Headington in 1952
Joanna Cannan, Oxfordshire
(London: Robert Hale Ltd, 1952)
It was worse to lose Headington [to the jerry-building of flimsy homes for the workers], always an entrancingly sinister village, secret behind high walls, decadent with condemned cottages, endemic with scarlet fever, littered with gypsy encampments, enriched by an area – Quarry – which policemen dared not enter save in pairs. The stony main street and chestnut-darkened alleys retain their old savour of malevolence: furtively the larger houses – actually inhabited by the jolly families of distinguished members of the University – cold-shoulder the pavements and direct the sly looks of their mullioned windows into their own high-walled courtyards.
Oblivious to the ceaseless roar of the by-pass road and the proximity of the dolls-house homes of Chestnut Avenue, in the drear months of January and February a ghost with uncombed hair wanders in Barton Lane. The farms of the neighbourhood, drowning in the tide of bricks and mortar, keep their Cold Comfort character to the end. Now the bright ripples of the Bayswater brook must disappear into pipe and culvert, and the rough and reedy Barton Fields vanish under handkerchief lawns and crazy paving. The fate of the genius loci is a matter for speculation – will it take itself off or remain to vex the home-makers, sowing thistles in the gardens and dissension among the neighbours, cracking the concrete, twisting the plastic, until the neat bright suburb is absorbed into the identity of the passionate crumbling village that we knew?
Joanna Maxwell Cannan (Mrs Pullein-Thompson) (1896–1961)
Cannan moved to Peppard Common in Oxfordshire in 1931, and would have come to know Barton Lane well over the next twenty years, as her sister Dorothea, who was married to John Johnson, lived there from 1929 to 1956. The building of the northern bypass in the mid-1930s drastically changed the nature of this country lane.
Here Cannan is deploring the development of the Barton estate in the 1950s, and simultaneous regretting the earlier development in the 1930s of Between Towns Field, where the building of Chestnut Avenue, Ash Grove, and Hawthorn Avenue brought suburbia to the doorstep of Old Headington (and particularly to her sister’s house in Barton Lane).
Joanna Maxwell Cannan was famous for her horse stories for children.