"The Company also has an important Extension line... The district through which it passes has been happily named Metro-land, and it is the purpose of this Guide briefly to describe the more important of the small townships which the Metropolitan serves, and in the steady development of which the line has been the principal agent." Foreword to "Metro-land" brochure (1924)
The MetropolitanRailway was the first steam underground in the world. It chugged beneath the Marylebone Road from Paddington to Farringdon, before spreading its tentacles out further around central London. So successful was the fledgling railway that its bosses started to look further afield, with dreams of connecting their network to Oxford, Birmingham and even Manchester. They took an existing stumpy branch line terminating at Swiss Cottage and extended it outwards - first to Willesden, then to Harrow, Rickmansworth, Aylesbury and beyond. Further branch lines followed, to Uxbridge, Watford and Stanmore, until the Metropolitan railway was the driving force across the northwestern Home Counties.
Long-distance traffic proved elusive, however, not least because the hoped-for connections to the Midlands failed to materialise, so the Met turned their attention instead to the land alongside their tracks. They'd had the sense to buy up acres and acres of fields while the railway was still under construction, because they realised the potential of future property development. Not only could they sell off executive villas for a tidy profit (detached houses in Ickenham sold for £650 each, for example) but they could also fill their trains with regular season-ticketed commuters (£2 first class for a month's travel from Ickenham to Baker Street). It was a surefire recipe for success.
The first published guide to Metro-land was launched in 1915. This annual glossy brochure attempted to lure the well-to-do away from built-up crammed-together London by painting a picture of a well-connected rustic paradise. All that a flat-renting smoke-dwelling clerk had to do was flick through the Metro-land brochure and select the station of his dreams. Everywhere was "traditional" but "modern", "delightful" but "convenient", "unspoilt" but "accessible". Estates were often "garden villages", country rambles were always "charming" and the golf clubs were nothing less than "luxurious". Estate agent superlatives haven't changed much over the years. The 1924 edition of the guide, the "British Empire Exhibition Number", is now available in bookshops should you want to take a look for yourself.
During the 1920s and 1930s the population of Metro-land increased dramatically. But as commuters moved in, so the countryside they had come to enjoy disappeared beneath acres of sprawling semis. Railway bosses had destroyed much of the rural idyll they were trying to sell, and these phenomenal growth rates stalled. When London Transport nationalised the line in 1933 their priorities were transport, not housing, and so the Metro-Land brand was dropped. It was left to private property investors to continue the area's transformation, at least until the Second World War and the emergence of the Green Belt put a stop to it.
Large swathes of northwest London are still mothballed in the 1930s, architecturally at least, thanks to the Metropolitan Railway. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners would live nowhere else, because they don't build homes like this any more. Indeed, it would be environmentally irresponsible to build on such a scale ever again. You don't get a tennis-court-sized garden in a modern housing development, you get a concrete patio and a windowbox. You don't get detached isolation in an inner city apartment, you get paper-thin party walls and ghetto-blasting neighbours. And you don't get a home of character with chimneypots in Prescott's Britain, you get a box surrounded by identical boxes, if you're lucky. Metro-land may be a fake Arcadia, but it's still a very desirable place to live.
The expansion of Metro-Land from Baker Street to... Swiss Cottage (1868), Willesden Green (1879), Harrow (1890), Pinner (1885), Rickmansworth (1887), Chesham (1889), Aylesbury & on to Verney Junction (1892), Uxbridge (1904), Watford (1925), Stanmore (1932)
Metro-land
The Metropolitan Railway was the first steam underground in the world. It chugged beneath the Marylebone Road from Paddington to Farringdon, before spreading its tentacles out further around central London. So successful was the fledgling railway that its bosses started to look further afield, with dreams of connecting their network to Oxford, Birmingham and even Manchester. They took an existing stumpy branch line terminating at Swiss Cottage and extended it outwards - first to Willesden, then to Harrow, Rickmansworth, Aylesbury and beyond. Further branch lines followed, to Uxbridge, Watford and Stanmore, until the Metropolitan railway was the driving force across the northwestern Home Counties.
The first published guide to Metro-land was launched in 1915. This annual glossy brochure attempted to lure the well-to-do away from built-up crammed-together London by painting a picture of a well-connected rustic paradise. All that a flat-renting smoke-dwelling clerk had to do was flick through the Metro-land brochure and select the station of his dreams. Everywhere was "traditional" but "modern", "delightful" but "convenient", "unspoilt" but "accessible". Estates were often "garden villages", country rambles were always "charming" and the golf clubs were nothing less than "luxurious". Estate agent superlatives haven't changed much over the years. The 1924 edition of the guide, the "British Empire Exhibition Number", is now available in bookshops should you want to take a look for yourself.
Large swathes of northwest London are still mothballed in the 1930s, architecturally at least, thanks to the Metropolitan Railway. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners would live nowhere else, because they don't build homes like this any more. Indeed, it would be environmentally irresponsible to build on such a scale ever again. You don't get a tennis-court-sized garden in a modern housing development, you get a concrete patio and a windowbox. You don't get detached isolation in an inner city apartment, you get paper-thin party walls and ghetto-blasting neighbours. And you don't get a home of character with chimneypots in Prescott's Britain, you get a box surrounded by identical boxes, if you're lucky. Metro-land may be a fake Arcadia, but it's still a very desirable place to live.
Metro-land
The 
Large swathes of northwest London are still mothballed in the 1930s, architecturally at least, thanks to the Metropolitan Railway. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners would live nowhere else, because they don't build homes like this any more. Indeed, it would be environmentally irresponsible to build on such a scale ever again. You don't get a tennis-court-sized garden in a modern housing development, you get a concrete patio and a windowbox. You don't get detached isolation in an inner city apartment, you get paper-thin party walls and ghetto-blasting neighbours. And you don't get a home of character with chimneypots in Prescott's Britain, you get a box surrounded by identical boxes, if you're lucky. Metro-land may be a fake Arcadia, but it's still a very desirable place to live.