Middlesex

• 1. Introduction

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  Middlesex once occupied the land that is now home to some of the most recognizable districts in the world: Chelsea, Hackney, Hammersmith, Islington, and Westminster. It was one of the historic counties of England, shaped on three sides by rivers , the Thames to the south, the Lea to the east, and the Colne to the west , and bounded to the north by a ridge of hills. By the time it was formally abolished on the 1st of April 1965, it had already been swallowed whole by the city it once surrounded.

  How did a county that predated the Domesday Book simply vanish? How did the Middle Saxons who gave it its name become the unlikely ancestors of London's urban sprawl? And what traces of Middlesex survive in the arms of London boroughs, in cricket scorecards, and in a battle cry still spoken today? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Middle Saxons

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  In 704, a Latin chronicle recorded a land grant at Twickenham using the phrase "in prouincia quæ nuncupatur Middelseaxan Haec" , territory of the Middle Saxons. That sentence is among the earliest written traces of the county's identity. The word Middlesex fuses the Old English middel with Seaxe, the name the Saxons used for themselves, a name that almost certainly derived from the seax, a distinctive short notched knife they were known for carrying.

  The Middle Saxon province occupied at least the area of the later county, and probably extended well into what became Hertfordshire. Charter evidence shows it was never the core territory of the Kingdom of the East Saxons, though it fell under their dominion. Some historians believe the province may once have been independent, possibly the domain of one of the co-kings who periodically shared rule over Essex. That link to the East Saxons persisted for centuries through the Diocese of London, re-established in 604 as the East Saxon see; its boundaries continued to follow the Kingdom of Essex until the nineteenth century.

  The name Seaxe appears in four English county names: Middlesex, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. The seax itself lives on in heraldry. Both Middlesex and Essex carry three seaxes in their emblems, though the Tudor heralds who fixed that image had only a vague idea of what the original weapon looked like, rendering it more like a falchion or scimitar than the actual knife.

• 3. Governing a County-Within-a-City

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  By 1086, when William the Conqueror's officials compiled the Domesday Book, Middlesex was already divided into six administrative units called hundreds: Edmonton, Elthorne, Gore, Hounslow (later recorded as Isleworth), Ossulstone, and Spelthorne. Ossulstone, the hundred closest to the City of London, was by the seventeenth century split into four divisions , Finsbury, Holborn, Kensington, and Tower , that gradually absorbed most of the county's day-to-day administration.

  The City of London itself was never straightforwardly part of Middlesex. It had been self-governing since the twelfth century and became a county corporate in its own right, yet the sheriffs of London retained jurisdiction in Middlesex, and the Diocese of the Bishop of London stretched across the county. To the east, the Tower Division, covering roughly what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and most of the London Borough of Hackney, operated as a county within a county. It had its own Lord Lieutenant, entirely independent of the Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, with military autonomy comparable to one of the Ridings of Yorkshire.

  The question of a county town was never cleanly resolved. Middlesex arguably never had one, and certainly not after 1789. The county assizes were held at the Old Bailey in the City of London. The sessions house moved from Hicks Hall in Clerkenwell , used from 1612 to 1782 , to the Middlesex Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green, which served from 1782 to 1921. New Brentford was first named as county town in 1789 on the basis that parliamentary elections for knights of the shire had been held there from 1701, but a traveller's guide from 1795 noted it had no town hall or any other public building to show for the title.

• 4. London's Advance

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  In 1771, the novelist Tobias Smollett looked at the westward creep of London and wrote a warning into his novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: "if this infatuation continues for half a century, then, I suppose, the whole county of Middlesex will be covered in brick." The prediction was accurate, if a little optimistic about how long it would take.

  For much of its history, Middlesex outside the metropolitan fringe was agricultural. In 1593, John Norden described the county attracting visitors to its orchards, gardens, and decorative walks. Inns and tea gardens at Isleworth, Tottenham, Edmonton, and Hornsey drew day-trippers from London through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hampton Court Palace, opened to the public in the nineteenth century, received 350,000 visitors in 1851 alone.

  The railways changed everything. From 1839, radial lines reaching outward from central London began pulling the county toward suburbia. Tottenham, Edmonton, and Enfield developed as working-class residential districts. The line to Windsor through Middlesex was completed in 1848, the line to Potters Bar in 1850, and the Metropolitan and District Railways began pushing extensions into the county from 1878. After World War I, the availability of labour near the capital drew new industries to places like Hayes and Park Royal. Twickenham Studios were established in 1913, and film facilities spread to Cricklewood, Isleworth, Kew Bridge, and Southall. The population peaked in 1951. By that point, William Cobbett's famous complaint about the stretch between Egham and Kensington , "flat as a pancake, and until you come to Hammersmith, the soil is a nasty, stony dirt upon a bed of gravel" , described a landscape that had long since been buried under brick.

• 5. The 1889 Fracture

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  Under the Local Government Act 1888, a metropolitan area of approximately 30,000 acres was carved out of Middlesex and several neighbouring counties to form the new administrative County of London. The act explicitly stated that the Middlesex portion would be "severed from Middlesex, and form a separate county for all non-administrative purposes." About a fifth of the historic county's area and a third of its population transferred overnight.

  That transferred territory was divided in 1900 into eighteen metropolitan boroughs, including Chelsea, Hackney, Hammersmith, Holborn, Islington, Kensington, Paddington, Shoreditch, Stepney, and Westminster. The remainder became the administrative county of Middlesex, governed by the Middlesex County Council, which met at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster , a building that, in a twist of administrative irony, sat within the new County of London rather than within the council's own area.

  At the same moment, Middlesex regained something it had lost in the twelfth century: the right to appoint its own sheriff. The Local Government Act 1894 then divided the remaining county into four rural districts and thirty-one urban districts. Those rural districts , Hendon, South Mimms, Staines, and Uxbridge , had all been abolished by 1934 as urbanisation overtook them. By the 1961 census, nine districts including Ealing, Enfield, Harrow, Tottenham, Wembley, and Twickenham each exceeded a population of 100,000, a threshold that would normally have entitled them to seek county borough status. Had all of them done so, the remaining county council would have governed fewer than one million people.

• 6. Abolition and What Remained

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  Evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London, which sat from 1957 to 1960, included a proposal to divide Middlesex into two counties , North Middlesex and West Middlesex. The commission rejected that route and instead recommended abolition. Parliament enacted the London Government Act 1963, which took effect on the 1st of April 1965, dissolving both the administrative counties of Middlesex and London.

  Nearly all of the historic county became part of Greater London, forming nine outer London boroughs: Barnet (in part), Brent, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow, and Richmond upon Thames (in part). Small fragments transferred to Surrey and Hertfordshire: Potters Bar became part of Hertfordshire, while Sunbury-on-Thames and Staines moved to Surrey. In 1995, the village of Poyle shifted further, from Spelthorne to the Berkshire borough of Slough.

  Royal Mail kept the Middlesex postal county in 1965 because amending the addresses across the bulk of Outer London would have been too costly. That decision preserved post towns like Enfield, Harrow, Uxbridge, Hounslow, and Twickenham under the Middlesex label in postal practice. The judicial commission area named Middlesex survived until the 1st of July 2003, when all five Greater London commission areas merged into one. The Earl of Middlesex title, created twice , in 1622 and again in 1675 , had already gone extinct in 1843, long before the county followed.

• 7. Die Hard and the Wood Anemone

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  Middlesex Day falls on the 16th of May each year, and its origin is a moment from the Peninsular War. At the Battle of Albuera in 1811, Lieutenant-Colonel William Inglis of the 57th (West Middlesex) Regiment was wounded but refused to leave the field. He stayed with the regimental colours and called to his men: "Die hard 57th, die hard!" The regiment held against a French attack, the battle was won, and the phrase passed into common English use. In 2003 an early day motion in the House of Commons formally noted the 16th of May as the anniversary of Albuera and the occasion of Middlesex Day.

  In 2002, Plantlife ran a national campaign inviting the public to vote on flowers representing each county. For Middlesex, voters chose the wood anemone, once common across the Forest of Middlesex. When London's suburbs spread over the county, many of its woodlands were bypassed rather than cleared, and the wood anemone continues to bloom in those surviving patches.

  Sir John Betjeman, who was born in 1906 in Gospel Oak and grew up in Highgate, became Poet Laureate in 1972 and held the title until his death in 1984. He returned repeatedly to the theme of Middlesex and suburban life in his poetry. Many of those poems were featured in the televised readings Metroland. His lines for the county read: "Dear Middlesex, dear vanished country friend, / Your neighbour, London, killed you in the end." The Saxon crown devised for Middlesex County Council's coat of arms in 1910 , derived from a silver penny portrait of King Athelstan , was later adopted into the arms of the Greater London Council when that body was created in 1965.