Paul Lee
The Naming of Houses
Once, this hill really was High Fields,
pasture for sheep and cows. Then the railway came.
A station and shunting yards were built,
accreting streets and roads around them
like nacre round the grit in an oyster.
Houses swarmed up, over and down the hill:
terraced for workers in the local factories;
three-storied and palisaded villas
for those who built both factories and terraces
the late-Victorian businessmen
a history book tells me were buttoned-up and insular,
at ease only with each other, their work, and paunches.
Men who gave the houses they built names like
Taybank, Albert, Jubilee, Kensington.
Yet there was one, at least,
who’d read more than accounts and balance sheets,
who’d seen dove-grey stucco, blind arches,
balconies trimmed with black filigree metalwork.
A man who named his houses Venetia, Tancred,
Endymion, Coningsby. A man who wanted posterity
to know he’d read the novels of Benjamin Disraeli.
Page(s) 42
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