User Reviews

Other reviewers have commented perceptively on the subject-matter of Edward Mirozeff's classic 1973 documentary, so there is no need to rehearse that material here. What makes the experience of watching the film so engaging is Betjeman's celebration of suburban life; the elegantly manicured gardens, the houses with their mock-Tudor gables, the grass verges with their oak-trees, all contributing to the illusion that the countryside had somehow been preserved, even though the landscape had been given over to redevelopment. METRO- LAND shows how everyone, not just the aristocrats, could now participate in the celebration of England's green and pleasant land; after having bought their suburban houses, they could cultivate their gardens and thereby refashion the landscape into something beautiful. The idea than "an Englishman's home is his castle" lay at the heart of the suburban dream, making people feel patriotic as well as happy that they now had sufficient financial wherewithal to buy into the English dream.

In the four decades since METRO-LAND was made, a lot has changed; many of the buildings Betjeman celebrates no longer exist. Nonetheless, if we approach the documentary as a period-piece, it still has important things to say to us today. Mirozeff's focus on village rituals - the annual fete in Pinner, the crowning of the Croxley Green queen - suggests that whereas suburbia promoted separate existences (with each family having their own separate plot of land), the village rituals brought them together, to remind them of their responsibilities to the community. The same principle still applies to any event, such as a rummage or car-boot sale.

More importantly, METRO-LAND reminds us that the obsession with home development - that manifests itself in endless do-it-yourself programs on television - is nothing new. In the early Seventies homeowners were still preoccupied with making their properties different from those of their neighbors' - this not only emphasized their individuality, but gave them a sense of well-being, that they were socially superior to everyone else around them. Class- difference mattered in the suburbs. The same is equally true today - witness the ways in which properties are endlessly remodeled with the addition of extra bedrooms, conservatories, gardens with decks, or water features.

The documentary's ending is slightly paradoxical; having spent forty-five minutes celebrating the growth and development of the English suburb, Betjeman expresses relief that the landscape at the end of the Metropolitan Line remained largely untouched (at that time). Some of England's green and pleasant land had been left to Mother Nature, rather than being colonized by developers. This view suggests that suburban development was somehow destructive, which contradicts what he suggested earlier on. In truth Betjeman had an ambiguous view of the suburbs as areas to be celebrated yet derided, that both endorsed yet destroyed the idea of rural England.

The subject-matter of METRO-LAND might be rather too esoteric for non-British viewers, but the program nonetheless offers a fascinating fragment of social history.

'Metro-Land' is John Betjeman's quiet celebration of the unique and special pleasures of life in one section of England in one segment of the twentieth century. Much of what's seen here was already on its way to extinction when Betjeman extolled it. If you're an Anglophile, or a nostalgic Briton of a certain age, you'll find 'Metro-Land' utterly fascinating: everyone else should give it a miss.

When the Metropolitan Railway constructed its tube line from Baker Street to Amersham during the period from 1910 to 1933, it enabled the creation of a line of suburbs from land that had been largely undeveloped and underpopulated. Orchards and meadows gave way to houses. Boarding the down train, Betjeman follows the route to its outer terminus. Here are some of the locations and people he encounters along the way:

In Neasden, Betjeman meets bird-watcher Eric Sims and follows him on a nature trail through Gladstone Park and the Brook Road allotments. In Wembley Park, Betjeman locates a never-completed replica of the Eiffel Tower, intended for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. (Wembley Stadium is there now!) In Harrow-on-the-Hill, long-haired boys in boaters sing the Harrovian song. In Pinner, residents wash their cars while listening to the Osmond Brothers(!) on a transistor radio. In Moor Park, Betjeman visits the links, swings at a golf ball ... and misses. In Chorleywood, Betjeman visits a man with an immense organ: a Wurlitzer pipe organ, which he keeps in his front room and plays every day. In Amersham, Betjeman indulges his fondness for architecture by visiting the modernist house built by Amyas Connell for Bernard Ashmole.

Finally, in the quaint village of Quainton, Betjeman expresses relief that the railway extends only so far, enabling nostalgists like himself to enjoy places still untouched by modern travel. Which is part of the problem: modern technology brings people closer to the old-fashioned way of life while acceleratng the decline of that same phenomenon. Much of what Betjeman celebrates in this 1973 video is already (as I write this) long extinct. Doctor Beeching, where are you? I'll rate this fascinating documentary 10 out of 10 ... for Anglophiles only, though.

This is a magnificent classic documentary film, which should really be required viewing in British schools (but then, so much should, and none of it is). This is one of the many superb films made by Eddie Mirzoeff, who was a directorial force in the 1970s at the BBC, before he was promoted to be a series editor. This is perhaps the best of all the films written and presented by the poet and individualist, Sir John Betjeman, who was so widely admired by everyone that he became in his lifetime 'a national treasure'. He was delightfully modest, brilliant, eccentric, and sad, all at the same time. The film is a bit of 19th and 20th century British social, design, and architectural history which only Betjeman could have presented to us. What is, or was, 'Metro-Land'? It was and faintly still is a kind of a concept, a kind of a dream, a kind of a hype, a vision, a mediocrity, both boring and exciting, both bizarre and mundane at the same time. Betjeman had a genius for finding the strange and the tremulous buried beneath the deceptive calm of an apparent normality. The Metropolitan Line is an extension of the London underground railway networks which runs from Baker Street Station northwards into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. As it was constructed and cut its way through the farms and fields of a slumbering and inert countryside, taking the tiny village of Pinner and making into 'somewhere', opening up Moor Park to golfers, and Chorley Wood and Rickmansworth to white collar workers from the City, it awakened the lands bordering its northwards thrust to a suburban dream, where men could get to work in town quickly whilst living the tranquil lives of ersatz gentlemen amongst lawns and lanes in the evenings. This region into which the Metropolitan Line had plunged was named by Betjeman, after the train line, 'Metro-Land'. It was a unique creation of a particular era, and its history is here recreated with all the odd charm of a typical Betjeman enquiry. It was above all Betjeman's deep and abiding love for his subject matter, his solicitude for ordinary people, his reverence for the hidden and abnormal secrets of the normal, his profound understanding of the deceptive nature of those things which at first sight appear uninteresting, that distinguished his unique work for television. He was the most unlikely of public personalities, as he was a man without an ego. There will never be another Betjeman, so the preservation of this wonderful film in digitally remastered form on DVD is a genuine contribution to what is unique in media culture.

I have an interest to declare. Sir John Betjeman was a cousin of mine. Admittedly, he was not a first cousin, but a distant cousin of my grandfather, and I never actually met him. He is, however, about the only celebrity I can claim as a kinsman, so I have always felt an interest in him.

Betjeman did not actually invent the term "Metro-land"; it was originally an advertising slogan coined by the Metropolitan Railway (today part of the London Underground) during the 1910s and remained current throughout the twenties and thirties to describe the suburbs and dormitory towns that grew up in Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire to the north-west of London. Unlike other railways, the Metropolitan also functioned as a property development company and therefore had a vested interest in developing new housing estates to serve London's growing commuter population in locations convenient for its stations. By the early seventies, when this film was first broadcast on the BBC, the term had largely been forgotten, but the programme helped to revive it; it was, for example, the inspiration for Julian Barnes's 1980 novel "Metroland" (without the hyphen).

In the seventies Betjeman was Britain's reigning Poet Laureate, but he was at least as well known to the public as a broadcaster, conservationist and commentator on architecture. The film was written and narrated by Betjeman himself and celebrates suburban life in the area in which the poet himself grew up. The film consists of a series of vignettes of the various suburbs and towns of Metro-land, from St John's Wood to Amersham. As might be expected, given Betjeman's passion for the subject, architecture plays an important role; he covers notable domestic buildings such as Norman Shaw's neo-Tudor Grim's Dyke in Harrow Weald (the home of W.S. Gilbert), Moor Park in Rickmansworth, an 18th century stately home, today a golf club-house, "The Orchard", Charles Voysey's Arts-and-Crafts house in Chorleywood and Amyas Connell's Modernist "High and Over" in Amersham. Betjeman also covers grander structures such as Wembley stadium and informs us that it was built on the site of "Watkin's Folly", London's own version of the Eiffel Tower, named after Sir Edward Watkin, Chairman of the Metropolitan Railway. (The tower was never completed, and the section that was built was demolished in 1907, seventeen years after work commenced).

In the Seventies it was fashionable to decry life in suburbia as dull, conventional and bourgeois, and part of Betjeman' purpose was to counter such views. He also tries to dispel the idea that the North London suburbs are entirely composed of (in the words of Malvina Reynolds) "little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same", by showing a surprising variety in the more humble types of domestic architecture. Another of his subjects is the sort of British eccentricity, which can exist behind even the most conventional of facades. We meet, for example, a man who has installed a Wurlitzer cinema organ in his semi-detached house and a birdwatcher who organises nature tours of Neasden, a place much derided as the archetypally dull London suburb. (It is not, however, dull in the ornithological sense; the said birdwatcher had seen the very respectable total of 92 bird species on his tours). An eccentric from the past was the Victorian clergyman John Smyth-Pigott, whose congregation declared him to be Christ. ("A compliment he accepted"). His magnificent villa in St John's Wood was known as the "Agapemone", or "Abode of Love", a name which was intended to refer to spiritual love, but could equally well apply to physical love, given Smyth-Pigott's many affairs with his female followers.

Speaking of "High and Over", Betjeman described it as "perhaps old- fashioned today", a description which forty years on looks prescient, but which at the time probably raised a few eyebrows among an architectural establishment unwilling to accept that Modernism was fated eventually to become just another historical style. In 1973, in fact, one of the programme's charms was its nostalgic celebration of life in the twenties and thirties, but today in 2013 it is just as likely to evoke another sort of nostalgia, that for the seventies.

I well remember the first broadcast of this film, which took place on 26th February 1973, my thirteenth birthday, as I was allowed to stay up late and watch it as a birthday treat. Today part of its appeal for me is the way in which it recalls the world of my youth- the cars, the fashions, the music. (Actually, the Osmonds, one of whose songs we hear blaring out, are a part of my youth I would rather forget). Indeed, the Betjeman himself is a very seventies figure, one of a series of kindly, avuncular, slightly eccentric but authoritative TV presenters who graced our screens during the decade; the last such, Sir Patrick Moore, only died earlier this year, but even before his death he seemed very much a figure from a bygone age. Even Betjeman's pronunciation ("restaurant" pronounced in the French manner, "brochure" stressed on the second syllable) often has an archaic air about it.

Since 1973 "Metro-land" has taken on the status of a classic piece of television; Betjeman's biographer A. N. Wilson said that it was "too good to be described simply as a programme", and this was a perceptive remark. It can be described as a poetic meditation on what might not normally be though of as a poetic subject, life in twentieth-century suburbia, and like many of Betjeman's broadcasts can be seen as being as much a part of his literary output as his poetry and his writings about architecture. 9/10

Metro-Land refers to people commuting from suburbia on the Metropolitan train line from Baker Street to Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire. John Betjeman the then Poet Laureate takes a poetic meander as he journeys through Mero-land.

However in this celebrated documentary he ignored the identikit houses of the early part of the century, well they are not exciting. Instead we see interesting architecture, eccentrics such as the man with a Wurlitzer in his living room, beauty pageants and the Moor Park golf club with its fancy club house.

Betjeman celebrates rural life, a life he was familiar with as a young boy and that was slowly disappearing and since the film was made in 1972 has presumably changed even more since. It is Betjeman's words that brings Metro-land to life, the way he describes some of the buildings and the places the Metro line encounters or passes through.

As a documentary though it is clunky, the film would had been taken at face value even up to a few years ago but now does not hold up. The school kids playing rounders was set up for the camera, as was the speech by the beauty queen, so was the bit where the security guard for the gold club lets one woman in and engages in a nice chat but does not let another lady pass through (who was probably part of the BBC production team!)

It is a celebration of an eccentric England of the past but if you wanted the real flavour of Metro-Land, look at the houses built near the Y shaped building and imagine the people living in those houses commuting in British Rail trains every day in 1960s and 1970s Britain.

Metro-Land refers to an ideal of commuting where communities and homes sprung up along the Metropolitan line that ran from Baker Street in London through to Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire. Poet Laureate John Betjeman travels out from London to explore the communities that sprung up as part of Metro-Land.

A peculiar piece this and one that is understandably little seen since its original broadcast and thereabouts. Repeated recently on BBC4 as part of a night of films and programmes looking at trains and the underground, I gave this a try because of the presence of Betjeman. I did half expect a documentary about the creation of the communities as the Metropolitan line spread out, but this is not what the film is. Instead it is a meandering walk through random parts of random towns that sees very ornate golf clubs, middle-class homes, local pageants (every girl's dream apparently) and so on. It is less a documentary than it is a poetic wander through a place that I have never experienced but is unmistakably England.

For this reason it will have limited appeal to a modern audience. Like fellow reviewer MacIntyre has said, to really enjoy the film you do need to live in Southern England and be old enough to be nostalgic for this or be a complete Anglophile. I am neither of these and accordingly I didn't find it as engaging as I would have liked. That said though, Betjeman's style held my attention – although for many younger viewers (?) he will intolerably slow and old fashioned as a presenter.

A curio of a film then that is delivered in a style that doesn't really exist any more about places and people who don't really exist any more. It isn't that strong a film by any means but if you watch it on these terms and have an interest in the period and people.