File:John Betjeman Keeping An Eye Out For Pigeons at St Pancras Station.jpg

English: John Betjeman, Poet Laureate and train lover was instrumental in saving the beautiful Gothic exterior of this station but is also associated with Marylebone Station through his TV Documentary called 'Metroland' which documents the very English state-of -mind personified by the middle classes who took advantage of the new rail system to move out along the line into the Home Counties. His continuing popularity is in no small part due to his ability to tap into what it is to be English. (as opposed to British, which is another thing altogether! )

What follows is from Wikipedia. In the mid 20th century, the spirit of Metro-land was evoked in three "late chrysanthemums" of John Betjeman (1906-84), Poet Laureate from 1972 – Harrow-on-the-Hill ("When melancholy autumn comes to Wembley/And electric trains are lighted after tea"), Middlesex ("Gaily into Rusilip Gardens/Runs the red electric train") and The Metropolitan Railway ("Early Electric! With what radiant hope/Men formed this many-branched electrolier") . In his autobiographical Summoned by Bells (1960) Betjeman recalled that "Metroland/Beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks".

Described much later by The Times as the "hymnologist of Metroland" , Betjeman reached a wider audience with his celebrated documentary for BBC television, Metro-land, directed by Edward Mirzoeff, which was first broadcast on 26 February 1973 and released as a DVD 33 years later. The critic Clive James, who judged the programme "an instant classic", observed that "it saw how the district had been destroyed by its own success" .

To mark the centenary (2006) of Betjeman's birth, his daughter Candida Lycett Green (b. 1942) spearheaded a series of celebratory railway events, including an excursion on 2 September 2006 from Marylebone to Quainton Road, now home of the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. Lycett Green noted of the planning of this trip that among the fine details considered were which filling to have in the baguettes on the train through Metro-land and how long it would stop at Ruislip Gardens so that the poem Middlesex could be read over the tannoy. The event was in the tradition of earlier commemorations of "Metro-land", such as a centenary parade of rolling stock at Neasden in 1963 and celebrations in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Uxbridge branch.