The Lea Bridge Road, although a broad and direct thoroughfare, makes a bad beginning, and branches off narrowly and in an obscure manner from the wide Lower Clapton Road. The present bridge was built in 1821. The road itself is a singular combination of picturesqueness and sordid vulgarity. Badly founded on the marshes that stretch, water-logged, on either side of the river Lea, its two miles’ length of roadway is full of ridges and depressions that no mere surface repairs will ever remedy, and nothing less than reconstruction from its foundations will ever cure the unequal subsidences of what should be the finest highway out of London into Essex.

The Lea Bridge Road is in some ways an exceptional thoroughfare. Although of urban character, it is largely a road without houses; for the marshy fields through which it runs, elevated in the manner of a causeway, have kept the builder at a wholesome distance, and from the Lea Bridge and other points one looks over wide level tracts of green meadows to where Upper Clapton, and Stamford Hill beyond, not unpicturesquely crown the heights with villa roofs and church spires, and seem with a superior air of riches and high-class villadom to look down across the valley of the Lea on to the thronged wage-earning populations of clerkly and artizan Walthamstow. You think, as you gaze from this midway vantage-ground and consider these things, of the “great gulf” set between Lazarus and Dives—with the essential difference that here, at any rate, Dives had the advantage.

A halt on the Lea Bridge Road is certainly stimulating to the imagination. On any summer midday that does not happen to be a Saturday, a Sunday, or a Bank Holiday, the contemplative man has it all to himself. Lazarus, from Walthamstow, in his many thousands of clerks and workmen, has departed, long ago, for the counting-houses and workshops of the city; and Dives from Clapton has, in more leisurely fashion, followed them to his office, or meeting of directors. The dirty, out-of-date tramcars that ply along the road, and seem never to be washed, are no longer crowded, and the traffic consists chiefly of costermongers’ carts and harrows, on their way to their daily house-to-house calls in the countless streets of that sprawling Walthamstow and that loose-limbed Leyton. The marshes, the distant frontier of banked-up houses, and even the long railway viaducts that stretch like monstrous centipedes across the levels, look interesting, and the water-loving willows and graceful clumps of the bushy poplar are not wanting to add something of beauty to the scene. There is, too, if you do but choose to look for it, a kind of skulking romance to be found on the Essex side of the Lea, where the rustic cottages come down to the fringe of the marsh; their faces away from, their back gardens towards it. Quite humble cottages, roofed with the old red pantiles, and sometimes weatherboarded; the crazy wooden palings of their gardens patched and mended with the oddest timber salvage, from the unnecessary sturdiness of an odd post from a four-poster bedstead, to the blue-painted staves of petroleum barrels and wrecked wheels of bygone conveyances. The posts of clothes-lines are permanent features of these gardens, and on good “drying days” the most intimate articles of underwear flaunt a defiant challenge across the valley to the prim susceptibilities of Upper Clapton and Stamford Hill—which put their washing out. It is not, however, in the under-linen and the stockings, very darny and limp, and lacking the interest of a shapely leg, that the skulking romance, already alluded to, lies. No, not at all: in fact, otherwise. You may perceive it in the varying lengths of those back gardens, which in their yard or so of more or less infallibly register the degree of courage or impudence possessed by the original squatters and their immediate descendants upon this land. For the sites of these cottages and their little pleasaunces were all originally stolen, cabbaged, pinched, nicked—what you will—from the common land of the marshes; and where you see a yard or two of extra length, there may be observed, set down in concrete form, the measure of that courage possessed by those squatters in times gone by. Such illegitimate intakes are no longer possible, for publicity alone, even were it not for the evidence of the Ordnance maps, would forbid, and the romance of them is a fossil survival, rather than a living thing.

The engine-houses, pumping water and filter-beds of the East London Water Company are the principal features of the Lea Bridge Road, and one would not deny them under certain conditions, and at a certain distance, a grandly impressive quality. At a distance, assuredly, for viewed close at hand, with the giant machinery seen through the windows, slowly pulsing up and down to the accompaniment of a warm scent of oil, and with the lofty chimneys that in their specious ornamentation look afar off almost like Venetian campanili, seen really to be sooty smokestacks, it is astonishing how commonplace they become. And when you think of it, considering the matter on the basis of a wide acquaintance with waterworks, how singularly dry, husky, coaly, and gritty, and void of any suggestion of water these gigantic engine-houses of the great water companies always are!

The Lea Bridge Road, and indeed Woodford also, and Epping Forest generally, are to be avoided by quiet folks on Saturdays, Sundays, and at times of public holiday, when the costermonger and his purple-faced “missus” drive their cowhocked ponies and attendant traps recklessly to the “Wake Arms,” to the “Robin Hood,” or to the pubs of Chingford, and all the waggonettes and all the beanfeasters in the East End of London are making merry in elephantine fashion.

The road finally leaves Walthamstow and the valley of the Lea at Knott’s Green and Whip’s Cross—at the present time an abject, down-at-heel compromise between a striving unsuccessful suburb and the open country. But in these latter days, when the neighbourhood of London changes with such startling rapidity, the true description of to-day may very reasonably be the misleading record of to-morrow, and that squalid air of failure which belongs to those places at the present time of writing may already, ere these lines attain the dignity of print, have given place to an era of substantial and prosperous expansion.

Nothing is more depressing than the unsuccessful suburb, created out of nothing by the too sanguine builder in one of his inflated moments. It brings disaster, not only upon the author of its being, who reaps the harvest of his rashness in foreclosed mortgages and the Bankruptcy Court, but upon those enterprising callow tradesfolk who, embarking upon businesses of their own with insufficient resources, cannot tide over the time of no trade, and leave a record of their failure in deserted shops still proclaiming the virtues of the tea that no one ever bought and the advantages of those “bargain sales” that failed to attract.

Whip’s Cross, as its name would imply, stands at a junction of roads. It forms the entrance to Epping Forest, and is said to have obtained the first part of its name from being the place whence the Forest deer-stealers were formerly whipped at the cart’s tail; but such things are now quite put out of sight and forgotten in these marchlands of town and suburbs.

This is Leyton, twin sister of Walthamstow. Vast populations are springing up, and interminable streets of little houses, the meaner and more pitiful because so pretentious. A little while, and the cheaply-built “villas” develop ominous cracks, the doors and windows warp and refuse to shut, or when shut decline to be opened, and the trivial brick gate-posts sink out of plumb. It would not be surprising in a few years to find that most of their slack-baked bricks had resolved into their native mud and road-scrapings.

For what do these huge populations exist? Life in the bulk must be very grey to them, whose individualities are sunk in the mass, who live in streets all precisely alike and in houses more kin to one another than the proverbial two peas. They exist, if you consider it, for truly great altruistic purposes; to be the corpus vile for governments, imperial or local, to experiment upon; and to be not only the milch-cow that supplies the funds for such governments, but the poor, senseless voting machine for whose support the candidates for Parliamentary and municipal honours struggle and lie and cheat. On their domestic and other needs thrive and wax fat the great trading companies that in their innumerable local branches are ousting the private shopkeeper and sending him in his old age to the Bankruptcy Court and the workhouse. For reasons such as these the swarming hives of wage-earners that ring round London and all the great cities make me melancholy. Let us away to the greenwood tree.