This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
In Metroland, John Betjeman comments on the transformation of Buckinghamshire’s rural farmland into suburban housing estates with a certain resignation — “it’s probably goodbye, England” — before the film finishes with the Metropolitan Line’s abrupt end just beyond Greater London.
The Line was meant to extend much further, but the developers ran out of steam. This suits Betjeman’s ends, hubristic hopes for the future falling flat. He self-deprecatingly discusses, for example, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley on St George’s Day 1924 and the optimism of the original suburban dream, whereby unlanded city dwellers could have their own miniature manors and tend to their rose bushes in the shadow of their mock Tudor gables. All this natural self-confidence was disappearing when Metroland was first shown, in February 1973.
That same month, on a site a few miles to the east of those fields where Betjeman bade England goodbye, a particularly impressive mock Tudor manor changed hands. Piggott’s Manor was purchased by George Harrison and donated to the Hare Krishna movement, of which he was a devotee. After the sale went through it was renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor — today marked with a large sign just off the A41 near Watford, past which I drove with two friends for a day out on a late August summer’s day.
I was keen to visit an important early example of mock Tudor architecture. It was built in the heyday of the Tudor revival, 1884 — contemporaneous with Northumbria’s magnificent Cragside (once dubbed the “English Neuschwanstein”), in a style that remained in vogue when Liberty’s department store opened in 1924.
Mock Tudor offered the late Victorian and Edwardian eras a distinctively vernacular style at a time when the Empire ruled the waves. Britain looked back to the Tudor period self-confidently, to the high-water mark of the English Renaissance, the Elizabethan Settlement and the beginning of naval prowess. Liberty’s was even built with oak repurposed from HMS Hindustan and HMS Impregnable.
In the years leading up to Harrison’s purchase, the use of the building was in keeping with mock Tudor’s cultural associations. It had been repurposed by the RAF during the war, then served as a preparatory college for the Bart’s League of Nurses, formed to perpetuate clinical excellence and mutual assistance for nurses at St Bart’s Hospital.
Here, young ladies were schooled in appropriate decorum and taught how to starch impeccably stiff uniforms. A photo of the house’s vast lounge during those days shows a majestically furnished room with a vast fireplace and a Persian carpet.
After parking, we walked towards the house. It wasn’t visible until we got close, for it is now a major pilgrimage site, so a newly-built visitor’s centre dominates the approach. The Hare Krishnas’ founder, Swami Prabhupada, arrived in New York in 1965, first preaching the Bhagavad Gita to beatniks and hippies. His message of spiritual bliss linked with the peace-and-love zeitgeist, and he accrued a significant following before eventually coming to London.
I still associated the Hare Krishnas with Western counterculture. I remembered them recruiting drop-outs I knew during my adolescence. They distributed free food in Soho, at Glastonbury Festival and outside LSE and SOAS. They thus offered many casualties of London’s underground scene a path of spiritual redemption, daring to come where Christian churches feared to tread.
This has all but disappeared today. Our little group of three were the only Westerners in sight. Since the 1960s, the Hindu population of North West London has grown steadily, mostly in an arc overlapping Betjeman’s Metroland, from Southall to Neasden, Wembley and Harrow. Bhaktivedanta Manor is now firmly established as an important site of worship for the many local Hindus.
We made our way into that majestic front room. The huge fireplace is now a shrine to Swami Prabhupada, all the other accoutrements have gone and on the opposite side is the temple’s sanctuary: an idol of Krishna and various members of his heavenly consort, bathed in sun under an original skylight — providing a dizzying and intoxicating array of colour and gemstones and sweet-smelling incense.
A friendly volunteer realised it was our first visit and gave us an impromptu guided tour of the temple’s features, with brief glosses of Hinduism along the way. I felt myself turning into that strange blend of Mr Bean and Prince Philip that sometimes overtakes me when I visit foreign lands. As our eyes fell on a painting of the lion-man avatar of Vishnu, disembowelling a child with his claws, I turned to my companions and said, “Gosh, look at this chap!” Thankfully our guide didn’t notice and explained the image’s cosmic significance.
We were then taken upstairs to view the Swami’s reserved living quarters. Again, the architect’s remarkable manipulation of natural light is outstanding — the vast bay windows and skylights saturate the rooms with a clean and clear radiance. Here, our guide discovered that I am a Christian theologian and began to question me on the differences between our respective traditions.
We discussed the incarnation of Christ and the Eucharist, neither of which she was familiar with. She was clearly grateful for the discussion. Our conversation ended with my agreeing to read a verse from the Bhagavad Gita aloud to the circle of listeners that had gathered about us.
Nonetheless, I made an effort to see traces of the original Piggott’s Manor. The extant woodwork is remarkable, adorned with carvings of English flora and fauna. Mock Tudor was popular amongst the Arts and Crafts movement. My mind turned to William Morris’ News from Nowhere, and his love of the Middle-Ages — as a time when “heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality” that it became “a part of the life upon earth”.
Morris’ imagined utopia sees this blessedness returning in England’s future. He visualises the people there having “an indefinable kind of look of being at home and at ease”. This description was certainly true of our hosts at Bhaktivedanta Manor. Yet it wasn’t true of myself, for whom the burden of being an awkward Englishman remained an ever-present threat.
William Morris felt that socialism would re-establish the heavenly character of the medieval period in England, enabling us to recall a “delight in the life of the world”. As the afternoon drew on, it seemed to me that it is the traditions of the East that have moved into this space. Maybe Christianity had again neglected to go where angels feared to tread — fully admitting the depth of the West’s cultural and religious deracination since the 1960s. One of my companions commented that a vast statue of Krishna in an English country garden somehow didn’t feel incongruous at all. I didn’t disagree.
Maybe the trajectory of Bhaktivedanta Manor is more emblematic of the contemporary English experience than the vernacular architecture of the original Piggott’s Manor. There is the boomer utopianism and oikophobia behind the property’s acquisition. There is the impact of the site’s latter-day pilgrims far exceeding anyone’s expectations. There is that eminently pragmatic adjustment of a new road promising to keep things out-of-sight of the local NIMBYs. But the net result is that someone like me can now feel as much of an oddity and outsider as a travelling Hindu preacher once did in landing on these shores.
It is said the Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind. One of John Lennon’s best lines describes life as something that happens when you’re busy making other plans. England’s present confusion, similarly, looks like something accidental — a fruit of national distraction, not decision.
We left the site along the road once constructed to keep the peace with local residents concerned by the tens of thousands of pilgrims attending the annual Janmashtami festival. It is named Dharam Marg, meaning “the way of truth”. As we rejoined the A41 to London, I wondered if we were now on the way of untruth. In any case, Betjeman’s words hung in the air about me: “it’s probably goodbye, England.”
