The place is now a busy suburb, like every other in most respects, and remarkable only for the extraordinary number and variety of its places of worship. Every brand of religion is represented here, but all that remains of the old parish church is the venerable mediÆval tower, hard by where the North London Railway crosses over the road. The body of the old building was demolished, on the plea that it was dangerous, in 1798: really, the times were out of sympathy with Gothic architecture, and any excuse was made to serve for the building of the hideous, nondescript pagan church that now stands close at hand. The old tower keeps watch and ward, beside the thronged modern street, over that great graveyard where the dead of 900 years lie, and pious hands, with the first year of the present century, have erected a tall Celtic cross of Kilkenny marble, in memory of “all who died in faith.”

It is a hard-working population that lives at Hackney, whose by-streets and alleys are very grey and mean; but somewhere in this very neighbourhood the hero of Mr. Gus Elen’s song had his “pretty little garden.” That was supposed to be a comic song, but it was one with a certain amount of pathos in it. It is not a pathos discernible by the builder, who finds his greatest satisfaction in pushing London still further out into the country, but it is there all the same. That Hackney hero was as fond of his backyard garden and of his somewhat problematical neighbourhood to the country as many an owner of vast estates, and took a greater personal delight in them. Thus went the refrain to one of the verses:—

Ay! if it wasn’t for the houses in between: there’s the tragedy of it! Do you not perceive the broad basis of pathos beneath the fun: that pitiful craving of the natural man for the country, and his heart-sickness of the pavements, while the fresh, green countryside is practically so remote, and is growing still more distant?

Lower Clapton Road leads out of Hackney, and in half a mile brings us, past the site of Lower Clapton toll-gate, to the beginning of the Lea Bridge Road, one of the very few routes by which London and the Essex suburbs can join hands, across the river Lea and its marshy fringes.

A favourite piece of advice of the late Lord Salisbury to politicians weak at the knees with apprehension of Russia’s advance in Asia was, “Consult large maps.” We need not stop to consider how far that overrated statesman, in consulting maps too large, was the victim of his own cynical advice; but we may apply it, frankly and without any cynical meaning, here. Thus, referring to a large map of London and its environs, you will soon perceive this restricted choice of roads between London and Essex. The Lea and the broad marshes of West Ham, Stratford, Hackney, Leyton, Walthamstow, and Tottenham have always offered great obstacles to road-makers, and have stemmed the tide of London’s expansion in this direction until quite recent years. Large maps of the London districts, scored with a dark tint of streets, still show a long strip of white, indicating ground still unbuilt upon, along the Lea valley from Blackwall to Edmonton, where it merges into the country, and in all those ten miles there are but three high roads leading from Middlesex into Essex. One is that which conducts from Poplar to Plaistow, and so on to Barking and Southend; another is the Norwich Road, from Bow to Stratford and on to Norwich by way of Chelmsford and Colchester; the third is our present route, through Clapton to the crossing of the Lea at Lea Bridge Road. Other crossings are few, without exception obscure and bad, and generally lead over roadways composed of clinkers, scrap-iron, broken bottles, and tin-clippings to morasses, or to the gates of soap factories, bone manure works, sewage-beds, and other useful but objectionable institutions of like nature. The Lea Bridge Road itself, although broad and straight and leading on to the country, has perhaps the worst surface of any road in or near London, not excepting even that monumentally bad roadway, the Victoria Embankment. Before 1757, when the predecessor of the present Lea Bridge was built and a roadway made, to open up communication between Middlesex, Epping Forest, and the Essex villages, the Lea was spanned only by an ancient and narrow bridge, and the roads leading up to it were impossible for wheeled traffic. At that period the best way to reach the Forest was by Stratford, West Ham, and Leytonstone, and a road through Hackney and Clapton is shown in maps so late as 1756 leading to the “World’s End,” which was apparently the significant name of the track that then wandered across the marshes to the Lea.

The present line of the Lea Bridge Road owes its existence to the Lea Bridge Turnpike Road Act of 1756, and is found duly set out on Rocque’s map of 1763, where it is continued on to Walthamstow as “Butterfield’s Lane”; but the first bridge was not built until 1772. By that time the coaches had begun to run—or, as the advertisement of the time phrased it, to “set forth”—but they, and the traffic to Newmarket generally, went the Stratford and West Ham route until the early ’20’s