Metro-Land refers to people commuting from suburbia on the Metropolitan train line from Baker Street to Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire. John Betjeman the then Poet Laureate takes a poetic meander as he journeys through Mero-land.
However in this celebrated documentary he ignored the identikit houses of the early part of the century, well they are not exciting. Instead we see interesting architecture, eccentrics such as the man with a Wurlitzer in his living room, beauty pageants and the Moor Park golf club with its fancy club house.
Betjeman celebrates rural life, a life he was familiar with as a young boy and that was slowly disappearing and since the film was made in 1972 has presumably changed even more since. It is Betjeman's words that brings Metro-land to life, the way he describes some of the buildings and the places the Metro line encounters or passes through.
As a documentary though it is clunky, the film would had been taken at face value even up to a few years ago but now does not hold up. The school kids playing rounders was set up for the camera, as was the speech by the beauty queen, so was the bit where the security guard for the gold club lets one woman in and engages in a nice chat but does not let another lady pass through (who was probably part of the BBC production team!)
It is a celebration of an eccentric England of the past but if you wanted the real flavour of Metro-Land, look at the houses built near the Y shaped building and imagine the people living in those houses commuting in British Rail trains every day in 1960s and 1970s Britain.