Proles apart

I have found it – the land that Nineteen Eighty-Four forgot. When the book’s hero, Winston Smith, flees Big Brother and the party operatives, it is to ‘the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been St Pancras Station’ that he runs. On the eve of the centenary of Orwell’s birth, which falls next Wednesday, I have identified those slums; they have been right under my nose for years.

Tracing Smith’s well-detailed route from St Pancras – ‘up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes’ – I ended up at my own front door in Kentish Town. A triangle of genteel Victorian villas nestling next to postwar council blocks, wedged between its more prosperous neighbours, Islington and Hampstead, Kentish Town is where Orwell lived in the mid-1930s, working in a nearby bookshop while preparing for the journey north that would become The Road to Wigan Pier.

Because, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Kentish Town slums are out of the way and the inhabitants so unimportant, they avoid the attentions of the authorities. Among the working classes, or the ‘proles’ as Orwell calls them, a nostalgia for the pre-totalitarian, pre-classless world pervades. And because they hold on to the past and are independent of the state, Winston Smith is sure that ‘if there was hope, it lay in the proles’.

The proles gather in ‘the drinking-shop’, or the pub, as they insist on continuing to call it in their old-fashioned way. And the views they exchange are also old-fashioned, patriotic and distinctly Eurosceptic.

An old man at the bar tells Winston how outraged he is at the new metric measures. ”E could ‘a drawed me off a pint. A ‘alf-litre ain’t enough.