Loss of a literary landscape

At the end of EM Forster’s Howards End, suburbia is looming on the idyllic spot. Now, 50 years after the author’s death, the childhood home that inspired it looks finally to be engulfed

- Richard Burton

The garden, the overhanging wych-elm, the sloping meadow, the great view to the west, the cliff of fir trees to the north, the adjacent farm through the high tangled hedge of wild roses were all utilized by me in Howards End, and the interior is in the novel too. The actual inmates were my mother, myself, two maids, two or more cats, an occasional dog; outside were a pony and trap with a garden boy to look after them.

‘From the time I entered the house at the age of four and nearly fell from its top to its bottom through a hole ascribed to the mice, I took it to my heart and hoped, as Marianne had of Battersea Rise, that I should live and die there. We were out of it in ten years. The impressions received there remained and still glow – not always distinguishably, always inextinguishably.’

So wrote EM Forster in a biography of his aunt about his childhood home, Rooks Nest, a red brick country house dating to Tudor times and formerly known as ‘Howards’, on the northeastern edge of Stevenage.

The celebrated author, who died 50 years ago this month, also described the wider area in a radio program in 1946 as ‘a district which I still think the loveliest in England... hedges full of clematis, primroses, bluebells, dog roses, and nuts’. The broadcast was part of a campaign to save the area from new town development.

Stevenage's new town did encroach on the area. The remnant of the countryside around Rooks Nest House and the church of St Nicholas which has its roots in the Saxon period, retain the last agricultural fields in the borough, separating it from the neighboring village of Graveley. Sadly, that will not be for long it seems. It will now be developed for 800 homes, saving a ministerial intervention.