The Brighton Road - free ebook by Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

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The Brighton Road

Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

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38 chapters

THE BRIGHTON ROAD

THE BRIGHTON ROAD

HISTORIES OF THE ROADS —BY— Charles G. Harper. THE BRIGHTON ROAD: The Classic Highway to the South. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: London to York. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: York to Edinburgh. THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike. THE BATH ROAD: History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway. THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD: London to Manchester. THE MANCHESTER ROAD: Manchester to Glasgow. THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: London to Birmingham. THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to Holyhead. THE HASTINGS ROAD: And T

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I

I

The road to Brighton—the main route, pre-eminently the road—is measured from the south side of Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium. It goes by Croydon, Redhill, Horley, Crawley, and Cuckfield, and is (or is supposed to be) 51½ miles in length. Of this prime route—the classic way—there are several longer or shorter variations, of which the way through Clapham, Mitcham, Sutton, and Reigate, to Povey Cross is the chief. The modern “record” route is the first of these two, so far as Hand Cross, where

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II

II

But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the King! Never, while the Brighton Road remains the road to Brighton, shall it be dissociated from George the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either end, and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense a Via Regia . It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton, and until the last—for close upon forty-eight years—it retained his affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because,

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III

III

The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in 1681. In De Laune’s “Present State of Great Britain,” published in that year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in and out of London, we find Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from “Bredhempstone” to the “Queen’s Head,” Southwark, on Wednesdays, and, setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which was

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IV

IV

Erredge, the historian of Brighton, tells something of the social side of Brighton Road coaching at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Social indeed, as you shall see: “In 1801 two pair-horse coaches ran between London and Brighton on alternate days, one up, the other down, driven by Messrs. Crossweller and Hine. The progress of these coaches was amusing. The one from London left the Blossoms Inn, Lawrence Lane, at 7 a.m., the passengers breaking their fast at the Cock, Sutton, at 9. The n

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V

V

We come now to the “Era of the Amateur,” who not only flourished pre-eminently on the Brighton Road, but may be said to have originated on it. The coaching amateur and the nineteenth century came into existence almost contemporaneously. Very soon after 1800 it became “the thing” to drive a coach, and shortly after this became such a definite ambition, there arose that contradiction in terms, that horsey paradox, the Amateur Professional, generally a sporting gentleman brought to utter ruin by Co

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VI

VI

Between 1841, when the railway was opened all the way from London, and 1866, during a period of twenty-five years, coaching, if not dead, at least showed but few and intermittent signs of life. The “Age,” which then was owned by Mr. F. W. Capps, was the last coach to run regularly on the direct road to and from London. The “Victoria,” however, was on the road, via Dorking and Horsham, until November 8th, 1845. The BRIGHTON DAY MAILS CROSSING HOOKWOOD COMMON, 1838. From an engraving after W. J.

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VII

VII

“Carriages without horses shall go,” is the “prophecy” attributed to that mythical fifteenth century pythoness, Mother Shipton; really the ex post facto forgery of Charles Hindley, the second-hand bookseller, in 1862. It should not be difficult, on such terms, to earn the reputation of a seer. Between 1823 and 1838, the era of the steam-carriages, that prognostication had already been fulfilled: and again, in another sense, with the introduction of railways. But it was not until the close of 189

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VIII

VIII

Robinson Crusoe, weary of his island solitude, sighed, so the poet tells us, for “the midst of alarms.” He should have chosen the Brighton Road; for ever since it has been a road at all it has fully realised the Shakespearian stage-direction of “alarums and excursions.” Particularly the “excursions,” for it is the chosen track for most record-breaking exploits; and thus it comes to pass that residents fortunate or unfortunate enough to dwell upon the Brighton Road have the whole panorama of spor

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IX

IX

Selby’s drive was very widely chronicled. The elaborate reports and extensive preliminary arrangements compare oddly with the early sporting events undertaken on the spur of the moment and recorded only in meagre, unilluminating paragraphs. What would we not give for a report of the Prince of Wales’s ride in 1784, so elaborated. A great drive, and a great coachman, worthily carrying on the good old traditions of the road. It has, however, been already pointed out that neither on his outward jour

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X

X

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

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XI

XI

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, t

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XII

XII

The High Street of Croydon really is high, 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 v

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XIII

XIII

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 explana

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XIV

XIV

Returning to the main road, we come, just before reaching Godstone Corner, to the site of the now-forgotten Foxley Hatch, a turnpike-gate, which stood at this point until 1865. Paying toll here “cleared,” or made the traveller free of, the gates and bars to Merstham, on the main road, and as far as Wray Common, on the Reigate route, as the following copy of a contemporary turnpike-ticket, shows: Foxley Hatch Gate R clears Wray common, Gatton, Merstham and Hooley lane gates and bars “To Riddlesdo

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XV

XV

The tramway terminus at Purley Corner is now a busy place. Those are only the “old crocks” who can remember the South Eastern railway-station of Caterham Junction and the surrounding lonely downs; and to them the change to “Purley” and the appearance in the wilderness of a mushroom town, with its parade of brilliantly lighted shops, its Queen Victoria memorial, its public garden and penny-squirt fountain, and—not least—its hideous waterworks, are things for wonderment. “How strange it seems, and

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XVI

XVI

Merstham is as pretty a village as Surrey affords, and typically English. Railways have not abated, nor these turbid times altered in any great measure, its fine air of aristocratic and old-time rusticity. At one end of its one clearly-defined street, set at an angle to the high-road, are the great ornamental gates of Merstham Park, setting their stamp of landed aristocracy upon the place. To their right is a tiny gate leading to the public right-of-way through the park, which presently crosses

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XVII

XVII

Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet another toll-gate. “Frenches” Gate took its title from the old manor on which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the unenclosed or free ( franche ) land of which it was wholly or largely composed. Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history. When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816, Redhill was—a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist we

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XVIII

XVIII

The Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton, instead of branching off along the Brixton Road, pursues a straight undeviating course down the Clapham Road, through Balham and Upper and Lower Tooting, where it turns sharply to the left at the Broadway, and in half a mile right again, at Amen Corner. Thence it goes, by Figg’s Marsh and Mitcham, to Sutton. It is not before Mitcham is reached that, in these latter days, the pilgrim is conscious of travelling the road to anywhere at all. It is all modern

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XIX

XIX

Reigate town lies at the foot, sheltered under this great shoulder of the downs: a little town of considerable antiquity and inconsiderable story. It is mentioned in Domesday Book, but under the now forgotten name of “Cherchefelle,” and did not begin to assume the name of Reigate until nearly two hundred years later. Churchfield was at the time of the Norman conquest a manor in the possession of the widowed Queen, and was probably little more than an enclosed farm and manor-house situated in a c

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XX

XX

Reigate Church has been many times restored, and every time its monuments have suffered a general post; so that scarce an one remains where it was originally placed, and very few are complete. The most remarkable monument of all, after having been removed from its original place in the chancel to the belfry, has now utterly vanished. It is no excuse that its ever having been placed in the church at all was a scandal and an outrage, for, being there, it should have been preserved, as in some sort

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XXI

XXI

The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield. Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay, thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian blunders upon them by a fortun

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XXII

XXII

The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the “White Lion,” and a few attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers’ attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has spru

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XXIII

XXIII

There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity associated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station, resided Mark Lemon, editor of Punch , who died here on May 20th, 1870. Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be converted into a grocer’s shop. The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I lighted upon the statement of his residence here

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XXIV

XXIV

Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of Crawley—the residential and superior modern district of country houses, each in midst of its own little pleasance. The cutting in the rise at Hog

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XXV

XXV

Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, situated where several roads meet, in this delightful land of forests. Its name derives, of course, from some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost and wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation times, on the lonely cross-roads. No houses stood here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest habitation of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, where, very little changed or not at all, it may still be sought. Slaugham parish

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XXVI

XXVI

The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always thus, for in those centuries—from the fourteenth until the early part of the eighteenth—when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks. CUC

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XXVII

XXVII

Cuckfield Place, acknowledged by Harrison Ainsworth to be the original of his “Rookwood,” stands immediately outside the town, and is visible, in midst of the park, from the road. That romantic home of ghostly tradition is fittingly approached by a long and lofty avenue of limes, where stands the clock-tower entrance-gate, removed from Slaugham Place. Beyond it the picturesquely broken surface of the park stretches, beautifully wooded and populated with herds of deer, the grey, many-gabled mansi

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XXVIII

XXVIII

Half a mile below Cuckfield stands Ansty Cross, (the “Handstay” of old road-books, and said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon, Heanstige , meaning highway), a cluster of a few cottages and the “Green Cross” inn, once old and picturesque, now rebuilt in the Ready-made Picturesque order of architecture. Here stood one of the numerous turnpike-gates. Close by is Riddens Farm, a picturesque little homestead, with tile-hung front and clustered chimneys. It still contains one of those old Sussex cast-iro

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XXIX

XXIX

Returning to the exploited main road. Friar’s Oak is soon reached. It was selected by Sir Conan Doyle as one of the scenes of his Regency story, “Rodney Stone”; but since the year 1900, when the old inn was rebuilt, the spot has become an eyesore to those who knew it of old. No one knows why Friar’s Oak is so called, and “Nothing is ever known about anything on the roads,” is the intemperate exclamation that rises to the lips of the disappointed explorer. But wild legends, as usual, supply the p

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XXX

XXX

From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view, crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this great wall of earth, chalk, and grass—Wolstonbury semicircular in outline and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small bushes. Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Cla

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XXXI

XXXI

And now to trace the Hickstead and Bolney route from Hand Cross, that parting of the ways overlooking the most rural parts of Sussex. Hand Cross, it has already been said, is in the parish of Slaugham, which lies deep down in a very sequestered wood, where the head-springs issuing from the hillsides are never dry and the air is always heavy with moisture. “Slougham-cum-Crolé” is the title of the place in ancient records, “Crolé” being Crawley. It was from its ancient bogs and morasses that it ob

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XXXII

XXXII

This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the topmo

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XXXIII

XXXIII

From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of the “deans.” North and South of the Downs are two different countries—so different that if they were inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we en

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XXXIV

XXXIV

It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town. It is Brighton’s ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London. Brigh

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XXXV

XXXV

But it was not this practical-joking Prince who first discovered Brighton. It would never have attained its great vogue without him, but it would have been the health resort of a certain circle of fashion—an inferior Bath, in fact. To Dr. Richard Russell—the name sometimes spelt with one “l”—who visited the little village of Brighthelmstone in 1750, belongs the credit of discovering the place to an ailing fashionable world. He died in 1759, long ere the sun of royal splendour first rose upon the

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XXXVI

XXXVI

The Pavilion and the adjoining Castle Square, where one of the old coach booking-offices still survives as a railway receiving-office, are to most people the ultimate expressions of antiquity at Brighton; but there remains one landmark of what was “Brighthelmstone” in the ancient parish church of St. Nicholas, standing upon the topmost eyrie of the town, and overlooking from its crowded and now disused graveyard more than a square mile of crowded roofs below. It is probably the place referred to

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XXXVII

XXXVII

A new era for Brighton and the Brighton Road opened in November, 1896, with the coming of the motor-car. Already the old period of the coaching inns had waned, and that of gigantic and palatial hotels, much more luxurious than anything ever imagined by the builders of the Pavilion, had dawned; and then, as though to fitly emphasize the transition, the old Chain Pier made a dramatic end. The Chain Pier just missed belonging to the Georgian era, for it was not begun until October, 1822, but, opene

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