AN AESTHETIC WALK

I went for a walk in Bedford Park, in West London.  As you may have guessed, I’m doing some suburban exploration.

Bedford Park has a good claim to be the first garden suburb.  Work began there in 1875, long before Letchworth Garden City or Hampstead Garden Suburb.  And whereas Letchworth Garden City was built by a visionary, and whereas Hampstead Garden Suburb was built by a social reformer, Bedford Park was built by a slightly dodgy property developer, Jonathan Carr.  

He bought 24 acres of land from his father in law, a ripe plot just north of Turnham Green tube station.  He commissioned EW Godwin and then Norman Shaw to design houses for the suburb, and in the end built 365 houses.  He also had the advantage of having a brother, J. Comyns Carr, who ran the Grosvenor Gallery and was connected with members of the Aesthetic Movement.  He recommended the place to influential and artistic friends, and Bedford Park became something of a Bohemian enclave.  WB Yeats lived there with his father and brother, and it was fashionable enough to have a satirical (and fairly lame) poem written about it, The Ballad of Bedford Park.  One verse runs:

Now he who loves aesthetic cheer
And does not mind the damp
May come and read Rosetti here
By a Japanese-y lamp.

On the map, Bedford Park is now small, triangular, a sort of Christmas tree shape, with The Avenue running up through it like a trunk, and roads off to the sides like branches, though it didn't start out like that.
  A current map shows you the boundaries of the place but these aren’t all that obvious on the ground.  The roads have “good old” English names, Blenheim, Marlborough, Vanbrugh, Fielding, Flanders.

         

Unlike Hampstead Garden Suburb this did feel like London. Some parts of it were very fancy, some not really that fancy at all, but clearly all of it pretty expensive. And unlike Hampstead Garden suburb it has a pub, The Tabard, a pub – designed by Norma Shaw with William de Morgan tiles in the interior.  There was also a Polish shop and a Buddhist Vihara on the Avenue.

I was walking without any great purpose and it was easy to get lost, but it was hard to staylost.  Just by wandering you can find yourself back where you started.  I occasionally I used some interesting old cars parked in the streets as markers, since the cars were rather more distinctive than many of the houses.

Having said that, I was fascinated by the odd combination in the architecture of diversity and similarity.  The original architects had done a certain amount to make the houses look individual and then the inhabitants had taken it further.  These two porches for instance which had surely started out looking identical.

And this succession of gables, no two of them quite the same; some quite plain, some looking like the insignia of a secret organization.

Bedford Park is now a conservation area which means there are strict rules about what you can do to your house, and about what you can do to your trees.  Under Section 211 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 “all trees in the conservation area are protected by law. It is an offence to deliberately damage or destroy a tree by cutting down, topping, lopping, uprooting or by any other means without permission from the local planning authority. … Six weeks’ notice must be given before any work is started.”

On the other hand I did see some dead trees, and some huge pieces of tree trunk, which were possibly located just outside the conservation area.

As for new buildings, well some of the houses are replicas in the Arts and Craft style, which replaced old ones that didn’t suit the tone of the place, but some of the most interesting buildings were a couple of zesty new houses that had been shoehorned in and looked different from the prevailing style and yet to my urban eye didn’t look at all out of place.

         

         

Yes there were gardens, and they were well looked after, nothing very eccentric, nothing kitsch that I could see, but there were some interesting plantings including this, which is one of the biggest olive trees I ever saw in captivity in England:

         Also this tasteful cat statue:

And at one point I became aware of a real cat walking very close to my feet.  It’s a measure of a certain kind of suburb that you see cats wandering freely, even if a few of them have missing ears or shortened tails. Now, I like cats well enough but I don’t like cute cats and there was nothing cute about this one.  He didn’t just look like the cat belonging to the evil genius – he looks like an evil genius in his own right.

 Suburbia is a great place for an evil genius to go into hiding.