Road, the Camberwell New Road, and the Brixton Road, all pool their
traffic, there stood, in times not so far removed but that some yet living
can remember it, Kennington Gate, an important turnpike at any time, and
one of very great traffic on Derby Day, when, I fear, the pikeman was
freely bilked of his due at the hands of sportsmen, noble and ignoble.
There is a view of this gate on such a day drawn by James Pollard, and
published in 1839, which gives a very good idea of the amount of traffic
and, incidentally, of the curious costumes of the period. You shall also
find in the "Comic Almanack" for 1837 an illustration by George
Cruikshank of this same place, one would say, although it is not mentioned
by name, in which is an immense jostling crowd anxious to pass through,
while the pikeman, having apparently been "cheeked" by the occupants of a
passing vehicle, is vulgarly engaged, I grieve to state, in "taking a
sight" at them. That is to say, he has, according to the poet, "Put his
thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out."
[Sidenote: KENNINGTON GATE]
Kennington Gate was swept away, with other purely Metropolitan turnpike
gates, October 31st. 1865, and is now to be found in the yard of Clare's
Depository at the crest of Brixton Hill. It was one of nine that barred
this route from London to the sea in 1826. The others were at South End,
Croydon: Foxley Hatch, or Purley Gate, which stood near Purley Corner, by
the twelfth milestone, until 1853; and Frenches, 19 miles 4 furlongs from
London--that is to say, just before you come into Redhill streets. Leaving
Redhill behind, another gate spanned the road at Salfords, below Earlswood
Common, while others were situated at Horley, Ansty Cross, Stonepound, one
mile short of Clayton; and at Preston, afterwards removed to Patcham.[6]
Not the most charitable person could lay his hand upon his heart and
declare, honestly, that the church of St. Mark, Kennington, which stands
at this beginning of the Brixton Road, is other than extremely hideous.
Fortunately, its pagan architecture, once fondly thought to revive the
glories of old Greece, is largely screened from sight by the thriving
trees of its churchyard, and so nervous wayfarers are spared something of
the inevitable shock.
The story of Kennington Church does not take us very far back, down the
dim alleys of history, for it was built so recently as the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, when it was thought possible to emulate the
marble beauties of the Parthenon and other triumphs of classic
architecture in plebeian brick and stone. Those materials, however, and
the architects themselves, were found to be somewhat inferior to their
models, and eventually the public taste became so outraged with the
appalling ugliness of the pagan temples arising on every hand that at
length the Gothic revival of the mid-nineteenth century set in.
But if its history is not long, its site has a horrid kind of historic
association, for the building stands on what was a portion of Kennington
Common, the exact spot where the unhappy Scottish rebels were executed in
1746, and where Jerry Abershawe, the highwayman, was hanged in 1795. The
remains of the gibbet on which the bodies of some of his fellow knights of
the road were exposed were actually found when the foundations for the
church were being dug out.
The origin of Kennington Church, like that of Brixton, is so singular that
it is very well worth while to inquire into it. It was a direct outcome of
the Napoleonic wars. England had been so long engaged in those European
struggles, and was so wearied and impoverished by them, that Parliament
could think of nothing better than to celebrate the peace of 1815 by
voting a million and a half of money to the clergy as a "thank-offering."
This sum took the shape of a church-building fund. Wages were low, work
was scarce, and bread was so dear that the people were starving. That good
paternal Parliament, therefore, when they asked for bread gave them stone
and brick, and performed the heroic feat of picking their impoverished
pockets as well. It was accomplished in this wise. There was that Lucky
Bag, the million and a half sterling of the Thanksgiving Fund; but it
could not be dipped into unless you gave an equal sum to that you took
out, and then expended the whole on building churches. And yet it has been
said that Parliament has no sense of the ridiculous! Why, it was the most
stupendous of practical jokes!
[Illustration: KENNINGTON GATE: DERBY DAY, 1839. _From an engraving after
J. Pollard._]
[Sidenote: HALF-PRICE CHURCHES]
Lambeth was at that time a suburban and a greatly expanding parish, and
was one of those that accepted this offer, and took what came eventually
to be called Half Price Churches. It gave a large order, and took four:
those of Kennington, Waterloo, Brixton, and Norwood, all ferociously
hideous, and costing L15,000 apiece; the Government granting one moiety
and the other being raised by a parish rate on all, without distinction of
creed. The Government also remitted the usual taxes on the building
materials, and in some instances further helped the people to rejoice by
imposing a compulsory rate of twopence in the pound, to pay the rector or
vicar. All this did more to weaken the Church of England than even a
century of scandalous inefficiency:
Abuse a man, and he may brook it,
But keep your hands out of his breeches pocket.
The major part of these grievances was adjusted by the Act of 1868,
abolishing all Church rates, excepting those levied under special Acts;
but the eyesores will not be redressed until the temples are pulled down
and rebuilt.
Brixton appears in Domesday as "Brixistan," which in later ages became
"Brixtow"; and the Brixton Road follows the line of a Roman way on which
Streatham stood. Both the Domesday name of Brixton and the name of
Streatham are significant, indicating their position on the stones and the
street, _i.e._, the paved thoroughfare alluded to in "Brixton causeway,"
marked on old suburban maps.
The Brixton Road, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a
pretty place. On the left-hand side, as you made for Streatham, ran the
river Effra. It was a clear and sparkling stream, twelve feet wide,
which, rising at Norwood, eventually found its way into the Thames at
Vauxhall. Its course ran where the front gardens of the houses on that
side of the road are now situated, and at that period every house was
fronted by its little bridge; but the unfortunate Effra has long since
been thrust underground in a sewer-pipe, and the sole reminiscence of it
to be seen is the name of Effra Road, beside Brixton Church.
The "White Horse" public-house, where the omnibuses halt, was in those
times a lonely inn, neighboured only by a farm; but with the dawn of the
nineteenth century a new suburb began to spring up, where Angell Road now
stands, called "Angell Town," and then the houses of Brixton Road began to
arise. It is curious to note that the last of the old watchmen's wooden
boxes was standing in front of Claremont Lodge, 168, Brixton Road, until
about 1875.
There is little in the Lower Brixton Road that is reminiscent of the
Regency, but a very great deal of early suburban comfort evident in the
old mansions of the Rise and the Hill, built in days when by a "suburban
villa" you did not mean a cheap house in a cheap suburban road, but--to
speak in the language of auctioneers--a "commodious residence situate in
its own ornamental grounds, replete with every convenience," or something
in that eloquent style. For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon
Marche, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the
continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of
semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in
the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the
gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel
drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! Solid
comfort resides within those four-square walls, and reclines in saddle-bag
armchairs, thinking complacently of big bank balances, all derived from
wholesale dealing in the City, and now enjoyed, and added to, in the third
and fourth generations; for these solid houses were built a century ago,
or thereby. They are not beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of
good yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted with age, and
sparsely relieved, it may be, with stucco pilasters picked out with raised
medallions or plaster wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free
from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably permanent--and large. They
are, indeed, of such spaciousness and commodious quality that an
auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing those characteristics
to houses which do not possess them feels a vast despair possess his soul
when it falls to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And yet I
think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until
the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building
plots for what we now understand by "villas"--a fate that has lately
befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one
of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour
thirty or forty little modern houses--why, then an unwonted respect is
felt for it and its kind.
[Sidenote: BRIXTON HILL]
Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous
church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of
the Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, prominent at
the angle of the roads--a _memento mori_, ever since the twenties, for
travellers down the road.
Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well
as joy and everything else human, passes, is one in shape like a
biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A
verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton
Hill, accompanies name and date:
O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere
Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here;
The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale
From this sad turf whene'er he reads the tale,
That one so young and lovely--died--and last,
When the sun's vigour warms, or tempests rave,
Shall come in summer's bloom and winter's blast,
A Mother, to weep o'er this hopeless grave.
An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in
1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no
flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight
assignations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton
snores.
On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains
an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black
tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now
replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as
it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the
present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here,
unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an
old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as
they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this
hill-top, and London seemed far away.
And so to Streatham, once rightly "Streatham, Surrey," in the postal
address, but now merely "Streatham, S.W." A world of significance lies in
that apparently simple change, which means that it is now in the London
Postal District. Even so early as 1850 we read in Brayley's "History of
Surrey" that "the village of Streatham is formed by an almost continuous
range of villas and other respectable dwellings." Respectable! I should
think so, indeed! Conceive the almost impious inadequacy of calling the
Streatham Hill mansions of City magnates "respectable." As well might one
style the Alps "pretty"!
But this spot was not always of such respectability, for about 1730 there
stood a gibbet on Streatham Hill, by the fifth milestone, and from it hung
in chains the body of one "Jack Gutteridge," a highwayman duly executed
for robbing and murdering a gentleman's servant here. The place was long
afterwards known as "Jack Gutteridge's Gate."
[Illustration: Streatham Common]
Streatham--the Ham (that is to say the home, or the hamlet) on the
Street--emphatically in those Saxon times when it first obtained its name,
_the_ Street--was probably so named to distinguish it from some other
settlement situated in the mud. In that era, when hard roads were few, a
paved way could be, and very often was, made to stand godfather to a
place, and thus we find so many Streatleys, Stratfords, Strattons,
Streets, and Stroods on the map. Those "streets" were Roman roads. The
particular "street" on which Streatham stood seems to have been a Roman
road which came up from the coast by Clayton, St. John's Common, Godstone,
and Caterham, a branch of the road to _Portus Adurni_, the Old Shoreham of
to-day. Portions of it were discovered in 1780, on St. John's Common, when
the Brighton turnpike road through that place was under construction. It
was from 18 to 20 feet wide, and composed of a bed of flints, grouted
together, 8 inches thick. Narrowly avoiding Croydon, it reached Streatham
by way of Waddon (where there is one of the many "Cold Harbours"
associated so intimately with Roman roads) and joined the present Brighton
Road midway between Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond, at what used to be
Broad Green.
[Sidenote: DOCTOR JOHNSON]
There are no Roman remains at twentieth-century Streatham, and there are
very few even of the eighteenth century. The suburbs have absorbed the
village, and Dr. Johnson himself and Thrale Place are only memories. "All
flesh is grass," said the Preacher, and therefore Dr. Johnson, whose bulky
figure we may put at the equivalent of a truss of hay, is of course but an
historic name; but bricks and mortar last immeasurably longer than those
who rear them, and his haunts might have been still extant but for the
tragical nearness of Streatham to London and that "ripeness" of land for
building which has abolished many a pleasant and an historic spot.
But while the broad Common of Streatham remains unfenced, the place will
keep a vestige of its old-time character of roadside village. A good deal
earlier than Dr. Samuel Johnson's visits to Streatham and Thrale Place,
the village had quite a rosy chance of becoming another Tunbridge Wells or
Cheltenham, for in the early years of the eighteenth century it became
known as a Spa, and real and imaginary invalids flocked to drink the
disagreeable waters issuing from what quaint old Aubrey calls the "sower
and weeping ground" by the Common. Whether the waters were too nasty, or
not nasty enough, does not appear, but it is certain that the rivalry of
Streatham to those other Spas was neither long-continued nor serious.
Streatham is content to forget its waters, but the memory of Dr. Johnson
will not be dropped, for if it were, no one knows to what quarter
Streatham could turn for any history or traditions at all. As it is, the
mind's-eye picture is cherished of that grumbling, unwieldy figure coming
down from London to Thrale's house, to be lionised and indulged, and in
return to give Mrs. Thrale a reflected glory. The lion had the manners of
a bear, and, like a dancing bear, performed clumsy evolutions for buns and
cakes; but he had a heart as tender as a child's, and a simple vanity as
engaging, beneath that unpromising exterior and those pompous ways. Wig
awry and singed in front from his short-sighted porings over the midnight
oil, clothes shabby, and linen that journeyed only at long intervals to
the wash-tub, his was not the aspect of a carpet-knight, and those he met
at the literary-artistic tea-table of Thrale Place murmured that he was an
"original."
He met a brilliant company over those teacups: Reynolds and Garrick, and
Fanny Burney--the readiest hand at the "management" of one so difficult
and intractable--and many lesser lights, and partook there of innumerable
cups of tea, dispensed at that hospitable board by Mrs. Thrale. That
historic teapot is still extant, and has a capacity of three quarts;
specially chosen, doubtless, in view of the Doctor's visits. Ye gods! what
floods of Bohea were consumed within that house in Thrale Park!
They even seated the studious Johnson on horseback and took him hunting;
and, strange to say, he does not merely seem to have only just saved
himself from falling off, but is said to have acquitted himself as well as
any country squire on that notable occasion.
But all things have an end, and the day was to come when Johnson should
bid a last farewell to Streatham. He had broken with the widowed Mrs.
Thrale on the subject of her marriage with Piozzi, and he could no longer
bear to see the place. So, in one endearing touch of sentiment, he gave it
good-bye, as his diary records:
"Sunday, went to church at Streatham. _Templo valedixi cum osculo._" Thus,
kissing the old porch of St. Leonard's, the lexicographer departed with
heavy heart. Two years later he died.
This Church of St. Leonard still contains the Latin epitaph he wrote to
commemorate the easy virtues of his friend Henry Thrale, who died in 1781,
but alterations and restorations have changed almost all else. It is, in
truth, a dreadful example, externally, of the Early Compo Period, and
internally of the Late Churchwarden, or Galleried, Style.
It is curious to note the learned Doctor's indignation when asked to write
an English epitaph for setting up in Westminster Abbey. The great
authority on the English language, the compiler of that monumental
dictionary, exclaimed that he would not desecrate its walls with an
inscription in his own tongue. Thus the pedant!
There is one Latin epitaph at Streatham that reads curiously. It is on a
tablet by Richard Westmacott to Frederick Howard, who _in pugna
Waterlooensi occiso_. The battle of Waterloo looks strange in that garb.
But Latin is frequent here, and free. The tablets that jostle one another
down the aisles are abounding in that tongue, and the little brass to an
ecclesiastic, nailed upon the woodwork toward the west end of the north
aisle, is not free from it. So the shade of the Doctor, if ever it
revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quantity, although
it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.
XI
Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the
speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and
its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in
1792, says that "Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres,
surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in
circumference." Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and
the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the
house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions
built in the seventeenth century, of a debased classic type.
[Sidenote: GIBBETS BY THE WAY]
Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston's time, and
indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark
Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad.
Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when
compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his "Britannia" of
1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and
another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later
editor, who issued an "Ogilby Improv'd" in 1731, they still decorated the
wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of
affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.
At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and
eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used
to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where
the extra large and permanent gallows stood, like a football goal, at
what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden
and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later
years been persuaded to play.
Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall,
the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon,
resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in
March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. "T 180," as he
was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898,
and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he
had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his
gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul's Cathedral by
the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised
commercial circles.
The estate of Norbury Hall has since T 180's release become "ripe for
building," and the mansion, the lake, and the beautiful grounds have been
"developed" away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot will have faded.
Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, and above the white
hillside villas of Sydenham and Gipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long
body of the Crystal Palace; that bane and obsession of most view-points in
South London, "for ever spoiling the view in all its compass," as Ruskin
truly says in "Praeterita."
I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphere of the building is
stuffily reminiscent of half a century's stale teas and buttered toast,
and the views of it, near or distant, are very creepily and awfully like
the dreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of such scriptural
scenes as "Belshazzar's Feast" and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects
from Revelation.
[Illustration: STREATHAM.]
At Thornton Heath--where there has been nothing in the nature of a heath
for at least eighty years past--the electric trams of Croydon begin, and
take you through North End into and through Croydon town, along a
continuous line of houses. "Broad Green" once stood by the wayside, but
nowadays the sole trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. At
Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little vestige of the past
left, in "Colliers' Water Lane." The old farmhouse of Colliers' Water,
reputed haunt of the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, was demolished
in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, and the secret staircase it
possessed was no doubt intended to hide fugitives much more respectable
than highwaymen.
The name of that lane is now the only reminder of the time when Croydon
was a veritable Black Country.
The "colliers of Croydon," whose black trade gave such employment to
seventeenth-century wits, had no connection with what our ancestors of
very recent times still called "sea-coal"--that is to say, coal shipped
from Newcastle and brought round by water, in days before railways. The
Croydon coal was charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests that
once overspread the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and was supplied very
largely to London from the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the
nineteenth.
Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the Croydon colliers famous. We
are not to suppose that his name was really Grimes: that was probably a
part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master collier, who in the
time of Edward the Sixth made charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke
and the grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop of
Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to
abolish the kilns. I think we may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled
lawn-sleeves.
We first find Croydon mentioned in A.D. 962, when it was "Crogdoene." In
Domesday Book it is "Croindene." Whether the name means "crooked vale,"
"chalk vale," or "town of the cross," I will not pretend to say, and he
would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with
the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror
to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which
still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate
until 1750.
[Sidenote: GROWTH OF CROYDON]