The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South

We may now, somewhat belatedly, after recounting these varied annals of the way to Brighton, start along the road itself, coming from the south side of Westminster Bridge to Kennington.

No one scanning the grey vista of the Kennington Road would, on sight, accuse Kennington of owning a past; but, as a sheer matter of fact, it is an historic place. It is the “Chenintun” of Domesday Book, and the Cyningtun or KÖningtun—the King’s town—of an even earlier time. It was indeed a royal manor belonging to Canute, and the site of the palace where his son, Hardicanute, died, mad drunk, in 1042. Edward the Third annexed it to his Duchy of Cornwall, and even yet, after the vicissitudes of nine hundred years, the Prince of Wales, as Duke of Cornwall, owns house property here. Kennington Park, too, has its own sombre romance, for it was an open common until 1851, and a favourite place of execution for Surrey malefactors. Here the minor prisoners among the Scottish rebels captured by the Duke of Cumberland in the ’45 were executed, those of greater consideration being beheaded on Tower Hill. It is an odd coincidence that, among the lesser titles of “Butcher Cumberland” himself was that of Earl of Kennington.

At this junction of roads, where the Kennington Road, the Kennington Park 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.”

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, 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 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 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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