London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, a woman you’ve probably never heard of.
Helen Allingham.
And yet there’s a fair chance she’s shaped the way you picture England.
Indeed, I’m going to stick my neck out.
Helen Allingham helped invent our dream of England.
She painted cottages.
Now that doesn’t sound especially promising, does it?
Cottages.
How exciting can cottages be?
Well, close your eyes for a moment.
I say, “English cottage”.
What do you see?
A thatched roof.
Roses climbing round the front door.
Hollyhocks.
A little gate.
A winding lane.
Moss on the roof.
Maybe a child in a bonnet.
A woman in the garden.
Nothing much happening.
Birdsong territory.
Old England.
Except here’s the thing.
There’s a good chance the England you’re seeing isn’t England at all.
It’s Helen Allingham.
She didn’t invent the English cottage.
She helped invent the way we dream about it.
Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born in Derbyshire in 1848.
She came from a remarkable family.
Unitarians.
Independent thinkers.
Clever people.
Her relatives included Joseph Priestley and Elizabeth Gaskell.
And there was artistic talent in the family.
Her aunt Laura Herford was the first woman to gain admission to the Royal Academy Schools.
Think about that.
The first woman.
And young Helen was going to have to learn fairly early that being a woman who wanted to make art professionally wasn’t going to be a Sunday afternoon picnic.
But there was something else in her childhood.
Something terrible.
When Helen was thirteen, diphtheria swept through the family.
Her father died.
Her youngest sister died.
Money became tight.
And Helen learned something that stayed with her for the rest of her life.
You work.
You earn.
You don’t waste money.
And if other people depend on you, you provide for them.
Remember that when we get to the pretty cottages.
Because Helen Allingham’s life wasn’t particularly pretty.
She came to London.
Studied at the Female School of Art in Bloomsbury.
Got into the Royal Academy Schools in 1868.
And became disillusioned with them.
Not enough teaching.
So she did what capable people so often do.
She got on with it.
She worked.
She became a professional illustrator.
And then, in 1870, something remarkable happened.
She joined The Graphic.
One of Victorian London’s great illustrated weekly newspapers.
And she was the only woman on the staff.
That’s our Helen.
She illustrated children’s magazines.
She went to evening classes at the Slade with Kate Greenaway, who became a lifelong friend.
And then she illustrated a novel by a young writer.
Thomas Hardy.
The novel was Far from the Madding Crowd.
Hardy liked her work.
Liked it enough to ask her later to illustrate another novel.
She said no.
I like her already.
Then, in 1874, she married the Irish poet William Allingham.
And suddenly we’re in one of those extraordinary Victorian artistic circles where everybody seems to know everybody.
William Morris.
Edward Burne-Jones.
Thomas Carlyle.
Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Not a bad address book.
And then Helen found the subject that would make her famous.
Cottages.
Old cottages.
Country cottages.
Cottages with gardens tumbling over themselves.
Cottages with children outside them.
Cottages with women standing at gates.
Cottages apparently untouched by the modern world.
She painted them with extraordinary precision.
A chimney wasn’t just a chimney.
She noticed the mortar.
A roof wasn’t just a roof.
She saw the moss between the tiles.
Flowers weren’t blobs of pink and yellow.
She painted the flowers.
She knew what they were.
And one of the people who encouraged that side of her work was her Surrey neighbour and friend Gertrude Jekyll.
Yes.
That Gertrude Jekyll.
The great garden designer.
So now the cottage gardens become even richer.
And this is where we come to today’s word.
Thatch.
Wonderful old English word.
Thatch.
The stuff that roofs so many of the cottages in the England Helen Allingham painted.
It comes down to us from Old English.
Þæc.
A covering.
A roof.
And behind it is an immensely ancient root meaning simply “to cover”.
And that ancient root has thrown out relations all over the linguistic landscape.
Deck.
A covering.
Protect.
Cover something in front.
Tegument.
A covering.
And here’s my favourite.
Stegosaurus.
That great plated dinosaur.
Its name means, essentially, “roofed lizard”.
So there you are.
Helen Allingham’s thatched cottage and a Stegosaurus.
Cousins.
Linguistic cousins, anyway.
In the beginning was the word.
And back to Helen.
Because what she was doing was more interesting than merely producing pretty pictures.
Britain was changing at terrifying speed.
Factories.
Railways.
Smoke.
Industrial towns.
Suburbs spreading.
Old buildings disappearing.
The workshop of the world.
And Helen Allingham turns her back on all of it.
She points her brush in the other direction.
She paints what is disappearing.
The cottage.
The lane.
The garden.
The old rural England.
She painted an England that was vanishing even as she painted it.
And people loved it.
Of course they did.
Because the faster Britain changed, the more attractive the old England became.
In 1886 the Fine Art Society gave her a one-woman exhibition.
Sixty-six pictures.
“Surrey Cottages”.
It was a tremendous success.
There was another exhibition six months later.
She’d found her market.
And she knew it.
Which brings me to something I particularly like about Helen Allingham.
There’s a danger of looking at those dreamy watercolours and imagining the woman who painted them was some equally dreamy Victorian lady wandering through the Surrey countryside with a paintbox.
No.
Helen Allingham was a working professional.
She was tough.
She was disciplined.
She was commercially astute.
In 1888 William’s ill health brought the family back to London.
To Hampstead.
A few months later he died.
Helen was a widow.
Three children.
Not much money.
So what did she do?
She worked.
Six days a week.
She travelled around Middlesex.
Buckinghamshire.
The West Country.
Looking for the cottages people wanted to buy.
She painted because painting put food on the table.
And she was good at it.
Very good.
She’d already become the first woman elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours.
Then, in 1890, she became the first woman admitted to full membership.
That’s quite a life.
And then taste changed.
It always does.
After the First World War, Helen Allingham’s England began to look hopelessly old-fashioned.
Too pretty.
Too cosy.
Too sentimental.
Modernism had arrived.
The twentieth century didn’t want roses round the cottage door.
And Helen Allingham fell out of fashion.
She carried on working.
She was still working almost to the end.
In September 1926 she was staying with a friend in Haslemere.
She’d gone there to paint.
She became ill.
Acute peritonitis.
And on September 28th, 1926, Helen Allingham died.
She was seventy-eight.
She was cremated at Golders Green.
And there’s a memorial plaque to her in Rosslyn Hill Chapel in Hampstead.
And for decades afterwards, the verdict was pretty dismissive.
Sentimental.
Pretty.
Victorian.
Woman artist.
Move along.
Nothing to see here.
Except there was.
Because eventually people started looking again.
And something had happened.
Many of the cottages she painted had disappeared.
The lanes had changed.
The villages had grown.
The England she’d recorded had become history.
And suddenly those paintings weren’t just pretty.
They were records.
Records made by somebody with an almost obsessive eye for architectural and botanical detail.
And there’s something more important still.
Helen Allingham didn’t merely record an England that was disappearing.
She helped create the England we became nostalgic for.
That’s the trick.
Roses round the cottage door.
Hollyhocks.
Thatch.
Children in country lanes.
The cottage garden.
The sleepy village.
An England apparently outside time.
She painted it so persuasively that, more than a century later, we still carry it around in our heads.
We think we’re remembering England.
Sometimes we’re remembering Helen Allingham.
And now for the London bit.
Because if you want Helen Allingham, there are some heavyweight institutions that can oblige.
The British Museum has her work.
The V&A has her work.
But the biggest public collection of Helen Allingham’s work is somewhere much smaller.
Somewhere much quieter.
And somewhere much more intimate.
Burgh House.
In Hampstead.
That beautiful Queen Anne house in New End Square.
And here’s where it gets personal.
Burgh House is a stop on my Hampstead walk.
In fact, it comes near the end.
So the fit is perfect.
Do the walk.
Meet Hampstead.
See the streets.
See the houses.
See the Heath.
Hear the stories.
And then, when the walk is over, head back to Burgh House.
It’s only a short stroll.
Go inside.
Admission is free.
And meet Helen Allingham.
Not a reproduction.
Not something on a screen.
The real thing.
The woman who painted an England that was disappearing.
The woman whose pictures helped determine what generations afterwards thought that England had looked like.
And while you’re there, have a look at the other goodies.
Because Burgh House is also home to the Hampstead Museum.
And that little museum has some stories to tell.
Lots of them.
But that’s another London Calling.
And Burgh House itself?
Built in 1704.
Hampstead spa.
Quakers.
Doctors.
Soldiers.
Kipling.
Gertrude Jekyll.
That house has lived several lives.
That’s another London Calling as well.
For today, though, Helen Allingham.
Little known.
Once hugely popular.
Then unfashionable.
Then rediscovered.
And hiding in plain sight in Hampstead.
The woman who painted an England that was vanishing even as she painted it.
And perhaps did something more remarkable still.
She painted it so beautifully that we never quite let it vanish.
Helen Allingham.
The woman who invented our dream of England.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets ahead.
See ya tomorrow.