London Squares

TLS

The point, of course, about the middle-class squares was not merely the “pram friendships” which they kept snugly within nanny’s eye-line, but, equally, the social contacts which they safely excluded. The hedges and railings of the square kept at bay the peril of a middle-class child bonding with some friendly kid with a cockney accent. Those residents who possessed a key to the square, with its lawn or shrubbery, its tennis court or benches, could safely know that they would never meet a Londoner less fortunately placed, unless he had been imported to weed the tennis court or rake the gravel. When, in the Second World War, the government authorized the destruction of the railings of the London squares, it would have been possible to guess, even at the time, that the melted ornamental cast-iron would be useless in the manufacture of fighter planes; but the photographs, reproduced in this lavish volume, of chaps in cloth caps and trilby hats gouging out the elegant railings, speak of social change far more than they suggest an answer to metal shortage in the Spitfire factories.