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| Stapleton Hall |
Years ago, when I lived over the hill in NW1, I was thrilled to come across a book by Gillian Tindall called The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village.
It was about Kentish Town, a place I walked through every day. It transformed my understanding of local history and my own neighbourhood. It wasn't the usual forbidding excursion into dusty parish records, but a tale told through the lives of people who had once worked, played and died in the area, and helped make the place what it is today.Imagine my excitement, then, when I found Gillian Tindall has written a book about the place I now call home, Stroud Green, and the history of its streets, houses and people. Can she work the same magic?
Three Houses, Many Lives is about three old buildings in different parts of England and the people who lived there. All of them are 'ordinary houses'.
The London house is number 5, Stapleton Hall Road - Stapleton Hall - picked apparently because a young and visionary Ms Tindall once walked past in the 1960s, then much later gazed into a lighted window years later from the top deck of a W3 bus.
Probably few people in the area today know Stapleton Hall exists, let alone where to find it. If Gillian Tindall is the kind of writer who likes shining a light on the obscure, half-forgotten and inconsequential, she has surely come to the right place in Stroud Green.
Like the neighbourhood itself, Stapleton Hall is curiously hidden away in plain sight. Why should anyone know of it? Yet it's possibly the oldest lived-in building in Haringey.
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| 5 Stapleton Road in 2013 |
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| From the back in 2013. The old weathercock housing still on the roof. |
I won't offer a brick-by-brick history of the 500 year old property and its occupants - life's too short, and Ms Tindall's book does the job if you're curious. But a few stand out facts and stories about Stroud Green and the house from the book are worth retelling.
* Did you know the original 'Stroud Green' was actually just a long boggy strip of uncultivated common land, with a muddy footpath along it, between (what's now) Finsbury Park Station and the bottom of Crouch Hill? Not even a road. Nobody lived there. It was so waterlogged the cows fell in and got stuck in the mud. (Ring any bells?)
* Stapleton Hall was probably the first proper house in the area. It was most likely first built in Elizabethan times (1558-1603) as a fashionable half-timbered country residence. Nobody knows its original name. Whoever built it was probably a London merchant, in Blackadder-style ruff and breeches, who wanted a second home and enjoyed a bit of duck shooting and country walks.
* Nobody called Stapleton ever lived there. In 1609, somebody doing a bit of gentrification made some improvements and put up a wooden lintel carved with the date and the initials TDS (it's not in the house any more, but in storage at Bruce Castle museum). Mrs T says those initials probably belonged to a merchant and brewer called Thomas Draper, and his wife Sarah - the first known gentrifiers of Stroud Green.
* A certain William Prowse and family occupied the posh part of the house for much of the nineteenth century. He was the Prowse who founded the Keith Prowse ticket agency, with a buddy named Mr Keith.
* The eponymous Stapleton Hall Tavern, virtually next door, opened as an alehouse in the early eighteenth century (the modern pub is on the same spot). So there has been nightlife in Stroud Green for more than 250 years. There was once a tea gardens where Japan Crescent is. One of the early landlords of the pub died in 1759 after falling from his horse on the way home from Islington. (Ring any bells?)
* There was an inscription over the door of the old Stapleton Hall Tavern that read 'Ye are Welcome All to Stapleton Hall'. I think it should be put back.
Ms Tindall apparently chose her three houses because she feels a personal connection with each of them. She first saw Stapleton Hall when, as a well-bred young woman in the 1960s, she made the daring trip from Hampstead by bus all the way to Finsbury Park, then a very unsalubrious area, to visit an unsuitable-sounding boyfriend.
She wandered up Stroud Green Road, which she recalls as an urban landscape of 'cracked stucco, blackened yellowish brick, broken or missing front walls'.
Further up she passed decayed Victorian houses 'almost daemonic in their ugliness'. It was 'like one of those places you only read about in a newspaper where something awful had happened: a fire, a strike and a riot, or a murder.'
A group of men standing outside the pub (probably the Stapleton) leered at her. Not much new there, then. So she turned into Stapleton Hall Road, and immediately came upon a 'porridge-coloured' house in the shattered remains of a garden. It was sooty, dirty, gray, and obviously very old.
A woman came out and passed the time of day. Then she had a Stroud Green moment. She had a vision - 'that these things were some sort of stage setting, that concealed behind were turrets and an inner courtyard with a proper garden and a fountain, like at Hampton Court....'
The memory of this terrifying expedition obviously stayed with her. Many years later, visiting relatives in the newly gentrified area, she glimpsed the house again from the top of a W3 bus - 'a brief view into the lighted interior...unmistakeable old beams.' And that's how Stapleton Hall came to be her subject.
As a social historian, Ms Tindall has a novelist's eye for colour and detail. I don't think she always gets it right. Her opinion of Stroud Green as it is today seems a little harsh ('boring and plain' pretty much sums it up), but then she's presumably never had the privilege of living in what we all know as a lively, multi-facted area.
And perhaps, as a writer, she has been influenced by the verdicts of well-known scribblers of yesteryear, some of whose efforts she has delightful dredged up and put on show.
Arnold Bennett, Compton Mackenzie, early twentieth century novelists, both wrote about what is now N4. They were all at it in those days - courting north London suburban low-life, walking Seven Sisters Road, or taking the train from King's Cross to Hornsey, noting the bleak inner city terraces and apparently bleaker lives, and turning them into fiction.
Stroud Green, seen from the train by Arnold Bennet in Hilda Lessways (1911), was 'acres of houses - vile and frowsty, and smoking like pyres in the dark air'. The Seven Sisters Road wa the setting for Compton Mackenzie's best-seller Sinister Street (1913).
Gillian Tindall is a writer of novels as well as a historian, and she takes an impressionistic approach to local history. It's a personal story as well as a historical journey, so there's plenty of colour and feeling.
Did it work the same magic? Not for me. If there's a clear failing in the book, it's the weird structure, randomly yoking together three randomly different houses, miles apart, in a somewhat muddled confusion of chapters that dodge about between Oxfordshire, Surrey and London N4. I skipped over the passages about both the other houses.
And all to make the point that - what? We make the places we live in. But I liked the cows stuck in the mud. Very Stroud Green.
