Four tube stations are named after country lanes, the longest of which is Rayners Lane in Harrow. What's more it still follows exactly the same meandering path across two miles of suburbia as it did when everything was fields. So I've walked it.
Everything out here was fields until the 1920s, eight square miles of entirely undeveloped agricultural land between Northolt and Ruislip where the only buildings were a few scattered farmsteads. One of the handful of country lanes threading through was an unhurried backwater running approximately north-south connecting Marsh Road in Pinner to Eastcote Lane in Roxeth (now better known as South Harrow). In the mid 19th century the fields alongside belonged to Daniel Hill, a farmer from Pinner, who built a single set of cottages midway where his labourers could live. George Rayner and his family moved into these buildings in 1841, and being the sole inhabitants hereabouts the lane became known as Rayner's Lane.
The Metropolitan Railway carved through in the early 1900s, initially without stopping, but in 1906 a lonely apostrophe-less halt was built on Rayners Lane. Hardly anyone used it, and when the District line extended from Ealing in 1910 it became known as Pneumonia Junction due to its windswept rural location. Only in the 1930s did Metro-land's developers finally invade with the building of their flagship project Harrow Garden Village, boasting "houses of different types by well-known builders at popular prices", balanced out to the south of the railway by the similarly vast Tudor estate. By the end of the decade passenger numbers had rocketed to four million annually and lowly Rayner's Lane was entirely unrecognisable, but still there.
Here's where it starts, at a mini-roundabout on the main-ish road out of Pinner, alongside an entrance to the very lovely Pinner Village Gardens. The flats on the corner aren't typical and soon make way for chains of broad semis with timbered gables and bay windows, adequate parking and perhaps a well-tended dash of shrubbery. But no single design predominates, true to the developers' original boast of "no stereo-typed layouts", even down to the very occasional interspersed detached. Small crescents of green have been retained as a nod to the rural past, generally encircled by roadways. Also the house numbers here are in the mid 600s, this an indication of quite how long Rayners Lane is going to be, passing into the 500s as the road crosses a low ridge and descends into a very obvious valley.
The river at the bottom of the slope is the Yeading Brook, a lengthy tributary of the Crane, which once lingered awhile in a small pool beside the lane but now passes through in a leafy channel more suitable for the reduction of flood risk. The linear woodland to either side is called Yeading Walk and is overseen by one of the lovely community groups which proliferate in this corner of Harrow. Bring your gloves and secateurs to the main wooden bridge every Saturday to help with horticultural maintenance or buy your £1 Super Draw tickets for a chance to win £25,000 and/or an iPhone. The lane climbs again beyond the sponsored roundabout, as Metro-Landy as ever, where special mention is due to the residents at number 526 who've surrounded their wheelie-bin store with a potted display of pink and white perennials.
This understated crossroads is where George Rayner's farm cottage once stood, roughly on the corner where the bungalows are. The sole clue to its existence is that the street off to the right is called Farm Avenue (and at a stretch, perhaps, that the school behind is called Longfield Primary). It would have taken extraordinary vision back then to picture the mud-splattered lane embellished with lampposts, belisha beacons, electricity substations, junction boxes, 'No Cold Calling' signs, 20mph speed limits and a tiny prep school across the hedge with red-capped boys spilling out into their parents' 4×4s before milking time. As for the presence of a significant shopping centre just to the south with his name attached, George's mind would have boggled.
That's George's cottage on the inn sign outside the Rayners Hotel, later The Rayners public house, a Truman hostelry opened in 1937. It no longer pulls pints having been bought out by Christ The Redeemer College, a place to study Ministry and/or IT and/or Business Studies, but they can't tweak the interior too much because it's listed. The retail mix along the main parade is typically Middlesex/South Asian, so Wetherspoons as well as Shambu's Juice Bar, Wenzels as well as Roti Hut and fried chicken as well as paneer and eggless cakes. A special mention to Harrow council who've already managed to attach a red poppy to every single lamppost hereabouts. An even more special mention to the tube station, one of Charles Holden's trademarkbrickcubes, its waffle-shaped reinforced concrete roof now only visible through pigeon netting. Most lovely.
Alexandra Avenue is the main road south, a key arterial in the developers' overall masterplan, but the original alignment of Rayners Lane still exists as the service road round the back. Turn off down the slope beside what used to be Tonino's diner and prepare to be underimpressed. Round the front is the utterly extraordinary Art Deco-ness of the former Grosvenor Cinema, now headquarters of the Zoroastrian Trust, but all you see back here is an all-brick rear entrance and a grubby car park with a £125 clamping penalty. Alternatively charge your e-moped at Ali Garage, purchase mystery fillets at Super Seller Fishmonger or sign up for cricket and darts behind the conifers at Harrow Town Sports Club (est 1934). It's nigh impossible to imagine this with haycarts and cows.
Now the residential zigzagging begins. The original Rayner's Lane made four right-angled turns to negotiate the edge of a field so today's Rayners Lane does that too, now lined by broad Tudorbethan semis with pronounced gables in vanilla shades. Front gardens are generally two-cars wide (and used for that purpose), but still with sufficient space for Harrow's three coloured bins. The H12 bus rumbles through every 10 minutes in case you live in Stanmore and want to rock down and see all this from a double decker. After the second bend the lane heads noticeably downhill and also forwards in time as the adjacent houses suddenly leap into the 21st century. This patch used to be a fairly miserable postwar council estate but was transferred to a housing association in 2002 who undertook an unusually successful round of 'decant and upgrade'. I still can't work out if the Costcuter supermarket is a spelling error or deliberate avoidance of trademark.
The sports ground on the last corner belongs to the Tithe Farm Social Club, established in 1933 and built on the site of a rifle range which once used to be the only other thing down Rayner's Lane. Today it's home to Rayners Lane FC and Broadfields United, two football teams whose home games alternate (and who yesterday managed a home win and an away draw respectively). If the facilities look relatively well off it's likely because they sold off their tennis courts for housing. Alongside is Newton Farm Ecology Park, a former council depot made good and the source of the little-known Roxbourne river. Their volunteer group meets every Saturday to tidy up and appears to have a particular litter-picking fixation. Much respect to Peter Davies who's filled a noticeboard with the results of his recent month-long beercan survey which revealed that Budweiser (219) was the most-chucked, closely followed by Carlsberg Special Brew (160) and Holsten Pils (129), although he only found a single Kopparberg strawberry and lime.
After all that newness it's time for the semis to return, not quite so appealingly but we're a long way from the station now. At number 44 a chunk of pebbledash has fallen off revealing a pitted blue plaster shell underneath. The main point of interest here is the Roxbourne Complex, a cluster of community health facilities including a GP practice, High Dependency Unit and mental health care centre. This was built on the site of Harrow Isolation Hospital which opened in 1896 for the "reception of cases of scarlet fever, diphtheria, enteric fever and Asiatic cholera", and was only the second building to appear on Rayner's Lane. This ends close by at another small roundabout where it leaks onto Eastcote Lane and Roxeth Green Avenue, the last of which was just a footpath when the hospital opened.
Having walked all two miles I'm still amazed I was precisely following a country lane that George Rayner would have known in the 1840s. I'm perhaps more amazed that an illiterate labourer who lived in poverty ended up giving his name to a road, then a station, then an entire suburb as if he were once a person of importance. There's fame and then there's having your name on every copy of the tube map.
