A landscape of beds, frames and glass

Walk the residential streets between Harrow-on-the-Hill and Pinner today and it is hard to picture that this was once one of the busiest growing districts on the edge of London. Through the nineteenth century, the parishes around Harrow — Roxeth, Wealdstone, Harrow Weald, Pinner, Sudbury and the fringes of Wembley — were worked as market gardens. Small fields of a few acres, divided by quickthorn hedges and drainage ditches, were cropped intensively by families who grew vegetables to sell rather than to eat.

The phrase "market garden" is a practical one. It meant ground worked mainly by hand and horse, with frames, hand lights and cloches, producing crops for sale in town. Harrow suited it. There was good loam in places, gravel and sand in others, water from the Pinn and the Yeading Brook, and a vast, hungry market to the south-east.

Feeding the growing city

What came out of those fields was ordinary, useful food: cabbages, savoys, broccoli and winter greens, onions, peas and broad beans, runner beans on tall sticks, celery earthed up in trenches, rhubarb, radishes, mustard and cress, and salads forced under glass. Everything was timed to the London season. Early peas and new potatoes fetched the best prices in spring; hardy greens kept the trade going through the winter.

Before the railway, produce went up by cart and horse to Covent Garden and the Borough markets, often overnight so that it arrived fresh for the early sales. The coming of the railway changed the scale of the trade completely. Growers could send boxes and hampers by goods train, and crops could travel further, faster and in better condition. The same rails that carried produce into London carried something valuable back out again — manure from the city stables, which Harrow's clay soils badly needed.

Making heavy clay pay

Harrow's soil is not naturally kind. Much of it is stiff London clay that waterlogs in winter and bakes hard in summer. Market gardeners dealt with it by brute effort and accumulated skill. Ground was trenched two spits deep, with manure and garden refuse buried in the bottom to break up the pan. Field drains were laid, often in herringbone patterns, feeding into ditches and ponds. Soot, wood ash, road grit and stable manure were dug in year after year until the topsoil turned dark and workable.

• Manure from London yards and stables, delivered by rail and cart, was the foundation of the whole system.
• Drainage ditches, grips and tile drains kept the clay workable through wet winters.
• Gravel and sand pits around Wealdstone and Harrow Weald left hollows that filled with water and became useful for irrigation and for cress.
• Hedges and shelter belts of thorn and hazel protected tender crops from wind and marked out rented plots.

Nothing was wasted. Weeds, crop waste, horse dung and household ash all went back into the ground. A good market gardener read the soil the way a farrier read a horse.

The squeeze from bricks and mortar

From the 1860s onwards, the pressure came not from pests or weather but from land values. Railways made Harrow reachable for commuters, and a field of cabbages could suddenly be worth far more as building plots. Landlords, seeing the difference, let tenancies lapse and sold to speculative builders. Rents for garden ground rose sharply. Where a grower had once held twenty acres on a yearly agreement, he might find himself with notice to quit, or a rent he could not make pay.

Piece by piece, the pattern repeated across the district: nursery ground sold, hedges grubbed out, ditches filled, streets laid. Estate agents advertised "freehold building land, close to the station", and the gardens that had fed the town became the town itself.

How the growers adapted

Market gardeners were not passive. Many changed what they grew rather than where. Glasshouses went up, first for cucumbers and salads, later for tomatoes, which became a staple of the London trade. Cut flowers — violets, narcissi, chrysanthemums — gave a higher return per square yard than cabbages. Others turned to strawberries, soft fruit, poultry and pigs, or kept a few cows and sold milk locally.

Some families simply moved further out, to the Colne Valley, Rickmansworth, Denham and beyond, where land was cheaper and the railway still reached the market. Others sold direct: door to door, to local greengrocers, or from a stall at the station. Specialising and intensifying was the usual answer to shrinking acreage.

Traces you can still see

The gardens have gone, but they have left marks on the map and the ground. Street names are the easiest clue — Nursery Close, Orchard Way, Meadow Road, Garden Crescent and their like often sit on former growing ground. Look also for:

• Ponds and damp hollows in parks and verges, often flooded gravel pits or old irrigation reservoirs.
• Remnant hedgerows with thorn, hazel and ash, running at field boundaries that no longer match the streets.
• Allotments, several of which occupy ground that was worked commercially before it was let in plots.
• Old fruit trees — apples, pears and damsons — surviving in back gardens and school grounds.
• Brick footings and broken glass where a greenhouse once stood, sometimes still visible at the end of a garden.

For anyone wanting to dig deeper, the local studies collections hold tithe maps, estate sale particulars and large-scale Ordnance Survey sheets that show the gardens plot by plot. Compare a map from the 1860s with one from the 1930s and you can watch the beds disappear under streets. It is quiet, absorbing work — and the best way to understand how a market garden fed a growing town before the town swallowed the garden.