Vale of Health Special

To the Vale of Health this weekend for some door-related wandering. An impromptu visit, so a heartbreaking set of pictures, taken as they were with Ms.Door's camera (which is built out of tin and twigs by a stereo manufacturer) as opposed to my own (produced more recently and solidly by a printer company, and containing at least a couple of useful buttons, and not flashing for no fucking reason in broad daylight on the sunniest afternoon of the year).

There are about forty houses in the Vale, and some fantastic doors, ranging somewhat beyond the high-quality Victoriana above, and into something a bit more ambitious. The magnificently crafted door below, for example, contains the whole of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's career in a single 8x3 frame, not that you'd be able to tell because it's blurred like an epileptic five-year-old's holiday snap from the sides of Stromboli, a picture he took while rollerskating on a trampoline.


So a revisit will be in order. Not that that's a problem, because the Vale of Health is a strange, strange, wonderful place, and a constant pole in any "how different parts of London are from each other, or anywhere else" equation. (This counts double on Bank Holidays, when the workers from the fair on Hampstead Heath stay adjacent to the Vale, on a hastily constructed caravan site.)

An enviably located hamlet, it pleases partly because it isn't, or wasn't, several things you'd think it is, or was. It looks like a postcard English village and gives clues, with its name and its lack of shops and pubs, that it's some sort of temperance Saltaire or Bourneville - a small factory town built for the health and wellbeing of a philanthropist's workers. But the clues mislead. "The Vale of Health" is not somewhere that Tudor kings came to take the waters, nor was it remotely healthy. A malarial marsh that was drained and built-up, possibly not quite in that order, the name was the invention of the property developers who presumably thought "it's sort of in a valley, and if you ignore the mosquitoes then it's cleaner than Clerkenwell: We call it Pleasant Valley? Elixir Green? Vale of Health!". This book is, I think, a documentary of the early stages of the settlement. It's only a matter of time before estate agents start calling neighbourhoods Eternal Life And Fellatio Borders.

So it's not healthy, and nor was it remotely model. The lack of shops and inns is not because of any planned Quakerism, but because if the Vale was a factory town, then it was a factory town *but for poets* And you can well imagine where that leads. Things get out of hand, and get shut down. Byron, Shelley and Coleridge all have connections there, and the key sentence in the above-linked history site is "Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), on his release from prison for libelling the Prince Regent, went to live in the Vale where he stayed until 1819".

Oh, to live amongst those who have libelled the Prince Regent.

Later blue plaques include D.H.Lawrence and Rabindranath Tagore (fine door for the great man, predictably enough with the flash bouncing off it in my photo, so some other time) as this century the Vale lived up to its publicity and became a model of a village of the type where, to move there, you have to carefully scan the obituaries of the Ham & High and be able to pounce quickly and brutally with the contents of an entire hedge fund. Sacha Baron-Cohen is having trouble getting his rebuild through the planning department. It was more fun in Napoleonic times, but the doors are better now.

I mean, look at the tessellation on these honeys. The owner of the top one was even good enough to backlight it for me.