XI

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!

KENNINGTON GATE: DERBY DAY, 1839.From an engraving after J. Pollard.

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 £15,000 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, twelvefeet 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 Marché, 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 werebuilt 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.

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—amemento 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 sincereWill sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here;The youthful bard will pluck a floweret paleFrom 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.”

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,theStreet—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 toPortus 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.

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-timecharacter 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, whoin 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 theDoctor, if ever it revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quantity, although it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.

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.

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 “Præterita.”

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.

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 inA.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 notpretend 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.

GROWTH OF CROYDON

By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still Croydon grows.

In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620 they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to be a “very obscure and darke place.” Archbishop Abbot “expounded” it by felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.

The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. Itwasthe North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last few years;but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks “improvement”; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good Whitgift’s noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play monkey-tricks—when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.

Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, “The Hospital of the Holy Trinity,” inscribed high up on the wall, seems strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.

There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, theoppositeside of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.

It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury and eloquent with the mottoQui dat pauperi non indigebit, the stranger has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old Aubrey quaintly puts it, “a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a college,by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late Archbishop of Canterbury.” The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation: twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each £40 and £30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital so long as of good behaviour, but “obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde of charmmynge, or witchcrafte” are punished by the statutes with expulsion.

THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.

The fourth side of the quadrangle is occupied by the Hall, the Warden’s rooms, and the Chapel, all in very much the same condition as at their building. The old oak table in the Hall is dated 1614, and much of the stained glass is of sixteenth century date.

But it is in the Warden’s rooms, above, that the eye is feasted with old woodwork, ancient panelling, black with lapse of time, quaint muniment chests, curious records, and the like. These were the rooms specially reserved for his personal use during his lifetime by the pious Archbishop Whitgift.

Here is a case exhibiting the original titles to the lands on which the Hospital is built, and with which it is endowed; formidable sheets of parchment, bearing many seals, and, what does duty for one, a gold angel of Edward VI.

These are ideal rooms; rooms which delight with their unspoiled sixteenth-century air. The sun streams through the western windows over their deep embrasures, lighting up so finely the darksome woodwork into patches of brilliance that there must be those who envy the Warden his lodging, so perfect a survival of more spacious days.

TheChapel, Hospital of the Holy Trinity.

A little chapel duly completes the Hospital, and here is not pomp of carving nor vanity of blazoning, for the good Archbishop, mindful of economy, would none of these. The seats and benches are contemporary with the building, and are rough-hewn. On the western wall hangs the founder’s portrait, black-framed and mellow, rescued from the boys of the Whitgift schools ere quite destroyed, and on the other walls are the portrait of a lady, supposed to bethe Archbishop’s niece, and a ghastly representation of Death as a skeleton digging a grave. But all these things are seen but dimly, for the light is very feeble.

The High Street of Croydon reallyishigh, for it occupies a ridge and looks down on the right hand on the Old Town and the valley of the Wandle, or “Wandel.” The centre of Croydon has, in fact, been removed from down below, where the church and palace first arose, on the line of the old Roman road, to this ridge, where within the historic period the High Street was only a bridle-path avoiding the little town in the valley.

The High Street, incidentally the Brighton Road as well, is nowadays a very modern and commercial-looking thoroughfare, and owes that appearance, and its comparative width, to the works effected under the Croydon Improvement Act of 1890. Already Croydon, given a Mayor and Town Council in 1883, had grown so greatly that the narrow street was incapable of accommodating the traffic; while the low-lying, and in other senses low, quarter of Market Street and Middle Row offended the dignity and self-respect of the new-born Corporation. The Town Hall stood at that time in the High Street: a curious example of bastard classic architecture, built in 1808. Near by was the “Greyhound,” an old coaching and posting inn, with one of those picturesque gallows signs straddling across the street, of which those of the “George” at Crawley and the “Greyhound” at Sutton are surviving examples. That of the “Cock” at Sutton disappeared in 1898, and the similar signs of the “Crown,” opposite the Whitgift Hospital, and of the “King’s Arms” vanished many years ago.

The “Greyhound” was the principal inn of Croydon in the old times. The first mention of it is found in1563, the parish register of that year containing the entry, “Nicholas Vode (Wood) the son of the good wyfe of the grewond was buryed the xxix day of January.” The voluminous John Taylor mentions it in 1624 as one of the two Croydon inns, and it was the headquarters of General Fairfax in 1645, when Cromwell vehemently disputed with him under its roof on the conduct of the campaign, urging more severe measures.

Following upon the alteration, the “Greyhound” was rebuilt. Its gallows sign disappeared at the same time, when a curious point arose respecting the post supporting it on the opposite pavement. Erected in the easy-going times when such a matter was nothing more than a little friendly and neighbourly concession, the square foot of ground it occupied had by lapse of time become freehold property, and as such it was duly scheduled and purchased by the Improvements Committee. A sum of £400 was claimed for freehold and loss of advertisement, and eventually £350 was paid.

RUSKIN

I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways. I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is referred to in “Præterita”:

“... Of my father’s ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother’s more than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the ‘Old King’s Head’ in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint her Simone Memmi’s ‘King’s Head’ for a sign.” And he adds: “Meantime my aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the little house still standing—or which was so four months ago[7]—thefashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop, in the second story” (sic).

There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts createdad hoc, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a handkerchief.

The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about the period of Croydon’s first expansion, when the οἱ πολλοί impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces, neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington.

Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration, after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon’s monument, however, still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.

The vicars of Croydon have in the long past been a varied kind. The Reverend William Clewer, who held the living from 1660 until 1684, when he was ejected, was a “smiter,” an extortioner, and a criminal; but Roland Phillips, a predecessor by some two hundred years, was something of a seer. Preaching in 1497, he declared that “we” (the Roman Catholics) “must root out printing, or printing will root out us.”Already, in the twenty years of its existence, it had undermined superstition, and was presently to root out the priests, even as he foresaw.

THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE

Unquestionably the sight best worth seeing in Croydon is that next-door neighbour of the church, the Archbishop’s Palace. Comparatively few are those who see it, because it is just a little way off the road and is private property and shown only by favour and courtesy. When the Archbishops deserted the place it was sold under the Act of Parliament of 1780 and became the factory of a calico-printer and a laundry. Some portions were demolished, the moat was filled up, the “minnows and the springs of Wandel” of which Ruskin speaks, were moved on, and mean little streets quartered the ground immediately adjoining. But, although all those facts are very grim and grey, it remains true that the old palace is a place very well worth seeing.

It was again sold in 1887, and purchased by the Duke of Newcastle, who made it over to the so-called “Kilburn Sisters,” who maintain it as a girls’ school. I do not know, nor seek to inquire, by what right, or with what object, the “Sisters” who conduct the school affect the dress of Roman Catholics, while professing the tenets of the Church of England; but under their rule the historic building has been well treated, and the chapel and other portions repaired, with every care for their interesting antiquities, under the eyes of expert and jealous anti-restorers. The Great Hall, chief feature of the place, still maintains its fifteenth century chestnut hammerbeam roof and armorial corbels; the Long Gallery, where Queen Elizabeth danced, the State bedroom where she slept, the Guard Room, quarters of the Archbishops’ bodyguard, are all existing; and the Chapel, with oaken bench-ends bearing the sculptured arms of Laud, of Juxon, and others, and the Archbishops’ pew, has lately been brought back to decent condition. Here, too, is the exquisite oaken gallery at the western end, known as “Queen Elizabeth’s Pew.”

That imperious queen and indefatigable tourist paid several visits to Croydon Palace, and her characteristic insolence and freedom of speech were let loose upon the unoffending wife of Archbishop Parker when she took her leave. “Madam,” she said, “I may not call you; mistress I am ashamed to call you; and so I know not what to call you; but, however, I thank you.” It seems evident that the daughter of Henry the Eighth had, despite her Protestantism, an historic preference for a celibate clergy.

Down amid what remains of the old town is a street oddly named “Pump Pail.” Its strange name causes many a visit of curiosity, but it is a common-place street, and contains neither pail nor pump, and nothing more romantic than a tin tabernacle. But this, it appears, is not an instance of things not being what they seem, for in the good old days before the modern water-supply, one of the parish pumps stood here, and from it a woman supplied a house-to-house delivery of water in pails. The explanation seems too obvious to be true, and sure enough, a variant kicks the “pail” over, and tells us that it is properly Pump Pale, the Place of the Pump, “pale” being an ancient word, much used in old law-books to indicate a district, limit of jurisdiction, and so forth.

JABEZ BALFOUR

The modern side of all these things is best exemplified by the beautiful Town Hall which Croydon has provided for itself, in place of the ugly old building, demolished in 1893. It is a noble building, and stands on a site worthy of it, with broad approaches that permit good views, without which the best of buildings is designed in vain. It marks the starting point of the history of modern Croydon, and is a far cry from the old building of the bygone Local Board days, whenthe traffic of the High Street was regulated—or supposed to be regulated—by the Beadle, and the rates were low, and Croydon was a country town, and everything was dull and humdrum. It was a little unfortunate that the first Mayor of Croydon and Liberal Member of Parliament for Tamworth, that highly imaginative financier Jabez Spencer Balfour, should have been wanted by the police, a fugitive from justice brought back from the Argentine, and a criminal convicted of fraud as a company promoter; but accidents will happen, and the Town Council did its best, by turning his portrait face to the wall, and by subsequently (as it is reported) losing it. He was sent in 1895, a little belatedly, to fourteen years’ penal servitude, and the victims of his “Liberator” frauds went into the workhouse for the most part, or died. He ceased to be V 460 on release on licence, and became again Jabez Spencer Balfour, and so died, obscurely.

The Liberal Party in the Government had, over Jabez Balfour, one of its several narrow escapes from complete moral ruin; for Balfour was on extremely friendly terms with the members of Gladstone’s ministry, 1892-94, and was within an ace of being given a Cabinet post. Let us pause to consider the odd affinity between Jabez Balfour and Trebitsch Lincoln and Liberal politics.

The Town Hall—ahem! Municipal Buildings—stands on the site of the disused and abolished Central Croydon station, and the neighbourhood of it is glimpsed afar off by the fine tower, 170 ft. in height. All the departments of the Corporation are housed under one roof, including the fine Public Library and its beautiful feature, the Braithwaite Hall. The Town Council is housed in that municipal splendour without which no civic body can nowadays deliberate in comfort, and even the vestibule is worthy of a palace. I take the following “official” description of it.

CROYDON TOWN HALL.

“On either side of the vestibule are rooms for Porter and telephone. Beyond are the hall and principal staircase, the shafts of the columns and the pilasters of which are of a Spanish marble, a sort of jasper, called Rose d’Andalusia; the bases and skirtings are of grand antique. The capitals, architrave,cornices, handrails, etc., are of red Verona marble; the balusters, wall-lining and frieze of the entablature of alabaster, and the dado of the ground floor is gris-rouge marble. The flooring is of Roman mosaic of various marbles, purposely kept simple in design and quiet in colouring. One of the windows has the arms of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and the other the Borough arms, in stained glass. Above the dado at the first floor level the walls are painted a delicate green tint, relieved by a powdering of C’s and Civic Crowns. The doors and their surroundings are of walnut wood.”

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