Everyone knows that one number of a postcode in London can change everything – from the designer boutiques of Chelsea (SW3) to the ska bars of Brixton Hill (SW2). Even more idiosyncratically, in this most deliberately mixed of cities, a move of a few hundred metres can take you to a different world.
My partner and I decided to swap a flat and a rented room in the leafy villa-lined roads of St John’s Wood (NW8) for a terraced house in a Victorian garden suburb in north Kensington (W10) – only just over a mile as the crow flies. We wanted more space: a little garden of our own and the security and control that come (in theory at least) from being a freehold owner. We knew we were moving to a more socially and ethnically mixed area. What we were not quite expecting was the sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle, ways in which our senses would need to adjust.
Architecturally, this was a matter of exchanging Georgian-inspired pilasters and stucco for turrets and polychrome brickwork. The Queen’s Park Estate, covering about 70 acres between the Harrow Road, to the south, and Kilburn Lane, to the north, was rather charmingly designed and built in the 1870s and 1880s by the Artisans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company (ALGDCL) in a gothic revival, arts and crafts style. It is now a conservation area and many of the buildings are Grade II-listed in spite of some second world war damage (Peach Road was demolished by a landmine dropped by parachute). The estate has to a remarkable degree conserved its distinctive character and architectural integrity.
The ALGDCL was founded by the remarkable William Austin, who worked his way up from country bird-scarer on one old penny a day to leading London developer, with the aim of providing decent and respectable housing for working-class families. The Queen’s Park Estate, modelled on the highly successful Shaftesbury Park Estate in Battersea, south London, certainly provided more comfortable dwelling conditions, with wide tree-lined roads and other facilities, compared to the often fetid and miserable slums of that time.
The estate quickly came to see itself as somewhat superior to the surrounding area. However, after the second world war, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the estate suffered: the nearby Mozart estate garnered an unenviable reputation for lawlessness (letters appeared in the local press headlined “Where decent people go in fear”) and, as local estate agent Jack Mire puts it: “The Queen’s Park Estate was not particularly in demand.”
For the ALGDCL, its mission was not only to provide physical accommodation for its tenants but also to supervise their moral and cultural well-being. No pubs or shops (with a couple of exceptions) were allowed; moral and cultural encouragement was provided at the Queen’s Park Hall and Library. The ALGDCL described the hall as “the centre of what may be called the civic life of the estate”. Early uses were for children’s parties, soirées, temperance meetings and concerts.
We were moving, in other words, from a quasi-aristocratic area of wealth and privilege to one inspired by the communitarian ideals of John Ruskin. Traipsing the streets of “the Avenues” (as our area is known to cabbies), I have come to feel great affection for the humane scale and design, the quirky decorative features of a fine and little-known piece of Victorian town planning.
Rather more difficult for my partner, Ching Ling, and me has been the loss of the tall planes, limes and chestnuts that give St John’s Wood its beautiful summer canopy. We have trees in our new locale, even mature planes planted in the 1880s, but they are strictly pollarded so as not to tower over or possibly damage the modest-sized houses.
The encouragement of gardens and gardening, both at the front and rear of the houses, was part of the ALGDCL’s original plan. The plots might be modest but they offer quite a lot of scope to determined gardeners. Looking out from our upstairs back windows, we see a patchwork that embraces more or less total neglect and the greatest loving care.
The gardens might lack grandeur but they are personal creations, not the work of design consultants. A thriving fuchsia, forsythia or even a lovingly trimmed privet hedge at the front of a house can touch the heart in a way that a gated patio (with resplendent SUV) cannot. Suddenly coming upon a mimosa or early prunus in bloom in W10 is more surprising than finding yet another magnolia in NW8.
There is also a randomness: why the full-sized Christmas tree rearing up two doors down? It is not beautiful but it is thriving and the birds use it. The motivation to grow plants has probably declined over the past century and a quarter but the plots and the potential remain.
We inherited a lovingly designed, romantic and somewhat overgrown garden from a bird-loving artist and took the difficult, sensible decision to make it more orderly. There were moments of despair when shady mini-arbours and tiny ponds gave way to a symmetry of York stone and borders but gradually it has taken shape. Best of all, we have seen the birds return. Here, once again, one needs to adapt: gone are the song thrushes, goldcrests, great spotted woodpeckers and long-tailed tits of NW8. In their place has arrived a steady stream of assertive great tits, blue tits, robins and house sparrows, and a veritable plague of wood pigeons.
Sound effects change as much as visual features when you move a mile in London. If, on balance, our road in W10 is quieter than the cul-de-sac off Abbey Road where I used to rent my room, the main reason is the absence of heavy-duty building work as ambitious people compete to make their homes more palatial. In NW8, barely a morning went by unpolluted by the scream of stone-cutters and the churning of cement-mixers and JCBs digging out basement sports areas.
By contrast, here in W10, all is mostly peaceful. The Queen’s Park Estate is protected from through traffic by cunning one-way systems and preserves a quasi-rustic tranquillity. But there is one big exception; we found that the 1870s brickwork was no match for modern TV and audio equipment.
In my previous experiences living in London flats, I had always focused on sound travelling vertically through poorly insulated floors and ceilings. I had thought less about the lateral penetration of sound through brick.
You quickly find that noise is not just a matter of quantity – decibels – but also of quality. Our neighbours on one side turned out to be occasional party people. Every now and then, usually on a Saturday night, a burst of dance music and sounds of merriment would boom through the walls. At first this was somewhat alarming – it sounded as if we were giving a party ourselves without knowing it – but we quite quickly got used to it. It was predictable and good-humoured and we knew it would not last for ever.
Very different were the sound effects from the other side. Here lived an elderly gentleman with nothing but a TV and a radio for company; or what turned out to be three TVs, one for each room. The relentless percolation of media noise – mindless jingles and jazzed-up chat – by day and night turned out to be far more noxious than the occasional louder sounds of rock and roll or drunken revelry.
Eventually it proved too much and we turned up at our local councillor’s drop-in surgery. As well as helpful advice and action, he also gave us a small lesson in civics. “On the whole this area is much better than it used to be – we don’t get many noise complaints. But there are people who live on their own and drink and forget to take their medication. I suppose we have to remember that this is their area too. Some were born and bred here.”
In the end what matters as much as, or more than, aesthetics is relationships: an area is not just architecture, gardens, noise and silence but people and neighbourhood. Moving to a new area obviously requires a certain sensitivity to the local culture and mores, however alien they might feel.
Some families, we found, represent the fourth or fifth generation living on the Queen’s Park Estate (and still support Queen’s Park Rangers, the local football club before the club moved to Shepherd’s Bush) – a remarkable continuity. Others embody the various waves of immigration that define postwar London: many Irish families, second and third-generation West Indians; Bangladeshis; and, most recently, Poles.
We, I suppose, represent something else: the drift northwards, westwards and across the canal of the Notting Hill arts and media crowd. We bought our house from an artist/actress. While house-hunting, we came across a film animator and a writing partnership. Several artist friends turn out to live nearby – some use the Great Western studios just across the canal near Westbourne Park. Here is a link with the area we have moved from. St John’s Wood, before it became a haven for the international financial community, was a chosen place for artists and musicians (Arthur Bliss, Thomas Beecham, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arthur Fleischmann).
For Jack Mire, who has specialised in selling properties within the Queen’s Park Estate for 20 years, the trends (despite the current slowdown in the market) are all positive. “Every year the houses are in better condition, with people taking more care. A lot of young single women professionals seem to be moving here from Notting Hill. When the mothers – it always seems to be the mothers – ask me whether it’s safe, I say, ‘Yes, on the whole.’”
For our neighbours Diccon and China, the issue is not so much safety as community. “One thing the estate needs is a focal point, like a neighbourhood shop where people meet,” says China.
There was one until 2001 when Richard Evans closed his dairy shop. In his 70s, he still runs milk deliveries three times a week around the estate, providing a thread of community and continuity that can surely be joined by others into a richer tapestry.
