Metro Land (1973 film)

Updated on Oct 06, 2024

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Metro-Land is a BBC documentary film written and narrated by the then UK Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman. It was directed by Edward Mirzoeff and first broadcast on 26 February 1973. The film celebrates suburban life in the area to the Northwest of London that grew up in the early 20th century around the Metropolitan Railway (later the Metropolitan line of the Underground).

"Metro-land" was the slogan coined by the railway for promotional purposes in about 1915 and used for about twenty years, until shortly after the incorporation of the Metropolitan into the railways division of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933. As Betjeman himself put it at the beginning of Metro-land, it was a "Child of the First War, forgotten by the Second". Betjeman carries the pamphlet guide to Metro-land from the 1920s with him as he travels.

The film was critically acclaimed and is fondly remembered today. A DVD was released in 2006 to coincide with the centenary of Betjeman's birth.

The concept

According to Mirzoeff, the programme was conceived in 1971 over lunch with Betjeman at Wheeler's Restaurant in Soho. The two had recently collaborated on a BBC series called Bird's-Eye View, which offered an aerial vision of Britain. Metro-Land was commissioned by Robin Scott, Controller of BBC Two, with the initial working title of "The Joys of Urban Living". As completed, it was a series of vignettes of life in the suburbs of Metro-land, drawn together by Betjeman’s commentary, partly in verse, whose text was published in 1978, and interwoven with black-and-white film shot from a Metropolitan train in 1910. It was 49 minutes long.

Locations in Metro-land

Betjeman's first appearance in Metro-land is over a pint of beer in a station buffet, reminiscent of a scene in the film Brief Encounter (1945). This sequence was filmed at Horsted Keynes, on the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. Other locations include:

Chiltern Court, over Baker Street Station, the Metropolitan’s London terminus, which still contained a restaurant in 1972 (the year of filming). The restaurant is now The Metropolitan Bar, part of the Wetherspoons chain;

Marlborough Road, a station closed in 1939, whose booking hall had become an Angus Steak House. It subsequently became a Chinese restaurant and in 2012 returned to railway use, supporting the new S class rolling stock on the Metropolitan line. Betjeman also mentions the house where Thomas Hood died, near the station, where the railway cut through the garden;

St John's Wood: surprisingly, perhaps, there was no mention of Lord's Cricket Ground, part of which had to be dug up in the 1890s to facilitate tunnelling for the Great Central Railway into Marylebone. Instead, Betjeman concentrated on St John’s Wood as a Victorian suburb and, in particular, the former residence of a clergyman, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, "whose Clapton congregation declared him to be Christ,/a compliment he accepted". This house, situated in Langford Place, has since been the home of both Charles Saatchi and Vanessa Feltz;

Neasden, caricatured since 1962 by the satirical magazine, Private Eye, for which Betjeman wrote, as the stereotypical "contemporary urban environment". Betjeman describes Neasden as "home of the gnome and the average citizen" (the former a reference to the preponderance of gnome statuettes in suburban front-gardens). Background music was provided by William Rushton’s recording of "Neasden" (1972) ("Neasden/You won't be sorry that you breezed in"), another Private Eye spin-off. Betjeman visits the Neasden Nature Trail (through Gladstone Park and the Brook Road allotments - now no longer accessible from Brook Road), where he met its creator, the ornithologist Eric Simms;

Wembley, site of the British Empire Exhibition in 1924-25 and the stadium (demolished and rebuilt in the early 21st century), which first hosted the Football Association Cup Final in 1923 and where England had won the World Cup six years before Metro-land was filmed. (Chants of "England!" could be heard in the background as Betjeman stood alone on the hallowed turf.) Betjeman recounted the partial construction (1890) on the site of the present stadium of "Watkin's Folly" (after Sir Edward Watkin, Chairman of the Metropolitan), demolished in 1907, which had been intended to exceed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. He also recalls the British Empire Exhibition and a St. George's Day rally held there in 1924;

Harrow: Harrow School and Grim's Dyke, Harrow Weald, where, in 1911, the lyricist W.S.Gilbert, collaborator of Arthur Sullivan, drowned in a pond after suffering a heart attack. Betjeman recounts that Gilbert had gone swimming with two girls, Ruby Preece and Winifred Isabel Emery; Ruby later became known as the artist Patricia Preece, who was the second wife of Stanley Spencer;

Pinner: Pinner Fair, described by Betjeman as "a mediaeval fair in Metro-land";

Moor Park Rickmansworth, on whose golf course Betjeman was filmed missing a tee shot. The fine club-house, an 18th-century mansion, was also shown. 34 years later, the Mail on Sunday recalled Betjeman's "hilarious" round, noting that many of the houses in private roads around Moor Park station were now owned by Indian businessmen. Accordingly, it dubbed one road in Moor Park, "Bollywood Boulevard of Suburbia";

Croxley Green: with a hint of irony, Betjeman refers to the Croxley Green "revels" as "a tradition dating back to 1952";

Chorleywood, which Betjeman called "essential Metro-land". He visits Chorleywood Common and The Orchard, an Arts and crafts house (1899) designed by Charles Voysey (1857–1941), about whom he had written an article in the Architectural Review in 1931. Elsewhere in Chorleywood, Betjeman listened to a local resident, Len Rawle, perform on the Wurlitzer organ from the Empire cinema, Leicester Square, which had been installed in his house. (In 2006 the organ was still there and Rawle performed for a BBC film, Betjeman and Me, made by Dan Cruickshank to mark Betjeman’s centenary);

Amersham, the terminus of the Metropolitan by 1973, where Betjeman visited High and Over (1929), a house designed by Amyas Connell in the modern style ("perhaps old-fashioned today") that overlooked the town. (Thirty years earlier he had referred, rather contemptuously, to "an absurd admiration of what is modern, as though 'modern' meant always a flat roof, a window at the corner ... in fact not genuine contemporary architecture at all but 'jazz'" ). Of the former Metropolitan beyond Amersham, Betjeman remarked, "In those wet fields the railway didn't pay/The Metro stops at Amersham today";

Quainton Road, a station in the outer reaches of Buckinghamshire that was finally closed to Metropolitan passengers in 1948, but has since become home to the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. Betjeman reminisced of having sat there in the autumn of 1929 watching the Brill tram depart. In 2006 his daughter Candida Lycett Green organised an excursion from Marylebone to Quainton Road, using the extant freight line from Aylesbury, to mark his centenary;

Verney Junction, near to the Claydons, the most distant outpost of the Metropolitan, closed since 1936, which, by the 1970s, had largely been reclaimed by nature. Betjeman appeared to close the programme here with the words, "Grass triumphs. And I must say I’m rather glad", although the scene was in fact filmed at Shipton Lee, some five miles to the south of the former terminus.

Critical reception

In general, Metro-land was warmly and favourably received. Miles Kington wrote to Mirzoeff that it was "just about the most satisfying TV programme, on all levels, that I've ever seen". Clive James, writing in the Observer, dubbed it an "instant classic" and predicted accurately that “they’ll be repeating it until the millennium”. (In 2006 it was shown on BBC Four in the same week that the DVD was released, and most recently was shown on BBC Four again in January and June 2013, and in September 2014). Christopher Booker rated it as the best of Betjeman's television programmes ("Like others, I have been endlessly grateful … over the years for the more public activities of the 'outer' Betjeman"), while Betjeman’s biographer A. N. Wilson recalled that it was "too good to be described simply as a ‘programme’".

In a contemporaneous review for the London Evening Standard, Simon Jenkins launched into imitative verse: “For an hour he held enraptured/Pinner, Moor Park, Chorley Wood./’Well I’m blowed’ they said, ‘He likes us./Knew one day that someone should.”

Cuttings

When the original film was launched, four passages were cut from it. They were: the section shot in Gladstone Park, Neasden, with Eric Simms talking about birdwatching; the section shot in Harrow where people were gardening, washing cars, etc. on a Sunday morning; the section shot at Moor Park where the gatekeeper admits a member of the Estate in her car, but prevents a non-member in her car from passing the barrier; and the section shot at Croxley Green, featuring the Revels and the crowning of the Queen of the Revels, accompanied by speeches. Later versions of the film are uncut.

Music soundtrack

"Tiger Rag" by the Temperance Seven plays over the opening title sequence, - a 33rpm vinyl disc at 45 rpm to provide 'a suitably manic sound', - followed by "Build a Little Home" by Roy Fox. As Betjeman sits at a table in the Chiltern Court restaurant, built above Baker Street Station, "When the Daisy Opens her Eyes" by Albert Sandler plays. When Betjeman looks at 12 Langford Place, 'Agapemone', 'the abode of love', country house of the Anglican clergyman, The Reverend John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, "The Witch of Endor" and "Le Roi David" by Arthur Honegger are heard. The sequence at Neasden is accompanied by the song of the same name by William Rushton. The Wembley sequence features three tunes: Elgar's "Civic Fanfare", towards the beginning, Walford Davies' "Solemn Melody" (as Betjeman stands in the Palace of Arts), while the pleasure park footage uses the beginning and the end of the 1926 recording of "Masculine Women, Feminine Men" by the Savoy Havana Band (HMV B-5027). During the sequence at Harrow School, the "Harrow School Song" is heard. When the sequence of stained glass windows at Harrow are shown, "Sunny Side of the Street" by Jack Hylton plays. Part of the segment on Grim's Dyke in Harrow Weald is accompanied by "Tit Willow" by Gilbert and Sullivan. "Golfing Love" by Melville Gideon accompanies the footage featuring golfers at Moor Park, and while the paintings in the Moor Park clubhouse are shown, Handel's Double Concerti plays. "Build a Little Home" is played again during part of the sequence at Chorleywood. The sequence featuring Len Rawle and his Wurlitzer is accompanied by three of his own works: "Crimond", "Varsity Rag", and "Chattanooga Choo Choo". Finally, during part of the sequence showing High and Over, "Everything I Own" by Bread is heard.

The section cut from the original script that features people working in Harrow is accompanied by "Family Favourites" by Rod McNeil and "Down by the Lazy River" by The Osmonds.

References

Metro-Land (1973 film) Wikipedia

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Metro-Land (1973 film) IMDb