User:Cnbrb/sandbox/Metro-Land

Metro-Land

Locations in Metro-Land

image	Location		Notes
	Horsted Keynes, sussex	Horsted Keynes railway station	Betjeman opens the film in the in the station buffet at Horsted Keynes, on the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. He finishes a pint of beer and boards a Metropolitan Railway steam train.
	Marylebone, London	Baker Street station	Chiltern Court, an apartment block constructed over the MR’s London terminus (now Baker Street tube station)
	Marylebone, London	The Chiltern Court Restaurant	In 1972 (the year of filming) the apartment block above Baker Street station still contained a restaurant. The restaurant is now The Metropolitan Bar, part of the Wetherspoons chain;
	St John's Wood, London	Marlborough Road station	Betjeman visits the disused platforms of Marlborough Road station (closed in 1939). He exits the booking hall, at the time of filming in use as an Angus Steak House restaurant.
	St John's Wood, London	Thomas Hood's house	Betjeman mentions the house where Thomas Hood died, next to Marlborough Road station, where the railway cut through the garden
	St John's Wood, London	John Hugh Smyth-Pigott's house	Amid several shots of suburban streets in St John’s Wood, Betjeman concentrates on a sinister "helmeted house", a Victorian Gothic dwelling that was once the 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 variously of Charles Saatchi and of Vanessa Feltz;
	Neasden	Neasden Lane	Over establishing shots of the suburb of Neasden, Betjeman describes the area as "home of the gnome and the average citizen" (the former a reference to the preponderance of gnome statuettes in suburban front gardens). The accompanying music is a recording of Willie Rushton singing the humorous song "Neasden" (1972) ("Neasden/You won't be sorry that you breezed in"). Both Betjeman and Rushton wrote for the satirical magazine Private Eye which frequently lampooned Neasden as the stereotypical "contemporary urban environment".
	Neasden	Gladstone Park	Betjeman visits the Neasden Nature Trail in Gladstone Park and the Brook Road allotments (now no longer accessible from Brook Road), where he meets its creator, the ornithologist Eric Simms.
	Wembley		Betjeman recounts the partial construction (1890) on the site of the present stadium of "Watkin's Folly" (after Sir Edward Watkin, Chairman of the MR), which had been intended to exceed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The "Folly" was demolished in 1907. He also recalls the British Empire Exhibition and a St. George's Day rally held there in 1924;
	Wembley		Referring to "this Middlesex turf", Betjeman stands alone on the pitch of the original Wembley Stadium (since 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.
	Wembley		Prior to its use as a sports ground, Betjeman recalls the hosting of the British Empire Exhibition on the Wembley site in 1924–25, in particular the Palace of Arts. King George V and Queen Mary are seen enjoying fairground rides.
			Passing through suburban Wembley streets, Betjeman describes the show-houses of the newly built Metro-Land estates, each placed on streets with evocatively rural-sounding names that now cover former fields.
	Kingsbury		Betjeman stands atop one of Ernest George Trobridge's eccentric castellated houses in Kingsbury.
	Harrow		A vista of Harrow on the Hill signifies a transition between suburbia and rural Middlesex
	Harrow		Although Harrow School has preserved much of the rural quality of Middlesex, Betjeman notes that it has been unable to resist being surrounded by "the rising tide of Metro-Land".
	Harrow		In the heartland of Metro-Land, Betjeman compares the rows of 1920s suburban mock-Tudor houses to the romantic images in the developers' brochure.
	Harrow Weald		At Grim's Dyke, Harrow Weald, Betjeman examines Norman Shaw's Victorian architecture and observes the Harrow Ladies' Byron Luncheon Club in the opulent function room.
	Harrow Weald		In the grounds, he shows the pond where the opera lyricist W. S. Gilbert, collaborator of Arthur Sullivan, drowned in 1911, after suffering a heart attack. Betjeman recounts that Gilbert had gone swimming with two girls, Ruby Preece and Winifred Isabel Emery.
	Pinner		Betjeman visits Pinner Fair, "a mediaeval fair in Metro-land", on the feast day of the parish saint, John the Baptist.
	Moor Park		On its golf course Betjeman is filmed missing a tee shot.
	Moor Park		The fine club-house, an 18th-century mansion, is 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";

Other locations include:

• Croxley Green: with a hint of irony, Betjeman refers to the Croxley Green "revels" as "a tradition dating back to 1952";
• Chorleywood, which Betjeman calls "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 listens to local resident Len Rawle perform on the Wurlitzer organ from the Empire cinema in Leicester Square, which had been installed in his house. (The organ was still there in 2006, when 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 1972, where Betjeman visits 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";

End of the line: Quainton Road in the direction of Verney Junction, 2006

• 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 reminisces of having sat there in the autumn of 1929 watching the Brill tram depart. His daughter Candida Lycett Green organised an excursion from Marylebone to Quainton Road in 2006, 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.