A. R. Hope Moncrieff

“ And ah! at times there comes a gloomier van to doors that must open for grief as well as for joy; then poor comfort it is to aching hearts if their dear ones have not so far to travel to that freshly laid-out cemetery that makes such a weary journey from the inner parts of London, where not even the dead may rest. But if one go-cart be turned into a household tombstone, neighbour mothers are happier in setting on their legs a brood of future citizens, who will grow up to know nothing of this suburb but as a great toy-box of bricks and mortar. ”

“ Galaxies of shops break out along the main thoroughfares, promoted from “Lanes” to “High Roads” or “Broadways”; and ere their fronts have grown dingy, their windows glow on red and green omnibuses plying to some Crown or Spotted Dog, whereat, before it took the style of a hotel, the rustic borderer leisurely drank his beer and opened his ears to strange tales of what went on in London, whose lights, if they have not lured him into its tempting glare, now stretch out to cheer his secluded home. The slow buses are shoved aside by tram-lines and motors, cause as well as effect of fresh growth. ”

“ Walking to Brentford on the tow-path for a couple of miles, one might fancy oneself in the heart of a rather common-place country, where straggling curls of the tamed river show scum almost as green as its banks; but the solitude is disturbed by a tram-line close at hand.
If that by-way is not very attractive, up the Brent one can turn through one of the prettiest bits of Izaac Waltondom so near London. The ground on this side is laid out as a park below the tall viaduct of the Great Western Railway, whose passengers have such a good view of the isolated Church. ”

“ At the west end of Acton, just before the road reaches Ealing Common, stood Fordhook, Fielding’s house, at one time occupied by Byron’s widow, that only since the coming of the tram has given place to homes for reformed Tom Joneses and respectable Pamelas of our generation. Among these spick-and-span houses, the name of a brand-new road, Twyford Avenue, invites the pedestrian to a rural digression. At the top of it, what is still a hedged path leads on under the slope of Hangerhill, a park on which golf has laid its privy paw as on so many about London. ”

“ The Rugby head master had to wrench himself away from Laleham, where, indeed, his special admiration was called forth on the Surrey side by the striking contrast of heath scenery mingling with rich valley lands. He could no longer rejoice in the bank up to Staines as a walk “which, though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness, there being not a house anywhere near it; and the river here has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it which makes it in many places as public as the highroad.” Nowadays one must search far up the Thames for an unstirred reach. ”

“ These youthful athletes hold their playgrounds on more precarious tenure than the richer amateurs of golf; then a season comes when the gates are left open, the fences fall in gaps, the weather-stained notices to trespassers stand in idle decay, and the local urchinry press in to sport at will, no longer snatching a fearful joy. For weeks, months, the field lies waste, uncared for, sodden and sorry, trampled to flaws of bareness, with patches of rank weeds and unsavoury rubbish-heaps—a no-man’s-land, as might seem, that in truth is signed, sealed, and delivered to the speculative builder. ”

“ The beauty, indeed, is mainly artificial, the ground being in general flat, traversed by sluggish streams, and often apt to revert to the condition of a flooded marsh till banked in by dykes of habitation and ornamentation that make most of this river-edge one line of garden suburb. When we abuse London for defiling the country, let us not forget how plain-featured country may be disguised and pranked out under the fancy-dress of parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds and playgrounds, to be reckoned among the manufactures of a great city. ”

“ Now choked by a tramway, it passes Kensal Green, London’s largest cemetery, where lie in peace all kinds of celebrities, from princes to authors, beneath a forest of tombstones, spaciously enclosed among streets, chimney stacks, gas-works, railway and canal banks, public houses for the cheering of mutes and mourners—an elaborate contrast to such a country churchyard as might make the weary soul half in love with death. ”

“ One can thread them by taking the road turning off at that venerable stump, to become a bridle-track along the edge of the woods, joined about half-way by a path coming up from New Barnet Station. This way is sacred to the pedestrian, though the cyclist is tolerated, if he care to plough through the roughness of its further end. It debouches at Cock Fosters, now a pretty hamlet of gentility about the inn which was once, no doubt, a resort of foresters, standing just off the road from Southgate to Potter’s Bar. ”

“ A mile or two further the road is no better than a street; and when it at last gets out into fields across the Brent, the shades of building begin to close upon it again beside Wembley Park, its gaps of green soon becoming more and more filled up by the spasmodic growth of Sudbury, which seems uncertain whether it wants to tack itself on to Wembley or to Harrow. To the north is designed for it a new growth styled the Sudbury Model Garden City, whose placarded promises appear in the fields through which the highway turns shirkingly along the side of Harrow Hill. ”

“ No one now would choose a retirement at Ponder’s End, that industrial eastern neighbour of Enfield overshadowing the Lea Valley with its tall smoke-stacks and long rows of workmen’s homes. Yet just beyond the grimy hideousness of Ponder’s End Station, the bridge leading over to Chingford Marshes gives a peep of the Lea that by moonshine might still make a trysting-place for shepherds and milkmaids. Daylight dulls all memories of romance with smoke and mist ”

“ We have a vision of our own,
Ah! why should we undo it?
On the other side of Tottenham’s spacious Broadway, towards Hornsey, we might still find a remnant of green fields shrinking like the peau de chagrin in Balzac’s romance. A height between this road and the Green Lanes has of late been laid out as a pretty park, overlooking the meadows of the Muswell Brook—mocked with the alias of Moselle—where the London County Council proposes to plant a new town of working men’s dwellings. ”

“ When, beyond the northern heights, a wayfarer of our generation thinks to have left the smoky Babylon behind him, he finds it breaking out again in whole towns of suburban homes, through which its trams run to the very edge of the county; for in these days of steam and electricity London grows and multiplies not only by accretion, but fissiparously, throwing out swarms to settle upon blooming trees and flowery meads, whence, indeed, it is the drones that daily flit back to make honey in the original hive, so that we had better drop this metaphor as a stinging one. ”

“ By this height there is a way across from Hampstead Heath Station, above which cluster the houses of South Hill, one of several outlying suckers of this favourite suburb.
Highgate makes a worthy neighbour to Hampstead, not standing quite as high in the world, but with a dignity and distinction of its own, and no small wealth of treasured memories. Its steep ascents have not been so much invaded by mere smartness; the face towards Hampstead, at least, shows quality rather than quantity in its colonization. ”

“ Between these straggling suburbs are still green fields, groves of elm and beech, and footway hints of vanishing rusticity; while much of the ground has been taken up by huge cemeteries on the heights once clearly outside of London. Electric trams and motor-buses seem at present in need of a good word, which they might have from anyone who had seen the Great North Road before its tram-line was made. ”

“ This may be gained beside Wormwood Scrubs, which, overcast by a gloomy prison, seems one of the least attractive parks of London; nor is the canal bank for a time more pleasant to the eye than to the nose, when one comes in wind of its refuse-destruction stations. But about Alperton it has pretty views of the heights of Ealing and Hanwell across the sinuous course of the Brent; then, as it gets below Horsendon Hill, that tiny Alp may be ascended for a prospect over green flats broken by straight railway-lines and by the curves of the canal. ”

“ Even within the present bounds of London they found their whispering groves, verdant lawns, and blossoming brakes, long buried beneath bricks and mortar, where such names as Maiden Lane, Islington Green, Highbury Barn, or Willow Walk are like the tombstones of beauty that lives to be a joy for ever in immortal verse. ”

“ Yet this lively highroad has still some patches of its greens to show; some stretches of private grounds turned into public demesnes, like Clissold Park and Finsbury Park; some pleasant glimpses of the fenced New River, in Lamb’s youth still open to the holiday explorations of his school-fellows. Beyond Palmer’s Green it grows more truly rural, the Green Lanes winding up to Enfield in a manner not unworthy of their name, with many tempting by-ways towards the Great Eastern Railway line on the right and the Great Northern Railway on the left, that would keep wanderers from going too far astray. ”

“ HIGHGATE are like to be swept away by a growth so rapid that Mother Shipton’s portent, Highgate Hill standing in the middle of London, would appear now no such impossibility, if the city did not spread as fast in other directions.
But the lion of Hornsey is the Alexandra Palace, that stands more conspicuous than beautiful on Muswell Hill, most of it, indeed, in the adjoining parish of Wood Green. ”

“ Upper Edmonton in turn imperceptibly becomes Lower Edmonton, the old village now strung to London by leagues of houses. A long mile beyond the “Bell” is reached a fragment of Edmonton Green, where the poor “Witch of Edmonton” was burned in 1621. We may here desert the road, and its trams running on to a gap of still-open fields which the builder threatens to close; then again the industrial outliers of Enfield will shadow it almost continuously to the edge of the county. ”

“ Among one’s books at one’s fire by candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one is not in the country; but with the light the green fields return, till I gaze and in a calenture can plunge myself into Saint Giles’s. O let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable! A garden was the primitive prison till man with promethean felicity and boldness luckily sinn’d himself out of it. ”

“ THE GREAT NORTH ROAD TO not every Londoner of this generation is the Great North Road as well known even by name as the Great Northern Railway running near it. The highway that led so many a hopeful youth across the northern heights, to see the lights of London at last shining before him, has more than once shifted its course, and now falls into the Metropolis by a delta of branches, among which one might be at a loss to pick out the main stream. ”

“ Yet it is doubtful if dusty cyclist or goggled motorist see as much of the country as their slow-going grandfathers, and that not only because there is less of open country to see. In their haste to get away from the streets they might as well travel on the Underground Railway. These speedy wayfarers—“machines themselves, and governed by a clock”—go in the traces of a road, blinkered by its rows of suburban houses, and ready to drop for fatigue when taken out of the shafts of pace-making and record-breaking. ”

“ For New Kensington, East Hampstead, or whatever title it assumes, has pushed out apace till its spreading lava-flow half hides the scattered hamlets or groups of tumble-down cottages which may thus be preserved for a time like flies in amber. For example, look into the back roads of Tottenham, or beside the church of Walham Green, where to-day a Juggernaut procession of motor-cars would soon crush the eighteenth-century poet who still berhymed this “green” as truly rural. Your new district may well have an old church to make its moral centre, perhaps in some out-of-the-way corner of the parish ”

“ In taking these quiet byways between bustling highroads, I cannot help observing how few persons one meets, and these few—if not whispering lovers, for whom their primrose path cannot be too lonely—are apt to be men of my own time of life rather than our juniors, who, when the hoardings and the gate-money are not too high, may be seen packed into fields for their beloved sports, some score of them playing, perhaps, while some hundreds or thousands take the exercise of noisily looking on. ”

“ Already the open field may be marked out in invisible streets, labelled with titles for which the builders have much ado to draw on their invention, one erecting a chain of castles in the air, another completing a series of abbeys, a third affecting historic surnames, while a fourth may invoke famous writers or heroes of the hour, and it saves trouble when some local landmark can be pressed into service as godfather. Soon, over broken waves of grass, emerge the brick reefs wrought by trades-union zoophytes. The rows of houses rise like an exhalation, story on story. ”

“ It is as well we are not bound to enter the County of London, since there the Lea would bring us to Hackney Marsh, perhaps the most unlovely spot of Middlesex soil—one which some examiners, indeed, might propose to bracket with Staines Moor, that at least deserves a proxime accessit.
Such blotches, however, are exceptional, and between those dismal flats on the most distant edges of the county so recklessly libelled as “all ugly,” it has been shown how one can find much pleasant and not a little charming scenery of a truly English type. ”

“ Next is reached the double hamlet of North End and Wildwood, a charmingly secluded group of cottages and mansions, one of them North End House, famed as the gloomy retreat of the great Lord Chatham. We might hence gain the Hendon Road up a grand avenue of chestnuts faced by lime-trees, which is not always discovered by wanderers on the Heath. But the leisurely explorer is advised to hold on to the common beyond the houses, and there turn left to a knoll commanding an expanse of green, bordered by the Hendon heights beyond the Finchley Road. ”

“ The Edgware Road is familiar to more Londoners than are aware of its antiquity. It is now too crowded with traffic to stir thoughts of bygone renown; but on one of the motor-buses that urge their wild career through Maida Vale and Kilburn, beyond Brondesbury making the arduous ascent of Shoot-Up Hill, a spur of the Hampstead heights, we can soon get out to the boundary of London County at Cricklewood. ”

“ The well-greaved pedestrian would find such a by-way on turning right from the tram-line at the end of the village to a house sentinelled by a spreading tree, where this broad, soft lane goes off on the left. When, after a mile of green solitude, it bends back towards the high road, he can take a path continuing its former direction, which leads over the fields to Edgwarebury, a most sequestered hamlet, reached on wheels by another lane from Edgware. Then beside the first house a grassy track mounts to the ridge road near Elstree, from which one has a wide prospect southwards. ”

“ Another contrast between the two counties is in shape, Surrey being, on the whole, more compactly contained than its sprawling neighbour. But the most striking difference is that of soil, Surrey marked off in zones of clay, chalk, and sand, that give its special ornament of dimpled variety, while Middlesex shows mainly a smug face of London clay, only here and there spotted by sandy pimples, gravelly scabs, rare warts of rock, or more frequent freckles of brick earth, in most parts interlarded with the patches and cosmetics applied by elaborate culture. ”

“ Passing to the left, one soon reaches Twyford Abbey on the bank of the Brent, where green slopes and the remains of a fine avenue seem threatened on all sides. To this smallest parish near London a tributary brook gives the name so common among England’s double fords. The modern mansion, titled on surmise of an abbey having once stood here, has quite recently deserved its name by passing to a community of foreign monks, whom the whirligig of time brings to seek refuge in our heretical island. ”

“ But no shire need hang its head that contains such scenery, still hardly spoiled, as can be found about Hampstead Heath, Enfield Chase, Harrow Weald, and the leafy heights of Pinner, with many islets of pleasant greenery not yet drowned in the brick-and-mortar deluge. Its very misfortune of being so near a rich city contributes one feature of ornament in notably frequent parks, pleasure grounds, and gardens. ”

“ On this road we may well hurry at tramway speed, looking for interest rather to either hand of it. As soon as we get out of what a year or so ago was the edge of building, where on the right stands a forbidding fortress of the Midland Railway, on the other side Dollis Hill Lane is about to be overshadowed by Dollis Hill Avenue. This leafy lane leads along the brow of Dollis Hill to Neasden, passing a house of Lord Aberdeen’s, more than once visited by the statesman in honour of whom its sloping grounds, now a public play-place for Willesden, have been named the Gladstone Park. ”