The genius of John Betjeman’s Metro-Land

‘Over the points by electrical traction, out of the chimney pots into the openness, till we come to the suburb that’s thought to be commonplace, home of the gnome and the average citizen.’ Fifty years ago, the BBC documentary Metro-Land aired for the first time. These free-flowing dactyls, which mimic the motion of a train, were delivered over the footage by the newly appointed poet laureate, John Betjeman, as he rode the Metropolitan line out into the middle-class Arcadia of Middlesex. They don’t write voiceovers like that anymore. 

Hailed as a masterwork right off the buffers, Metro-Land was a hymn not only to Betjeman’s suburbia but also to the Tube that took him there. For the poet, it turns out, was a lifelong lover of trains, Underground or otherwise. He played with models of them as a child.