page_title: Metro-Land (1973 film)
section_title: Locations in Metro-Land
hierarchical_section_title: Metro-Land (1973 film) / Locations in Metro-Land
caption_attribution_description: 12 Langford Place, St John's Wood
context_page_description: Metro-Land is a BBC documentary film written and narrated by the then Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, 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 London Underground.
  "Metro-land" was a slogan coined by the MR for promotional purposes in about 1915, and used for about twenty years until shortly after the incorporation of the MR into the railways division of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933. As Betjeman himself puts it at the beginning of Metro-Land, it was a "Child of the First War, forgotten by the Second". Betjeman carries with him, as he travels, the pamphlet guide to Metro-land from the 1920s.
  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.
context_section_description: 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, an apartment block constructed over Baker Street station, the MR’s London terminus; in 1972 (the year of filming) the block still contained a restaurant. The restaurant is now The Metropolitan Bar, part of the Wetherspoons chain;
  Marlborough Road, a station closed in 1939, whose booking hall had by the time of filming become an Angus Steak House. (This subsequently became a Chinese restaurant and then returned to railway use in 2012, 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: perhaps surprisingly, there is 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 station. Instead, Betjeman concentrates 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 variously of Charles Saatchi and of 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 is provided by William Rushton’s recording of "Neasden" (1972) ("Neasden/You won't be sorry that you breezed in"), another Private Eye spin-off. It was re-mixed and re-mastered for the programme. 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!" can be heard in the background as Betjeman stands alone on the stadium pitch.) 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;
  Harrow: Harrow School and Grim's Dyke, Harrow Weald, where the lyricist W. S. Gilbert, collaborator of Arthur Sullivan, drowned in a pond in 1911, 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 is filmed missing a tee shot. 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";
  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 t
caption: The house in Langford Place, St John's Wood
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