"A Town Through Time" was the working title of a book project I developed with Russ Nicholson in the 1990s. I thought of it when my wife and I saw some 19th century maps of the part of London where we live. In the 1870s it was all fields. The only landmarks we recognized were the main road, some churches, and a coaching inn that is now our local pub. Thirty years later everything had changed. All the familiar roads were there and where there had been fields were now hundreds of houses.
What happened to so radically transform the outskirts of London? The underground railway, that's what. Overnight it made sense for people to live a few miles from the city centre and commute to work each day. To give you a sense of the difference: I used to work in Camden, a district in the north of London. To walk there from south-west London, where I live, would take two and a half hours. On the Tube it used to take me less than an hour door to door.
I was interested in how the landscape could show a changing world. We talked about each spread showing the same few roads, and each time you turned the page there'd be a new snapshot ten years on. So on one page there might be a carrot-topped kid doing a paper round. On the next spread we'd see a wounded soldier with red hair back from the Western Front, and we'd realize that was the boy grown up.
Here's how I described it in a letter to Russ:
I think the book should focus on a street in a southern English town, showing how it has changed over the period from the 1850 to the present day. The gimmick would be to show the street each decade, so the book could be called Ten Years On.
I've sketched a vague idea of how the street could look. This is an area which would have been parkland adjoining a major coaching route up until the mid-19th century. The original buildings were just the church, manor and coaching inn. As the suburbs grew, more buildings were put up. By the 1900s it is a suburban street with a fruit-&-veg shop at the end and the coaching inn has become the local pub. By the 1950s the manor will have been partially bombed and rebuilt as a school.
I'm going to do some research at the local library, which has a good historical reference section. I'll photocopy anything you might find useful. To sell the book, I think we'll need to do at least one spread, and I suggest the one set in the 1900s. Queen Victoria has died and people wear black armbands. In one of the houses a woman scolds her maid. Her husband is coming back from work in the city, tipping his top hat to the lady next door as he comes in his front gate. The son plays with a stick-and-hoop in the street. The cutaway of the house next door shows an upstairs room where a man lies sick in bed with a doctor listening to his breathing.
On the main road at the end of the street, people are coming and going on foot, horseback or penny farthing. The road is still more like a hard-packed earthen track than a modern tarmac surface, of course. A man could be driving a couple of pigs down the street, taking them to the common. (That actually happened in the area where we live when people first started to move into the newly-built houses in the 1890s. A banker was astonished to come out of his front door and see farmers with their animals coming up the road.)
All the spreads will show the street from the same angle, as if viewed from 45° above the ground. The cutaways will be X--ray vision views into the houses that can vary from spread to spread -- ie in some cases we might look into the attic of one house, the ground floor of the one next door, and in the following spread we might not look into either.
The idea will be to show the way lifestyles, fashions and the appearance of the street change over the years. Also to be a kind of 'soap opera' where you can see a man courting a girl down the street, married to her ten years on, their son playing, off to war ten years on... etc. Put in any amusing little visual stories you think of, as this is one of the aspects that the editors at Pan Macmillan liked. Call me once you've had a think about it. I think this project could be a real winner - one of those books that stays in print for thirty years.
The publishers liked the idea -- unsurprisingly, as picture books like that can sell to dozens of countries without the expense of a lot of translation. I don't know why we never went ahead with it. Maybe the publishers didn't like the sketch Russ did. Or maybe we got so busy on the Fabled Lands books that we forgot about this project.
I was reminded of it recently by the release of Robert Zemeckis's film Here, which uses a fixed camera and a series of time jumps to tell its stories. I obviously like the idea of telling a story with a fixed camera because I even dreamt about it twenty years after Russ and I first discussed Ten Years On. Maybe it's just the passage of time that fascinates me. Funny thing is, I told Russ this could be "one of those books that stays in print for thirty years". Well, it's been thirty years now, and while the book never made it into print, the concept has stayed with me just as long.
