This blog's been quiet for a while, sorry, but I have been awoken from my slumber by the excellent Mr Tregaskis. So for you my friend, this, from SPB Mais (one of the arch proto-psychogeographers / crypto-topographers) on his topographical adventure through Harrow (1937):
"I descended from this dignified, unspoilt village past Matthew Arnold's lovely home, Byron House, into the Weald with reluctance, for I kept on running up against that nightmare of a gasometer. In the end I took a bus and drove through all the other Harrows. To my great surprise as I wandered down Oxhey Lane...I found a gloriou common of bracken and silver-birches on both sides of the road. I was on the ridge of the hill with glorious views southward over all the Harrows. At least, the view would have been glorious had it not been for my discovery that the monstrous Harrow gasometer had suddenly spawned. I had been sufficiently harassed by the sight of one. But now there were two."
The inability to appreciate the beauty of a gasometer nestling in the landscape does make me wonder whether, rather than being a prophet, Mais was actually a bit of a phillistine. When they recently pulled down the Edwardian gasometers in High Wycombe the old people lamented their passing. The rusting gasometers on Leyton Marshes are a key feature of the areas topography(like the pylons). They are merely the modern (or not so modern) descendants of the windmills that I read in Understone today sat down on the corner of Francis Road and Newport Road. I wonder whether Daniel Defoe complained bitterly about the cursed windmills that blighted his view.
3 comments:
There is an excellent photo of the Harrow Gasworks in WW Druett's book on the town from 1938 (I think..). Harrow, the jewel of Middlesex with its streams running down to Roxeth (the Roxbourne) and east into the Lidding Brook, bound for the lost village of Monks Park. Roxeth is said to mean "where the rooks drink" and last year while following the Roxbourne I saw dozens of crows hanging out in a local park. Whether they were rooks I can't say. The Roxbourne joins the Yeading Brook just south of Northolt, close by a pumping station for the West Middlesex Main Drainage Scheme. The trunk sewers clearly follow the rivers and just by the streams' confluence, in an area of long grasses and nettles I found the steel plate mounted atop a small brick plinth. Inscribed clearly on the plate the words: MIDDLESEX COUNTY COUNCIL 1934.
I went to school on the lower slopes of Harrow-on-the-Hill. Smoking spliff an' ting age 15 on Church Fields, overlooking the gasometer. This gasometer had 'NO' painted on its side in large white letters, to indicate nearby Northolt airport (hence preventing pilots from mistaking it for Heathrow), but this 'NO' was open to all sorts of other interpretations, of course, especially to the teenage mind. Later at Weald 6th form College, Harrow Weald (tucked away amid the bracken mentioned by SPB Mais), I made a pen and ink drawing of the more famous Kensal Green gasometer, phantoms rising from the famous cemetery in the foreground, but they failed me on my 'A' level art and I had to spend another year there being haunted by gasometers, waiting to re-sit it.
I agree, that 'NO' was open to many youthful interpretations. I grew up within sight (and sound) of both the Northolt Gasometer and the Piccadilly Line railway viaduct, with the nightly rumble of the goods trains marking time and echoing on towards South Harrow station. As a child, unaware of its pilot-warning function, I believed the 'NO' to be a warning; a prohibitive admonishment rising high over the sedate suburban landscape, battling for prominence with the spires of St Mary's.
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