'Chalk And Cheese'

Day 19

 

Chalfont & Latimer - Chalk Farm - Chancery Lane

 

I'm starting off with a long old schlep out to the Chilterns this morning for the first of today's 'C' stations - Chalfont & Latimer.
 

Chalfont & Latimer

Lying at the north-west end of the Metropolitan Line, just before it branches to the final two stations on the line (Amersham and Chesham), Chalfont & Latimer station is in the village of Little Chalfont.

The word Chalfont apparently means 'chalk fountain' or 'spring', and there are in fact three 'Chalfonts' in the area - Chalfont St. Peter (the largest), Chalfont St. Giles (of popular rhyming slang fame) and Little Chalfont, which is where I find myself this morning. (The 'Latimer' which forms the second part of the station's name, is a fourth village in the region, lying just north of Little Chalfont.)

As I begin to explore the station and its surroundings, the word 'private' keeps flitting across my mind. I get the distinct impression that strangers are not encouraged here. From the station itself, which, thanks to the many trees that surround it, is hidden from view the minute you leave its car-park; to the suspicious glances I get from the one or two locals I encounter on my wanderings,

Even the name of the station is secreted away, on a sign tucked under a deep porch, so that it takes me a while to find it as I stand in the car-park to take my usual photo.

And I can't immediately see why the place merits such protective secrecy. There's nothing here! (Or is that just what I'm meant to think...?) A few shops, a pub or two, some pretty houses (although very few actual people, as far as I can see) and a girls' grammar school are all it seems to offer.

I'm sure the other two Chalfonts are all very picturesque and rural and with much to commend them to the weary traveller. Little Chalfont however, seems to have no other raison d'être than to house this station, and even that seems a peculiar choice as the other villages it nominally serves are several miles away, and would surely benefit from having their own dedicated stations.

Strange then, that they seem to want to hide this station away so thoroughly. Unless of course, it isn't so much people coming here that they're afraid of - it's people wanting to leave...

If no-one can find the station, no-one can break free...

The village of Little Chalfont was, until relatively recently, actually called 'Chalfont Road Village', which is as clear a sign as any of its status as 'somewhere-on-the-way-to-somewhere-else', and the residents must have resented this somewhat, as they voted to change the name to the more dignified 'Little Chalfont' in 1925.

 

The one point of curiosity I find in the village, is down a narrow winding road called Finch Lane. About halfway down stands a reasonably pretty little house, which at first glance may not appear to have anything particularly noteworthy about it, but which on closer inspection reveals the reason for its unusual name of 'Bottle Cottage'



Bottle Cottage, Finch Lane



 



Bottles in the wall -
like you do...

Embedded into the walls of flint rubble are several diamond patterns, which are made out of the thick round ends of old green bottles. The house is a Grade II Listed Building dating from the late 18th Century, and was once, according to a local website, the home of the village blacksmith.

 

Why bottles? I have no idea - but its quirkiness appeals to me, and at least sends me back to the station thinking the trip hasn't been entirely a waste of time.

***
On then, to the next station - Chalk Farm.

Unlike the Chalfonts, with their 'chalk spring' heredity, the name Chalk Farm is derived from neither the word 'chalk' nor, it would seem, any particular farm of note.

 

Instead, it seems the name comes from that of a village that once stood here - Chalcot - which is itself a corruption of 'Chaldecot', meaning 'cold cottages'. The cottages in question formed the first settlement here on Haverstock Hill, which must presumably have been a bleak and inhospitable place back then.

And now here's your starter for ten, no conferring...

The ox-blood red tiles that form the façade of Chalk Farm station are the signature feature of which London Underground station designer?


Chalk Farm Station

If you answered Leslie Green - well done, top marks, go to the head of the class.

If you answered Charles Holden - I'll give you a couple of points for at least remembering that he was a station designer, even though he's the wrong one.

If you didn't answer with either of those, or indeed at all, then you clearly haven't been paying attention in class and I'll be having words with your parents at the next open evening. Now settle down and stop picking your nose...


The station at the junction of Adelaide Road (left) and Haverstock Hill (right)

The station stands at the junction of Haverstock Hill (where the cold cottages were) and Adelaide Road, and is almost, if not actually, as trendy as neighbouring Primrose Hill (to the south west) and Camden (to the south east). A number of 'celebrities' are associated with the area, including actors Lindsay Duncan and Denis Lawson, Singer and Actress Billie Piper, and the Milliband brothers who went to school on Haverstock Hill.

Just down the road from the station, and dominating the skyline, is The Roundhouse - now a major performing arts venue, but which was once a railway engine shed containing a huge turntable. In the days before steam locomotive designers realised they should probably make the engines capable of going backwards as well as forwards (true - incredible - but true), the trains had to be physically turned round in buildings such as this, whenever they had any maintenance work done on them.


The Roundhouse - praise be to the limited imagination of railway engineers!

In fact, The Roundhouse was only used as a railway shed for a couple of decades, before advances in railway technology (i.e. the locomotives were made bigger, and wouldn't fit onto the turntable any more) meant that the building was no longer capable of serving the purpose for which it was designed.

 

Normally in these situations, the building would then have been demolished, but luckily Gilbey's, a supplier of wine and spirits, took it over and used it as a warehouse for nearly a hundred years.

 

In the 1960s playwright Arnold Wesker was granted a 19-year lease on the building to turn it into an arts venue and after a great deal of fund-raising, succeeded in starting it on its long and sometimes 'chequered' journey to where it is today.

 

In its time it's hosted plays, nude revues, musicals, and concerts. It nearly closed in the 80s and 90s, was reborn in the 00s and today is one of the most popular venues in town.

 

On the roof of the newer wing is a figure now familiar across many parts of the UK - one of Antony Gormley's human forms. I always enjoy seeing these figures whenever I encounter them, and this one (called 'You') stands serenely watching the world go by below.

 

Roundhouse - Anthony
Gormley Figure

Are 'You' looking at me?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

***
The next, and final, stop of the day is Chancery Lane. 

 

Chancery Lane

The station isn't in fact on Chancery Lane at all, but a few hundred feet away at the junction of Holborn, High Holborn, and Gray's Inn Road.

The road itself is to the west of the station, and was originally the road used by the Knights Templar between their old temple on Holborn and their new church (the one we still know today as 'Temple') just south of Fleet Street.

It's the heart of the legal district here, with Lincoln's Inn to the west, Gray's Inn to the north, and Inner and Middle Temple to the south. The Law Society is housed at number 113 Chancery Lane, and the UK Patent Office used to reside on Southampton Buildings, a road just off to the east.

Across the road from the station is the Victorian splendour of the old Prudential Assurance building, which was designed by Alfred Waterhouse - architect of, among other landmarks, The Natural History Museum, Gonville & Caius College Cambridge, Balliol college Oxford, and Strangeways Prison Manchester. Another of his creations - Reading School - is where I spent my formative teenage years, learning so many valuable lessons (chief among which being that I was never going to set the world alight academically).


The Prudential Building

Further east is the bottom end of Hatton Garden - the diamond quarter. Here the many jewellers and diamond specialists smile benignly at young men trying to persuade young women that those huge rocks are 'so vulgar darling...'

Chancery Lane also happens to be the area in which my wife, Mrs Nowhere Man, works as a patent attorney. So before I set off and explore the area, I combine business with pleasure and the wife and I partake of a very pleasant lunch near her offices in New Street Square. This square is a relatively new development in the area (which is a very odd mix of the very, very old, and the ultra-ultra-modern) and has a number of very good eateries around its perimeter. In the summer, huge TV screens show the tennis from Wimbledon and the square is a mass of lawyers vying for a decent view and a place to sit. It's a wonder any work gets done at all - so convivial is it here. 

 

Having picked her brains about what to see and do here, I bid Mrs Nowhere Man farewell, and set off on a mini (and by no means comprehensive) tour.

The fact is, there's so much history here that it's impossible to take it all in in one go.

Aside from the legal associations, connections with the Knights Templar, and the proximity of Fleet Street, with it's newspaper barons and demon barbers, there is also a history of literary figures living, studying or working here. Among them, and perhaps most famously, is the man who first proposed a causal link between being tired of London and the suicide rate, and whose 'Dictionary Of The English Language' took him nearly nine years to complete.
 

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

Dr Samuel Johnson (for 'twas he) lived tucked away in the back streets north of Fleet Street at 17 Gough Square, but before visiting his house, I pay a quick visit to one of his other supposed haunts - a pub called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, on Wine Office Court.

 

I say 'supposed', because in fact there is no evidence that he ever actually visited the place at all - unlike other 'regulars', including Charles Dickens, Oliver Goldsmith, G.K. Chesterton, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and many more.

 

Wine Office Court (which is a
street, not a lawyer's 'to do' list)

Nevertheless, the association is played for all its worth by the pub, and I suppose there's no reason to think that he didn't actually visit it.

 

It's a dingy place, with little natural lighting to enliven the dark wood panelling, but this creates an atmosphere that sits very well with its olde worlde pretensions.

 

A sign on the wall outside, in Wine Office Court, provides another quote from Dr Johnson, which does at least resonate with my current project, as it exhorts the reader not to be satisfied with the 'great streets and squares' but to 'survey the innumerable little lanes and courts' of London.

 

Dr Johnson's House

And it's in one of these little lanes, just around the corner from the square in which we had lunch earlier on, that I find Dr Johnsons House.

I choose not to go in, having little interest in the reconstructed arrangements of furniture and tea-sets that the website tells me I will find within. Instead I spend a few minutes in the tranquillity of the little square on which the house stands.



Hodge - Dr Johnson's
pet domesticated carnivore
of the genus FELIS

There's a statue of his cat Hodge here, which, other than being mentioned in Boswell's famous biography, seems to have very little noteworthy about it. Being patted by the same hand that wrote the dictionary  (a distinction that might equally apply to his pocket handkerchief) seems little justification for being immortalised in bronze.

Still, it's a peaceful little corner, and a pleasant end to a long day's exploration.