WHEN YOU WALK IN THE GARDEN ...

I went for a walk in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I was going to say “somebody has to” but I’m not sure that anybody really does.  

Hampstead Garden Suburb was the product of Henrietta Barnett.  She’s generally described as a social reformer, originally in Whitechapel where her husband was vicar of St Jude’s, and where there was a lot to be reformed. She was the author of Practicable Socialism (1889) and Toward Social Reform (1909).  By the time that second book was published she’d founded the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust and would have been well aware of Ebenezer Howard, and developments in Letchworth Garden City.  Building work started in 1907.

She employed Howard’s planners and architects, plus Sir Edwin Lutyens, who brought a lot of star power with him.  Walking around the Suburb these days, I couldn’t swear which houses were real Lutyens and which were merely “in the style” of Lutyens.  No doubt others can.

My friend Joanna Moriarty who grew up in the Suburb, told me the word on the street was that if you bought a Lutyens house you bought yourself a whole load of trouble. His sweeping tile roofs were considered to be a serious liability.

Joanna also had a story that somebody from the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust, came knocking on the family’s front door one weekend afternoon and said to her father, “Your neighbor is laying crazy paving.  What are you going to do about it?”  Crazy paving, I assume, was a horror to the sensibilities of the Hampstead Garden Suburb crowd. Joanna’s dad, being a civil servant of the old school said, “I’m going to continue to mind my own business.” 

That, of course, is what most people in the suburbs say they want – to be left in peace - but of course neighbours can get out of hand, and so various local rules are imposed to keep them in line.   The Trust website says ominously, “It is a criminal offence to undertake unauthorised works to trees on the Suburb (pruning or felling).”

The Suburb was built with no pubs, no shops no cafes, no cinemas  – a situation  that endures - though the supermarket in Finchley Road has a sign on the front that reads, “Welcome to Hampstead Garden Suburb’s Co-op.” You will note the very shiny car coming  in from the left.

The whole area felt moneyed, posh, controlled, and there were some very fancy cars in the driveways. I found it fascinating and by no means objectionable or oppressive, but it didn’t feel at all like London: which may have been the whole point for the people who live there. 

And as I walked around I noted that, unlike in Letchworth Garden City, the inhabitants here were determined to live up to the “garden” part of the name.  A lot of energy had gone into the landscaping and planting, and some of the front gardens were wonderful and extraordinary.  

No doubt some professional help had been employed here and there, as evidences by this van belonging to Urb’s Gardens – I couldn’t tell how many layers of irony Urb had in mind.

And at some point it struck me, and it took me longer than it probably should have, that there were no garden walls here between the houses, or between there houses and the roads.  There were no bricks, no concrete, only hedges, and some people had really gone to town turning them into arches, finishing them off with bits of topiary, although one or two did look a bit the worse for wear.

However, and it’s a biggish however, the south eastern  boundary of the Suburb abuts the Hampstead Heath extension and between them is a structure know as the Great Wall, which some sources will tell you is reminiscent of a medieval town.  You can no doubt pick quite a few metaphors out of that, but the one that struck me was that sometimes a hedge just isn’t enough of a barrier between you and the rest of the world.

QUEENLY WALKING

I don’t have any hard and fast “rules” for walking but I do have some habits. And one of them is that if I’m walking and I come across a book that’s been left in the street, I pick it up and read at least some of it, and it’s amazing how often this discarded and randomly picked up books seem to have something relevant to say.

Last week I found a copy of Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad, first published in 1952.  It wasn’t any old edition but the Collins English Readers Edition that you see above - “these carefully adapted versions are shorter than the original with the language graded for upper-immediate learners,” which reduces the length to 100 pages, for which I am grateful, and I have read now every one of those pages.

Is there walking in They Came To Baghdad? You bet.  The plot, I think it’s fair to say, makes no sense whatsoever, but it involves archeology, world domination and a plucky heroine named Victoria who meets some bloke on a park bench in London and decides she has to follow him to Baghdad.  And yes, believe it or not, complications ensue.  Hair dying is also involved.

On the way to Baghdad, Victoria stops in Cairo, “She decided to go for a walk.  Walking, at least, needed no money.”  True that.

And when she gets to Baghdad there’s a somewhat detailed account of a walk she does there, “Baghdad was completely different from her idea of it – people shouting and a main road filled with cars, sounding their horns angrily … Most people wore poor quality Western clothes, bits of old army uniforms; and there were a few figures with long black clothes, their faces covered, who went almost unnoticed … The road was in poor condition with the occasional large hole.”

Agatha Christie was married to an archeologist, Max Mallowan, so she must have known something of what she was writing about, but even so the novel contains what strikes me as one of the strangest sentences I have ever read, “Richard jumped down into the long hole and the two archeologists enjoyed themselves in a highly technical manner for a quarter of an hour.”  Perhaps it was a more innocent age.

Above, I believe, is Agatha Christie at the Nimrud Dig in Syria the 1950s; that was the place where Mallowan made his reputation. 
          The whole city was destroyed by Isis in 2015 on the grounds that the ancient artefacts there were blasphemous. UNESCO declared the distruction to be a war crime.  I look forward to the trial.

LEANINGS

I know it’s probably bad and wrong of me to be walking down the street, see this, and be royally amused.

Of course if this had been in a sitcom, the whole row of bikes would have fallen over like dominos, and I suppose there’s something about the stands holding the bikes that prevents that.  
          In general I don’t want my life to be more like a sitcom.  But in this case I’m not so sure.

THE HANGING GARDENS OF LETCHWORTH

I went for a walk in Letchworth Garden City – I had my reasons.  When you get off the train there’s a sign in the station reminding you, if you need reminding, that you’re in the world’s first garden city, though I’d have thought Babylon with its hanging gardens might have been in with a shout.

And if you walk down to the southeastern end of things there’s another signpost hammering home the message. This is the front: 

And this is the back: 

That’s a low relief image of Ebenezer Howard (and not a great likeness, if you ask me), the founder of Letchworth Garden City, and of the garden cities movement in general. 

Now, Howard’s notion of a “garden city” was not as we might imagine it today.  Like so many other people before and since he was worried about urbanization, about people leaving the land and moving to big cities, especially in this case London. 

So he conceived of a much smaller city, adjacent to fields, where people would work the land and then go back to their pleasant, nearby, arts and crafts style homes; which of course did have gardens.

It’s not clear to me how many, if any, agricultural labourers actually moved into Letchworth; the received wisdom was that it was far more a haven for socialists, vegetarians, nudists, teetotalers; New Agers before the term was current.  I’m not sure how many of those are now in Letchworth either.

This picture above taken in 1912 suggests it wasn’t entirely a rural idyll – and those front gardens look extremely perfunctory.  The picture below looks far more as though the inhabitants might, at least, be trying to feed themselves from their own gardens.

 I set myself the task of walking around Letchworth looking at gardens.  I was, for sure, in search of individuality, eccentricity and, OK, a certain kitschness, but all of that was surprisingly hard to find. And yes it was end of November, when few English gardens look their best, even so I really had to search hard to find much of anything out of the ordinary.  But I didn’t fail completely

There were some curious plantings:

Some curious topiary, if that’s the right word in this case:

A decaying chair in the shape of a hand:

And yes, one garden that looked like the householder might be aiming for self-sufficiency:

But the majority were tidy and unexciting – nobody seemed to be expressing themselves through their gardens.  And I wondered if this was a class thing.  Perhaps the upper and lower classes do indeed express themselves through their gardens, either on a large scale or a small,  but the middle classes just keep them neat and tidy, and above all they keep them to themselves.  They don’t want passersby (like me) to know their tastes and their business.  And of course, I was mostly looking at front gardens. It was possible perhaps that there were untold follies and grottos, and for all know hanging gardens, in the back , but somehow I doubted it.

Naturally enough there are public gardens in Letchworth.  There are the Broadway Gardens, a name they got at the time of the Letchworth centenary. For while before that were the John F Kennedy Gardens – a fact memorialized by this block of (I think) granite:

There are also Howard Park and Gardens – which contain an adventure playground, water features, a bowling green and statue of Sappho – not every public garden has one of those.  And for a good while Howard Park and Gardens didn’t have one either.

The statue was presented to the city in 1907 and moved around, ending up in 1939 in the Ball Memorial Gardens. But the statue was stolen in 1998, so what’s there now is a replica, and its been moved round the back of the International Gardens Cities Exhibition, away from prying and criminal eyes.  

Clearly Letchworth contains elements that would have appalled Ebenezer Howard, and I can’t even imagine how he’d feel about some of the businesses on the main drag such as No Morals Tattoos. 

I guess this is known as reaction.

GAIT ANALYSIS

 I went to see Gilbert Shelton at the British Library, in conversation with Posy Simmons.  They were mostly there to talk about cats – there’s a new exhibition at the library Cats on the Page.

Of course Shelton was there because of Fat Freddy’s Cat (above), a noble and subversive animal, though not bearing much relationship to any real cat.  Shelton was far more scholarly than I’d expected him to be, and he did say something I absolutely agree with, that cats don’t really have facial expressions – we simply project our feelings onto them.  Cartoon cats of course have the most expressive faces, and indeed gaits, imaginable.

Shelton has always struck me as the most benign and engaging of the underground comix crowd, less consciously transgressive than most.  The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers weren’t as hip as they thought they were, or were trying to be, and that was a source of the comedy, and when it came to subversion, dope smoking and a distrust of the police was about as far as it went.

At one point the onstage conversation turned to the various attempts that have been made to animate the Freak Brothers.  They certainly have a very specific walking gait, which looks just fine in still cartoons but seems a real problem when it comes to animation.  There's this curious teaser floating around on Youtube, which shows you how hard it is to make them walk convincingly, or in fact move at all:

Shelton is about far more than just the Freak Brothers.  I was always taken with Philbert Desenex who walked looking like this:

And then turned into Wonder Warthog who in general does more flying than walking, though not always

And digging around online I can across this Shelton image.  Trangressive no doubt, and also depicting a very fine, if again unlikely, gait.

And if you're interested, this is what Gilbert Shelton looks like these days: