Charles G. Harper

STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN—KEW—CHISWICK—MORTLAKE—BARNES

There is a waterside walk from Brentford to Kew Bridge, commanding a full view of that new and solid, perhaps also stolid, structure of stone, opened May 20, 1903. The old bridge was a more satisfactory affair to the eye, although its roadway was steep, rising sharply as it did from either end to an apex over the middle arch. The arches, boldly and beautifully semicircular, were delightful to look upon, not like the flattened-out segmental spans of the new bridge, which have a heavy and ungraceful appearance, looking for all the world as though they had settled heavily in the making upon their haunches and would presently fall, flop, into the river.

Things change, after all, but slowly here. Much has gone of late years, but much is still left. Here, for example, stands a riverside inn the “Oxford and Cambridge,” with a delightful little lawn, exquisitely green, behind a low wall that gives upon the towing-path. It has a very rural look, amid urban surroundings, and at the rear you may yet see a range of old malthouses, with cowled ventilators upon their old richly-red tiled roofs, in every way resembling their fellows far down in Kent. But they are to be let or sold, and for long past the side of them giving upon the road has served the purpose of an advertising station; so the end of these things is at hand.

Kew—called on some old maps “Cue”—across the bridge into Surrey, stands grouped around its green, as of old; the curious church, which is half Byzantine and half of the Queen Anne method, presenting an outline so remarkably suggestive of an early type of locomotive engine that one would scarce be surprised to find some day that it had steamed off.

Kew Green is charming, but there is a dirty little slum down by the riverside, with labyrinthine alleys and corners where children make dust-and mud-pies and women in aprons stand at doorways with arms akimbo and gossip. Here is a street of modern cottages with an odd old name: “Westerly Ware.”

I do not think Kew can be condemned as being go-ahead and ultra-modern. Time was, somewhere about 1880, when a tramway was laid along the Kew Gardens road from the foot of Kew Bridge into Richmond. It was regarded when new as a very rash and deplorable and innovating thing, and the tinkle of its horse-bells was anything but pleasing to the ears of the wealthy residents of the mostly peculiarly ostentatious villas on the way. But “circumstances alter cases,” as the old adage tritely tells us, and now that few provincial towns of any size are without their electric tramways, this little single-line horsed tramway is come to be regarded almost in the nature of a genuine antique. You take your seat upon one of the little cars and wait and wait, and still wait. It is very pleasant and drowsy in summer to wait until the next tram down has left the way clear at one of the occasional sidings, but if you are in a hurry, it is quicker to walk. I do not think any one really wants electric tramways into Richmond, though, no doubt, they will come.

When they do, there will be introduced an altogether undesirable element of hurry into a road that at present veritably exhales leisure. There is a certain Æsthetic pleasure in lingering along this road, for although the architecture of those villas is perhaps not the last word in art, their gardens are beautiful and are easily to be seen. Would that Kew Gardens were so readily visible. But the churlish Government department that formerly had the management of the gardens built a high and ugly brick wall the whole length of the road, so only the tree-tops are visible over it, even to travellers on tramcar roofs; and no one has yet had the public spirit to demolish the useless thing and to substitute an iron railing in place of it. One opening, indeed, was made, about 1874, when a charming red-brick building by Eden Nesfield was erected, just inside the grounds, and the peep it gives into Paradise, so to speak, only makes one the more inclined to ask why any of the wall should be allowed to remain.

Strand-on-the-Green is the name of the picturesque waterside row of houses of many shapes and sizes that extends along the Middlesex foreshore from Kew Bridge towards Chiswick. It is a kind of home-grown Venice, and sometimes, when the Thames is in flood, its feet are dabbled in the water, and ingenious ways with planks and clay are resorted to for the keeping of the river out of ground floors. But since the Thames has become more and more curbed and regulated, these occasions have grown and are still growing fewer. I do not know where is the “Green” of Strand-on-the-Green, and the “strand” itself that stretches down to the river at low tide from the brick-and-asphalted walk in front of the village, or hamlet—by whichever name we are rightly to entitle the place—is mostly mud, where the rankly-growing grass ceases. Old boats and barges that long since grew beyond any more patching and mending, and were not worth even breaking up, have been left here to lie about, half in mud and half in water, grass growing in them.

And an island lies in mid-stream; an island on which, for many years past, men may have been observed wheeling barrows to and fro and engaged in other apparently aimless activities that certainly during the last thirty years have had no beginning and no end. It is a picturesque island, with flourishing trees, and it looks a most desirable Robinson Crusoe kind of a place, especially when viewed from the trains, that just here cross the river on an ugly lattice-girder bridge. A timber gantry projects from one side, and things are done with old boilers and launches. Repairs are occasionally made to the banks of this island, and they have at last resulted in making it a very solid and substantial place, faced upstream and down and round about with bags of concrete; so that no conceivable Thames flood that ever was, or can be, could possibly wash it away.

There is half a mile of Strand-on-the-Green. It is a fairly complete and representative community, comprising in its one row of houses those of an almost stately residential class, including Zoffany House, where the painter of that name lived and died at last in 1810; some lesser houses, a number of cottages housing a waterside population, three inns, the “Bull’s Head,” the “City Barge,” and the “Bell and Crown”; and some shops of an obscure kind, such as one might expect to see only in remote villages. A highly-sketchable old malthouse or two and a row of almshouses complete the picture. As to the almshouses, they are going on for the completion of their second century, as a tablet on them declares:

Also the Port of London Authority has an office overlooking the river, and a firm of motor-boat builders has established works here, amid the ancient barges—a curious modern touch.

Strand-on-the-Green is a hamlet of Chiswick, long a delightful retreat of the Dukes of Devonshire, whose stately mansion of Chiswick House in its surrounding park dignified the old village. But when a suburban population grew up around the neighbourhood of that lordly dwelling-house the owners left it. There is an antipathy between dukes and democracy comparable only to oil and water. Even the neighbourhood of a highly-respectable (and highly-rented) suburb renders the air enervating to ducal lungs, even though the ducal purse be inordinately enriched by the ground-rents of it. It seems that when a man becomes a duke the sight of other men’s chimney-pots grows unendurable; unless indeed they be the chimney-pots of another duke; and so he is fain to seclude himself in the middle of his biggest park, in the most solitary part of the country he can find. The higher his rank in the peerage, the more cubic feet of air he requires.

What I should like to see—but what no one ever will see—would be a duke graciously continuing to reside in the midst of the suburb that has grown up around him, and to which he owes a good part of his living, and being quite nice to his neighbours. Not only patronising and charitable to the poor, but just as human and accessible as middle-class snobbery would allow him to be.

It cannot be said that the local developments have been at all swift, or more than very moderately successful. For example, as you proceed from Strand-on-the-Green to Chiswick, you come first of all to Grove Park, where there is a railway station of that name which, together with an ornate public-house and a few shops and houses, wears a look as though left in the long ago to be called for, and apparently not wanted. I have known Grove Park for forty years, and it is just the same now as then. “The last place made” was the description of it long ago given me by a railway official there, pleased to see a human being; and although many places have come into existence since then, it still wears that ultimate look.

In the long ago, when I went to school in the Chiswick high road at Turnham Green, at a boarding-school that occupied an old mansion called “Belmont House,” we fronted almost directly opposite Duke’s Avenue, which still remained at that date just an avenue of trees, with never a house along the whole length of it, until you came to the noble wrought-iron gates leading into the awful ducal sanctities themselves. One might freely roam along the delightful avenue, but the great iron gates were, it seemed, always jealously shut; and even had they not been, one’s vague ideas of a something terrible in unknown ducal shape would have prevented trespass. I have seen not a few dukes since then, and haven’t been in the least frightened, strange to say.

Nowadays the needs or the greed, I know not which, of their successive Graces have caused the land along either side of Duke’s Avenue to be let for building upon; and although, as already remarked, the trees remain, and are indeed finer than of yore, numerous very nice villas may be found there; a little dank perhaps in autumn and in wet weather generally, when those trees hold much moisture in suspense, but still, quite desirable villas.

The wonderfully fine old wrought-iron gates were really much finer in the artistic way than one ever suspected, as a schoolboy, and they were flanked by rusticated stone piers surmounted by sphinxes. Exactly what they were like you may see any day in London, for they were removed in recent years to Piccadilly, there to ornament the entrance to the Duke’s town house, and to render the exterior of that hideous building, if it might be, a thought less hideous. They have had their adventures, having originally formed the chief entrance to Heathfield House, Turnham Green, inhabited about the middle of the eighteenth century by Viscount Dunkerron. A Duke of Devonshire acquired them in 1837.

There were very frequent grand spreads and entertainments of various gorgeous kinds at Chiswick House in the distant days when one went to school at Turnham Green. His late Majesty Edward the Seventh, of blessed memory, occasionally, as Prince of Wales, had Chiswick House in summer-time between 1866 and 1879. He was not perhaps so universally popular then; for those were the days when Sir Charles Dilke was posing as a red-hot Radical, and furious persons of that kidney talked of republics and all that kind of nonsense. But at anyrate, rank and fashion were to be observed flocking to the princely garden-parties here; and very stunning the carriages and the horses, the harness and the liveries looked; and very beautiful, it seemed, the ladies with their sunshades and dainty toilettes. Those were days long before any one could have predicted the present motor-car era, and no one could ever have imagined that the daughters of those daintily attired ones would be content to drive along amid dust and stinks, and to tie up their countenances with wrappings that sometimes look like fly-papers, and at others like dishclouts. And those, too, were the days not only before electric tramways, but also before even horsed trams, along the Chiswick high road; and Turnham Green (the worthy proprietor of our school called it “Chiswick,” because it looked better) was a quite rustic place, and the distance of five miles to home in London seemed to one person at least a very far cry.

These be tales of eld, and now Turnham Green is, to all intents and purposes, London, and shops have long been built where the school stood, and that dark high road—upon whose infrequent pedestrians, certain schoolboys, packed off to bed all too early, and not in the least tired, were used to expend all the available soap and other handy missiles, from lofty windows—has become a highway even more than a thought too brilliantly lit at night.

What remains of the park and gardens around Chiswick House now looks sorry enough. The place came into the hands of the Dukes of Devonshire in 1753, when William Cavendish, the fourth duke, who had married the daughter and heiress of the third and last Earl of Burlington, succeeded on that nobleman’s death. It was this Earl of Burlington who had created the glories of Chiswick. A princely patron of the arts, especially those of architecture and sculpture, he had brought home with him from his travels in Italy a taste for the grand exotic manner in the building of mansions and the planning of gardens; and built the house here in 1729, after the Palladian model. It has been somewhat altered since, but the general idea remains, and sufficiently proves that the grand manner, learned abroad under summer skies, is not the comfortable manner as evolved by the necessities of a less ardent clime. English architects have been slow to unlearn the classic fallacy, but the home-grown architecture wins in the end, not from any appreciation of the artistic merits or demerits of the many methods, but on the score of sheer comfort or discomfort in living.

The gardens of Chiswick House abounded in formal walks and long vistas, with conventional “ruins” and groups of antique statuary, but most of these are now gone.

Chiswick House, deserted by its owners, became a lunatic asylum, and stands at last more than a little forlorn, with new streets and roads everywhere around its grounds, and a newer suburb with the projected name of “Burlington” arising by piece-meal, instead of being created ad hoc, as the intention originally was. Burlington is an excellent name; substantial people, with good bank balances should surely reside at such. It radiates respectability; no one could be ashamed of it. I can easily imagine confiding tradesfolk giving unlimited credit to residents at Burlington; but it has not yet come into being, and the vast wilderness-like expanse of Duke’s Meadows, projecting far southward, like a great cape between two bends of the river, remains a tussocky place of desolation, looking over to Mortlake.

In Burlington Lane, which is an old name, is a new length of villas, “The Cresent,” its name so misspelled, and kept so with the valiance of ignorance, uncorrected, for at least five years past.

What remains of the old village of Chiswick lies considerably to the east of all these developments, and beside the river. There, past Hogarth House, where that famous painter lived and worked—now a museum and showplace at sixpence a head, in memory of him—stands old Chiswick church. Restorations and additions have left really very little of the original building, but it wears a very plausible appearance of age. The weather-vane exhibits a figure of St. Nicholas, to whom the church is dedicated, standing in a boat and holding a staff surmounted by a cross.

A strange inscription may be seen on the churchyard wall, at the east end. It seems to tell of a time when Chiswick was a village in every rustic circumstance:

No one appears to know who was William Walker the Fifth, and history is equally silent on the subject of the others of that dynasty.

The neighbourhood is now one of remarkably striking contrasts. By the church stands the “Burlington Arms,” an old inn claiming a remote origin, early in the fifteenth century, and with obvious honesty, for the ancient oaken timbers remain to bear witness to the fact. It is a quite humble, but cosy, little inn, astonishingly dwarfed by a great towering fortress-like brewery at the back; as though Beer had withdrawn itself into a final stronghold, there to defend itself to the last vat. Opposite the inn and this Bung Castle stands a stately red-brick mansion of early in the eighteenth century, with fine wrought-iron garden-gates. Up the street are other fine old mansions, mingled with squalid streets; and round by the riverside is Chiswick Mall, with other noble houses of the olden times. Osiers are cut even to this day on Chiswick Eyot, the reedy island opposite.

Such are the contrasts of Chiswick, one of the last outposts of rural things in these parts. To find the last we must travel on through the Mall and on to the more sophisticated Mall of Hammersmith; thence proceeding across the bridge and along the Hammersmith Bridge Road to Barnes. That is the very last village. Near by is Mortlake. No one has ever satisfactorily explained that place-name, nor attempted to define the mortuus lacus—the dead, or stagnant lake—that would seem to have originated it. Nowadays it is rather to a dead level of commonplace that Mortlake is descending, in the surrounding jerry-building activities. All that is left of the old church is the tower, apparently restored in the time of Henry the Eighth, for a tablet on the western face is inscribed “Vivat R.H. 8, 1543.”

To speak of Barnes in these days of suburban expansion as a “village” may at the first mention appear to be unduly stretching a point, but although Suburbia spreads for miles in every direction, and although Barnes is completely enfolded by modern developments, the ancient village is still where it used to be. It is true that a frequent service of motor-omnibuses does by no means tend to the preservation of the old-time rural amenities of Barnes, nor do those who remember the Barnes of thirty or forty years ago welcome the sudden irruption of modern shops and flats opposite the old parish church; but very much of old Barnes is left embedded within these twentieth-century innovations; and while Barnes Common remains, it is not likely that the place will decline to the common characterless condition of an ordinary suburb. Of the original Barnes—the “Berne” of Domesday Book—the place owned by the canons of St. Paul’s, before the Reformation, nothing, of course, is left; and we may but dimly picture that rural riverside manor, then considered remote from London, with its great spicaria, or barns (the barns that were so much larger, or more numerous, than the usual type that they gave the place its name); but there is a half squalid, half quaint appearance in the narrow, winding streets and lanes that hints, not obscurely, of the eighteenth or even of the seventeenth century. The church, too, although an examination of the interior proves it to have been, in common with most other once rural churches round London, swept almost entirely bare of ancient features, is picturesquely placed, and its sixteenth-century red-brick tower, partly clothed with ivy, looks venerable. There is little of interest within the church, beyond the somewhat curiously-worded epitaph to a former parson, which deserves the tribute of quotation:

The really most sentimentally interesting thing here is something that might well be overlooked by ninety-nine of every hundred whose curiosity prompts them to enter the churchyard; and it is probably so overlooked. This is the not at all striking tomb of one Edward Rose, citizen of London, who died in 1653, and lies buried in the churchyard, against the south wall of the church, by the great yew tree. He left £20 for the purchase of an acre of land, from the rent of which he ordained that his grave should be maintained in decent order, and bequeathed “£5 for making a frame or partition of wood” where he had appointed his burying-place; and further ordered three rose-trees, or more, to be planted there. The bequests were to the minister, churchwardens, and overseers for the time being, so long as they should cause the wooden partition to be kept in repair and the rose-trees preserved or others planted in their places from time to time, as they should decay.

Thus it is that, duly honouring his sentimental fancy, rose-trees are to this day to be seen here, enclosed within a low wooden railing.