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Metro-land (or Metroland – see note on spelling, below) is a name given to the suburban areas that were built to the north-west of London in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex in the early part of the 20th century that were served by the Metropolitan Railway (also known as the Met). The railway company was in the privileged position of being allowed to retain surplus land; from 1919 this was developed for housing by the nominally independent Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited (MRCE). The term "Metro-land" was coined by the Met's marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide. It promoted a dream of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway service to central London until the Met was absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.
Electric traction was introduced in 1905 with electric multiple units operating services between Uxbridge, Harrow-on-the-Hill and Baker Street. To remove steam and smoke from the tunnels in central London, the Metropolitan Railway purchased electric locomotives, and these were exchanged for steam locomotives on trains at Harrow from 1908. To improve services, more powerful electric and steam locomotives were purchased in the 1920s. A short branch opened from Rickmansworth to Watford in 1925. The long Stanmore branch from Wembley Park was completed in 1932.
Robert Selbie, then General Manager, thought in 1912 that some professionalism was needed and suggested a company be formed to take over from the Surplus Lands Committee to develop estates near the railway. The First World War delayed these plans however, and it was 1919, with the expectation of a housing boom, before the MRCE was formed. Concerned that Parliament might reconsider the unique position the Met held, the railway company sought legal advice. The legal opinion was that although the Met had authority to hold land, it had none to develop it, so an independent company was created, although all but one of its directors were also directors of the railway company. The MRCE went on to develop estates at Kingsbury Garden Village near Neasden, Wembley Park, Cecil Park and Grange Estate at Pinner and the Cedars Estate at Rickmansworth and create places such as Harrow Garden Village.
The term Metro-land was coined by the Met's marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide, priced at 1d. This promoted the land served by the Met for the walker, the visitor and later the house-hunter. Published annually until 1932, the last full year of independence for the Met, the guide extolled the benefits of "The good air of the Chilterns," using language such as "Each lover of Metroland may well have his own favourite wood beech and coppice – all tremulous green loveliness in Spring and russet and gold in October." The dream promoted was of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway service to central London.
From about 1914 the company had promoted itself as The Met, but after 1920 the commercial manager, John Wardle, ensured that timetables and other publicity material used the term Metro instead., see also the publicity material reprinted in Land development also occurred in central London when in 1929 a large, luxurious block of apartments called Chiltern Court opened at Baker Street, designed by the Met's architect Charles W. Clark, who was also responsible for the design of a number of station reconstructions in outer "Metro-land" at this time.
A few large houses had been built on parts of Wembley Park, south-west of the Metropolitan station, as early as the 1890s. In 1906, when Edward Watkin’s Tower closed, the Tower Company had become the Wembley Park Estate Company (later Wembley Ltd.), with the aim of developing Wembley as a residential suburb.
Unlike other railways, from an early date the Metropolitan Railway had bought land alongside its line and then developed housing on it. In the 1880s and 1890s it had done so with the Willesden Park Estate near Willesden Green station, and in the early 1900s it developed on land in Pinner, as well as planning the expansion of Wembley Park.
In 1915 by the Metropolitan Railway's publicity department had created the term Metro-land. It was used as the new name for the company's annual guide to the places it served (known as Guide to the Extension Line prior to 1915). The Metro-land guide, although partly written to attract walkers and day trippers, was clearly primarily intended to encourage the building of suburban homes and create middle-class commuters who would use the Metropolitan Railway's trains for all their needs. It was published annually until 1932, but when the Metropolitan became part of London Transport in 1933 the term and guide were abandoned. By then North-West London was well on the road to its reputation for suburbanisation.
The 1924 Metro-land guide describes Wembley Park as "rapidly developed of recent years as a residential district", pointing out that there are several golf courses within a few minutes journey of it.
Over the years during which the guide was published, large numbers of Londoners moved out to the new estates in north-west London. Some of these estates were developed by MRCE, a company that Robert H. Selbie, the Metropolitan Railway's General Manager, set up in 1919. It would eventually build houses along the line, from Neasden reaching far out as Amersham.
One of the earliest of these MRCE developments was a 123-acre one at Chalkhill, within the bounds of what was Repton’s Wembley Park. MRCE acquired the land shortly after it was created and began selling plots in 1921. The railway even put in a siding to bring building materials to the estate.
The term ‘Metroland’ (often seen now without the hyphen - see Note on spelling, below) has become shorthand for the suburban areas that were built in north-west London and in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex following the Metropolitan branches. It had become immortalised well before the guide stopped being published. A song called "My Little Metro-land Home" had been published in 1920, and Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall (1928) has a character marrying a Viscount Metroland. She reappears, with the title Lady Metroland, in two more of Waugh's novels; Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934).
The British Empire Exhibition further encouraged the new phenomenon of suburban development. Wembley's sewerage was improved, many roads in the area were straightened and widened and new bus services began operating. Visitors were steadily introduced to Wembley and some later moved to the area when houses had been built to accommodate them.
Between 1921 and 1928 season ticket sales at Wembley Park and neighbouring Metropolitan stations rose by over 700%. Like the rest of West London, most of Wembley Park and its environs was fully developed, largely with relatively low-density suburban housing, by 1939.
Steam traction continued to be used on the outer sections of what had become the "Metropolitan line" until 1961. From that date Metropolitan trains ran only as far as Amersham, with main line services from Marylebone covering stations between Great Missenden and Aylesbury.
The architect Hugh Casson regarded Harrow as the "capital city" of Metro-land,Stephen Halliday (2001) Underground to Everywhere while Arthur Mee's King's England described Wembley as its "epitome".Arthur Mee, The King's England: London North of the Thames (revised Ann Saunders, 1972)
The Metro-land guide insisted that Metro-land was "a country with elastic borders that each visitor can draw for himself". Even so, Metro-land was quite firm that, so far as the Buckinghamshire Chilterns were concerned, its "Grand Duchy" was confined to the hundred of Burnham: "the Chilterns round Marlow and the High Wycombe are not in Metro-land".
The usefulness of the term Metro-land, has occasionally led journalists to use the term for the suburban catchment of other underground lines.Kathryn Bradley-Hole writing about Gunnersbury Park, Country Life, 22 July 2004An article by Anthea Masey "Down the line into Metroland", used the line when describing High Barnet (Northern line), Loughton (Central line) as well as Metropolitan line areas Evening Standard, 21 October 2009
By the 1920s, the word was so ingrained in the consciousness that, in Evelyn Waugh's novel, Decline and Fall (1928), the Hon Margot Beste-Chetwynde took Viscount Metroland as her second husband. Lady Metroland's second appearance in Vile Bodies in 1930 and A Handful of Dust in 1934 further reinforces this.Waugh, Evelyn, A Handful of Dust (London, 1934), 10.
Metro-land further entered the public psyche with the song "My Little Metro-land Home" (lyrics by Boyle Lawrence and music by Henry Thraile, 1920), while another ditty extolled the virtues of the Poplars estate at Ruislip with the assertion that "It's a very short distance by rail on the Met/And at the gate you'll find waiting, sweet Violet".
Queensbury and its local surroundings and characters were cited in the song "Queensbury Station" by the Berlin-based punk-jazz band The Magoo Brothers on their album "Beyond Believable", released on the Bouncing Corporation label in 1988. The song was written by Paul Bonin and Melanie Hickford, who both grew up and lived in the area. GEMA database listing for Queensbury Station song, work no.: 2181020-001
In 1997, Metroland was the title and setting for a movie starring Christian Bale about the development of the relationship between a husband and wife living in the area. The movie was based on the novel of the same name written by Julian Barnes.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark recorded a song Metroland on the English Electric album. It was released as a single, with the video showing the singer dreamily gazing out from a train at an idealised suburban landscape.
Some stations, such as Hillingdon (1923), were built specifically to serve the company's suburban developments. A number, including Wembley Park, Croxley Green (1925) and Stanmore (1932), were designed by Charles W. Clark (who was responsible also for Chiltern Court) in an Arts and crafts "villa" style. These were intended to blend with their surroundings, though, in retrospect, they arguably lacked the panache and vision of Charles Holden's striking, modern designs for the Underground group in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
A more cynical view, that sought to contrast illusion with changing times, was offered in 1934 by the composer and conductor Constant Lambert who "conjured up the hideous faux bonhomie of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of Metroland, singing obsolete sea shanty sic with the aid of the Week-End Book, imbibing chemically flavoured synthetic beer under the impression that he is tossing off a tankard of 'jolly good ale and old' ... and astonishing the local garage proprietor by slapping him on the back and offering him a pint of 'four 'alf'".Constant Lambert (1934) Music Ho!.
To mark the centenary of Betjeman's birth his daughter Candida Lycett Green (born 1942) spearheaded a series of celebratory railway events, including an excursion on 2 September 2006 from Marylebone to Quainton Road, now home of the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. Lycett Green noted of the planning of this trip that among the fine details considered were which filling to have in the baguettes on the train through Metro-land and how long it would stop on the track so that the poem "Middlesex" could be read over the tannoy. Country Life, 8 June 2006 The event was in the tradition of earlier commemorations of "Metro-land", such as a centenary parade of rolling stock at Neasden in 1963 and celebrations in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Uxbridge branch.
John Betjeman admired John Piper's illustrations for Castles on the Ground, describing the "fake half-timber, the leaded lights and bow windows of the Englishman's castle" as "the beauty of the despised, patronised suburb".John Betjeman (ed Candida Lycett Green, 1997) Coming Home However, as the historian David Kynaston observed sixty years later, "the time was far from ripe for Metroland nostalgia".David Kynaston (2007) Austerity Britain
Thus, the central character of Metroland (1980), a novel by Julian Barnes (born 1946) that was filmed in 1997, ended up in Paris during the disturbances of May 1968 – though, by the late 1970s, having thrown off the yearnings of his youth, he was back in Metro-land. Metroland recounted the essence of suburbia in the early 1960s and the features of daily travel by a schoolboy, Christopher Lloyd, on the Metropolitan line to and from London. During a French lesson, Christopher declared, " J'habite Metroland" "I, because it "sounds better than Eastwick the, stranger than Middlesex".
In real life, some schoolboys had made similar journeys for more hedonistic reasons. Betjeman recalled that, between the wars, boys from Harrow School had used the Metropolitan for illicit excursions to night clubs in London: "Whenever the police raided the Hypocrites' Club or the Coconut Club, the '43 or the Blue Lantern there would always be Harrovians there".David Faber (2005) Speaking for England
Another glimpse of Metro-land in the 1970s was provided by The Good Life, the BBC TV comedy series (1975-78) about suburban self sufficiency. Though set in Surbiton, the programme's location filming was carried out in Northwood, an area reached by the Metropolitan in 1885. A less benign view of Metro-land was offered in the mid-2000s by the detective series Murder in Suburbia (ITV 2004-06), which, though set in the fictional town of Middleford, was also filmed in Northwood and other parts of north west London.
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