‘The most pitiful of Surrey small towns’?

Leatherhead, where I grew up, was damned by critic Ian Nairn. Sixty years on, I went back to find out why

I took it personally, years ago, when I read in the Surrey volume of the renowned series The Buildings of England (the life’s work of Nikolaus Pevsner) that Leatherhead was “the most pitiful of Surrey small towns”. For I had been brought up there and was a little boy cycling to school when the book came out. Not that I noticed at the time.

But I had noticed the grassverged roads and the handful of town streets in Leatherhead, and I found them pleasant enough. I went back to look at them a week ago because a revised edition of Surrey has just come out, 60 years on, much fatter but less condemnatory. I have come, moreover, to realise that the remark about the most pitiful town was in a way right, justified by a later explanation that “the old pattern here was smaller and humbler than most and hence was pushed aside more easily”.

The remarks were not made by Pevsner himself but by the man who became the first to collaborate with him on a volume, Ian Nairn – brilliant, opinionated, dissatisfied and drunk. He had “a more beneficial effect on the face of Britain than any other architectural writer of his generation”, in the judgment of the architectural historian Gavin Stamp. He was in his early 30s when he worked on Surrey and died in 1983 after a last visit to the St George’s Tavern, in Belgrave Road, which I can see from my office window.

It’s a dangerous thing to go back to a once loved place. In a way it is impossible, because you see things no one now can see – what used to be there. I can see the milk churns standing in the sun on their wooden platform at the bottom of the little hill running up to the station. I can see the row of elm trees where my father and I, in the snow, pulled home a great log when the coal gave out in the long, freezing winter of 1962-63. Those trees with their rookery died, like millions more, from Dutch elm disease, transforming the landscape of England.

Going back is like the experience of the hero of Orwell’s cruelly nostalgic Coming up for Air, who remembers his childhood home of Lower Binfield as it was in 1900: “Beside the horse-trough in the marketplace, the carrier’s horse is having its nose-bag. At the sweet-shop on the corner, Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls...”

Yes, I remember coming home from school at the beginning of the summer holidays, a happy day normally, and on the walk from the station seeing the smoke from the bonfire they were making of the old painted garden palings of a pair of cottages. They were to be demolished in order to add a couple more shops to the Parade, on Kingston Road, where Mr Murphy kept his sweet-shop and gave me pennies for returning lemonade bottles.

In place of the cottage gardens, the asphalt was extended. On the opposite side of the road, the stream that ran into a culvert was soon wholly buried in a concrete pipe. The horse-trough was a survival even when I was a boy, though our next-door neighbour was a blacksmith. His old father puffed at his hot tea poured into the saucer just as he puffed at the fire in the forge.

Of course, the grapevine I proudly grew from a pip has been stripped from the pebbledash of our semi, and the brick gatepost of the garden wall that my father built, in his careful self-taught way, has been torn off. Where the marigolds and love-in-a-mist grew, sensible chippings make a standing for the owner’s car.

Before he wrote the rural half of Surrey, Nairn, a child of Surrey, too, had brought out a volume called Outrage, a special issue of The Architectural Review, identifying an evil being wrought on town and country in Britain. He called the evil Subtopia: “the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern”. He blamed the planners, bureaucrats and architects. “Spoiled” was a favourite word.

With savage, Swiftian indignation, Nairn stood at the crossroads in Leatherhead and declared: “Apart from the church, no building is worth a visit, and the townscape has gone, along with the old buildings.” At the top of Bridge Street, running down to the rushing Wind in the

Willows-esque river Mole, he sneered at “the fake-Tudor National Provincial Bank, facing the fake17th-century plastered Timothy White’s; both hideous”.

Here, a comical mix-up occurred. I remember Timothy White’s, the chain chemist, and it wasn’t plastered. It was, and is, pilastered, with giant columns in shallow relief against the brickwork. Perhaps Nairn was a bit plastered himself when he read the proofs from Judy Perry, the editorial assistant to whom he dedicated the volume, and married before it was published. When the volume was revised in 1971, the imaginary plaster remained unnoticed. In today’s new edition, pilasters appear, but they’ve got the wrong “hideous” row of buildings, not Timothy White’s but yet another bank, on the opposite corner. Too many pilasters are perhaps a symptom of soulless Subtopia.

But here’s the test. The “hideous” fake-Tudor bank of 1929, which later bravely made a go of it as a bookshop for a decade, is now a listed building of “special architectural and historic interest”. The editor of the new Pevsner volume, Charles O’Brien (another child of Surrey), thinks this building “carried out with aplomb and dedication to detail”. Like begonias, which some condemn for vulgarity rather than for their floral form, fakeTudor can be hideous on principle.

Otherwise, the old materials of this gap in the Downs – flint, warm red brick, timber, uneven handmade roof tiles – make for the best of the old buildings that Nairn had no room for: Sweech House, timbered and wisteria’d; an empty 14thcentury hall house in the High Street; weatherboarded cottages; brick Georgian mansions. There’s a ghastly but unmissable elephantine water-pumping works from 1935, made of concrete that turns grey when it rains, but blessedly unlike the sheet steel of the business park that has suffocated and destroyed the old houses of brick and gables and chimneys.

The only Leatherhead illustration in the new volume is the staircase of the theatre, of fair-faced concrete with the shuttering marks of timber exposed. I noted it on the way to The Sleeping Beauty panto in 1969. The building, opened by Princess Margaret that year, was developed from Nairn’s “weary stripped-off classical” Crescent cinema, where in 1963 I would have seen Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, had there not been a power cut.

Nairn identified the evil of Subtopia: ‘the steamrollering of all individuality of place’