where they can. The only difference is that their tenancy will be more precarious, more at the mercy of ill-informed bureaucratic decisions, or vainglorious architectural experiments. And if imposed controls produce a landscape which diverges too far from the traditional, a desert without domestic scale or subtlety or variety, then the instinct of attachment to the place wilts and fails. We are very ready, today, to concede people’s need for ‘meaningful human relationships’, yet we fail almost entirely to realise that other relationships, with places, objects, views – other supports for the human psyche – may be just as profoundly important, and that, if these are denied, the resulting impoverishment of the person may have deep and lasting consequences.
3
Manors and Gentlemenâs Seats
Local history develops its own local conventions. It has become customary for anyone writing about the St Pancras â Kentish Town area to quote the Domesday list of its manors and then to go on to discuss the subsequent ownership of each in some form that makes apparent sense. Compilers of potted histories in local borough publications have made much use of evasive phrases such as âthe manor then passed toâ or âcame into the possession ofâ such-and-such a family, and statements plucked from contemporary documents give apparent authenticity and authority to the whole. I say âapparentâ because, however true individual statements may be, the overall effect they are used to produce â that of a clear and logical sequence of landlords through the centuries in each of four clearly defined manors â is to some extent fictitious. The fact is that the four manors mentioned in Domesday, one of which in any case is not called a manor, probably bear only a tenuous relationship to the later mediaeval manorial holdings in the district.
Nor, for that matter, is the mediaeval pattern itself entirely clear. It has been confidently reiterated that in the old Borough of St Pancras (roughly the once-extensive parish of St Pancras church) we are dealing with four manors as follows: the large manor of Tottenhall (Tottenham Court), the smaller âlayâ manor of St Pancras, the even smaller prebendal manor, and the larger manor of Cantelowes which is usually identified with Kentish Town. In addition, there was the somewhat spectral manor of
In this way, by subtle and variegated signs that go unperceived by the stranger, the inhabitants of any urban area define and colonise their particular bit of territory. Only to the uninformed eye, or the jaundiced eye of a commuter passing through districts that are not his own and never stopping there, is a townscape a ‘formless morass’. London may be, as Chesterton said, a collection of submerged villages, but to the inhabitants they are not even fully submerged. People’s attachment to ‘their’ street may be just as tenacious and appreciative as the attachment of a smallholder to his particular fields, of a hunting tribesman to a known area of scrub and woodland. The instinctive allegiance which primitive man gives to a natural habitat (large trees, hills, streams, etc.), urban man transfers to man-made landmarks, but the essential nature of that allegiance remains the same.
Yet town planners have persistently ignored this component in human life and, in ignoring it, have done obscure violence to it. In their rationalistic cosmopolitanism, they have failed to grasp that just because you transfer the descendants of ploughmen to paved streets, or turn villages into urban areas, you do not in fact alter human beings; they will still make their villages where they can. The only difference is that their tenancy will be more precarious, more at the mercy of ill-informed bureaucratic decisions, or vainglorious architectural experiments. And if imposed controls produce a landscape which diverges too far from the traditional, a desert without domestic scale or subtlety or variety, then the instinct of attachment to the place wilts and fails. We are very ready, today, to concede people’s need for ‘meaningful human relationships’, yet we fail almost entirely to realise that other relationships, with places, objects, views – other supports for the human psyche – may be just as profoundly important, and that, if these are denied, the resulting impoverishment of the person may have deep and lasting consequences.
3
Manors and Gentlemenâs Seats
Local history develops its own local conventions. It has become customary for anyone writing about the St Pancras â Kentish Town area to quote the Domesday list of its manors and then to go on to discuss the subsequent ownership of each in some form that makes apparent sense. Compilers of potted histories in local borough publications have made much use of evasive phrases such as âthe manor then passed toâ or âcame into the possession ofâ such-and-such a family, and statements plucked from contemporary documents give apparent authenticity and authority to the whole. I say âapparentâ because, however true individual statements may be, the overall effect they are used to produce â that of a clear and logical sequence of landlords through the centuries in each of four clearly defined manors â is to some extent fictitious. The fact is that the four manors mentioned in Domesday, one of which in any case is not called a manor, probably bear only a tenuous relationship to the later mediaeval manorial holdings in the district.
Nor, for that matter, is the mediaeval pattern itself entirely clear. It has been confidently reiterated that in the old Borough of St Pancras (roughly the once-extensive parish of St Pancras church) we are dealing with four manors as follows: the large manor of Tottenhall (Tottenham Court), the smaller âlayâ manor of St Pancras, the even smaller prebendal manor, and the larger manor of Cantelowes which is usually identified with Kentish Town. In addition, there was the somewhat spectral manor of
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