A house stood on a hill. And that hill was Bleakridge, the summit of
the little billow of land between Bursley and Hanbridge. Trafalgar Road
passed over the crest of the billow. Bleakridge was certainly not more
than a hundred feet higher than Bursley; yet people were now talking a
lot about the advantages of living `up' at Bleakridge, `above' the
smoke, and `out' of the town, though it was not more than five minutes
from the Duck Bank. To hear them talking, one might have fancied that
Bleakridge was away in the mountains somewhere. The new steam-cars
would pull you up there in three minutes or so, every quarter of an
hour. It was really the new steam-cars that were to be the making of
Bleakridge as a residential suburb. It had also been predicted that
even Hanbridge men would come to live at Bleakridge now. Land was
changing owners at Bleakridge, and rising in price. Complete streets of
lobbied cottages grew at angles from the main road with the rapidity of
that plant which pushes out strangling branches more quickly than a man
can run. And these lobbied cottages were at once occupied.
Cottage-property in the centre of the town depreciated.
The land fronting the main road was destined not for cottages, but for
residences, semi-detached or detached. Osmond Orgreave had a good deal
of this land under his control. He did not own it, he hawked it. Like
all provincial, and most London, architects, he was a land-broker in
addition to being an architect. Before obtaining a commission to build
a house, he frequently had to create the commission himself by selling a
convenient plot, and then persuading the purchaser that if he wished to
retain the respect of the community he must put on the plot a house
worthy of the plot. The Orgreave family all had expensive tastes, and
it was Osmond Orgreave's task to find most of the money needed for the
satisfaction of those tastes. He always did find it, because the
necessity was upon him, but he did not always find it easily. Janet
would say sometimes, "We mustn't be so hard on father this month;
really, lately we've never seen him with his cheque-book out of his
hand." Undoubtedly the clothes on Janet's back were partly responsible
for the celerity with which building land at Bleakridge was `developed,'
just after the installation of steam-cars in Trafalgar Road.
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