Euston Road

“ If, instead of the Strand and Piccadilly route, or the Holborn and Oxford Street route, a visitor takes the northernmost main route, he will find less to interest him. The New Road, in its several parts of City Road, Pentonville Road, Euston Road, and Marylebone Road, forms a broad line of communication from the city to Paddington, four miles in length. Though very important as one of the arteries of the metropolis, it is singularly deficient in public buildings. ”

“ He left the office at half-past five, mounted a tram-car in the City Road, and with his camera in a hand bag made for the regions of the Euston Road.
For some reason the Euston Road is famous for the number of its photographers—the lower class of that art.
The double description is used as it is a calling full of artfulness and craft. The this-style-in-a-frame-for-a-shilling sort seem to look on it as a happy hunting ground.
The tout outside produces samples of the photographic art—created perhaps a dozen miles away—and lies with the freedom of a cyclometer. ”

“ It is difficult to understand the annoyance of being stopped continually to show a pass or to pay the pike. Thus, there were two or three turnpikes41 in what is now called the Euston Road, and was then the New Road ”

“ Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long, empty street is not too wide; but all the year round, and every year, the broad highway hence on to Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic. Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-grabbing, enclosing country gentleman upon this generous width of macadamised surface, and are allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient for the present needs of the traffic. ”

“ The same horse-pond by the roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same prehistoric dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no traveller, the emptiness is appalling.
To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic and essayist, during several years, for quietude. ”

“ From the hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows, mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient Rome.
Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. ”

“ And an excellent picture of the coaching age, although ‘Yoho!’ smacks too much of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that word when he surely meant ‘Tallyho!’ Nor is this a correct portrait of the Exeter Road by any manner of means. Dickens, usually so precise in topographical details, has generalised here. A true and stirring picture of country roads in general, there are farms, and villages, and churches all too many for this highway. It should have been ‘Yoho! across the bleak and barren down. Yoho! ”

“ But where in olden times these romantic attendants of, or dissuading circumstances from travel existed, we have now only occasional trees and an infinity of flat roads, past Shipton village to Tollerton Cross Lanes and Easingwold. This country is dulness personified. The main road is flat and featureless, and the branch roads instinct with a melancholy emptiness that hives in every ditch and commonplace hedgerow. ”

“ The grass had begun to show green on the beautiful lawns of Bentford Main Street. The great elms drooped their slender, bare limbs like cathedral arches. We purred softly up the Slab City road, pleased by the name of it, passed the two estates on the hill outside of the village, and then dipped into a hollow. As this hollow held no extended prospect, the summer estates had ceased on its brim. The road became the narrow dirt track of 9 tradition, bramble-lined. Presently we reached the crossroad. ”

“ One small street, the Rue Pié, appears to have lost all control over itself, for it dives insanely under another street—houses, road and all—and then rushes down hill in the dark to apparent destruction. There is one lane that is especially picturesque. ”

“ Thus it is that an illustration is shown here of the ‘parting of the ways’ before the transformation is complete; for although the fork of the roads leading to places so distant from this point, and from one another, as Bath and Exeter must needs always lend something to the imagination, yet a commonplace modern street building cannot, for another hundred years, command respect or be worth sketching, even for the sake of the significant spot on which it stands. ”

“ As an example of a short part utterly disappearing, one can take [149] any one out of hundreds; the best example near London (typical of many others) is the gap in the Roman road between the Epsom racecourse and Merton. The road is evident as a clearly marked high embankment above the steep rise at Juniper Hill near the Dorking road to within a mile of Epsom racecourse. Then it suddenly ceases. There is no change in the soil. It is on chalk before and after its disappearance ”

“ Salisbury Plain,{216} in short, bred a race of highwaymen who preyed upon the neighbourhood and levied contributions from all the rich farmers and graziers who travelled between the Cathedral City and other parts, and sometimes graduated with such honours that they became Knights of the Road at whose name travellers along the whole length of the Exeter Road would tremble. ”

“ The road is a thoroughfare for hawkers, policemen, and lovers, because a narrow lane follows the line of the tumble-down fence, leading on one side to the hinterland of West Kensington railway station and on the other gradually widening into a terrace of small red-brick houses, the outworks of similar terraces beyond. Why anybody at least fifty years ago should have built in what must then have been open country or nursery gardens along the North End Road these thirty-six porticoed houses remains inexplicable. ”

“ Passing this toll-house, the old road runs through an inhospitable succession of uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike to mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or drive a horse, or urge forth your wild career on a motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is chiefly a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover behind, and it is not until ‘the Wallops’ are reached,{155} at Little (or Middle) Wallop, lying in a hollow where a little stream trickles across the road, that any relief is experienced. ”

“ The broad interminable perspective of the East India Dock Road, the great perspective of drab brick walls, of grey pavement, of muddy roadway rumbling dismally with loaded carts and vans lost itself in the distance, imposing and shabby in its spacious meanness of aspect, in its immeasurable poverty of forms, of colouring, of life--under a harsh, unconcerned sky dried by the wind to a clear blue. ”

“ Very hilly, very open, very white and hot and dusty in summer, and covered with loose stones and flints after any spell of dry weather, the road goes hence steeply down into Winterborne Whitchurch, where the ‘bourne,’ from which the place takes the first half of its name, goes across the road in a hollow, and the church stands, with its neighbouring parsonage and cottages, in a lane running at right angles to the high-road, for all the world like Tarrant Hinton and Little Wallop. ”

“ The ‘Bells of Ouseley’ had at one time a reputation for a very much less innocent thing than picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago, or thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class of footpads, who were used to waylay travellers by the shore, or on the old Bath and Exeter Roads, and, robbing them, were not content, but, practically applying the axiom that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ gave their victims a knock over the head, and, tying them in sacks, heaved them into the river. ”

“ It is worth noting, that no part of the Old Road is enclosed for so great a length as that which passes from the western to the eastern lodge of Eastwell Park. Nearly two miles of its course lies here within the fence of a private owner.
It is odd to see how little of the road has fallen within private walls. In Hampshire nothing of it is enclosed; in Surrey, if we except the few yards at Puttenham, and the garden rather than the park at Monk's Hatch, it has been caught by the enclosures of the great landlords in four places alone: Albury, Denbies, Gatton, and Titsey. ”

“ They consist for the most part each of one straggling main street, itself a part of the Kingston Road, and differentiated from it only by the unkempt habitations that line its length, and by the inevitable wooden pavements, broad in the central portions, but narrowing to a single plank in the outskirts—where, no doubt, it was in reality, if not in name, the "Lovers' Walk." ”

“ If such terrors were to take place, the great legislative power would lie at the mercy of the rabble. If the mob will not hear reason they must be taught it.
A PLEA FOR GOOD ROADS
‘It may be urged that there are not passengers enough on the Western Road to defray the expenses of erecting these turnpikes. To this I answer by denying the fact; ’tis a road very much frequented, and the natural demands from the West to London and all England on the one part, and from all the eastern counties to Exeter, Plymouth, and Falmouth, etc., on the other are very great, especially in war-time. ”

“ Experimental Pavement of Oxford Street.—This, doubtless, the most extraordinary and novel undertaking which has ever been attempted in the annals of road making, is, to the gratification, not only to the respectable inhabitants of Oxford Street, but to a curious public, at last, completed. On Friday (4 Jan.) at 2 o’clock, the line of this great thoroughfare, occupied by the various specimens of paving, extending from Charles Street to Tottenham Court Road, presented a most animated spectacle, being thronged by thousands of spectators anxious to witness its opening to the public. ”

“ Though it has only been constructed during late years, the gables and points give it an old-fashioned and picturesque look, but beauty and variety of style are studied at Eastbourne, and each house is apparently designed with a view to artistic effect. College Road is bordered on either side by Sussex elms. The approach is by gates right and left which open into a garden filled with shrubs. On seeking admittance you are taken up to a bright, cheerful room which faces the west, and has all the outward and visible signs of being devoted to literary and artistic pursuits. ”

“ The road itself is a 35singular 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 coast-road which leads from Westport skirts along the edge of the bay, and is diversified by many a pretty cottage whose trellised walls and rose-covered porches vouch for the mildness of the climate, and are in summer resorted to as bathing-lodges by numbers from the inland counties. The high-road has, however, a grander destiny than to such humble, though picturesque, dwellings, for it suddenly ceases at the gate of an immense demesne, whose boundary wall may be seen stretching away for miles, and at last is traced high up the mountain side, where it forms the enclosure of a deer park. ”

“ The least frequented of the great highroads running out of London is assuredly that which passes through Uxbridge, and so right into the heart of the shire of Buckingham—the home or clearing or settlement of the Beeches. Few bicycles attempt this road; the ordinary cyclist knows or cares nothing for the attractions. Yet there is much to see. In one place you can visit the cottage where Milton finished “Paradise Lost.” ”

“ Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated, like all the other places between this and Hyde Park Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as on the road to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the book on that highway. Coming to the place again, there seems no reason to alter or add much to what was said in those pages. The long, long uninteresting street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few houses of any note facing it are fewer. ”

“ Finally I wandered off into Euclid Avenue to recover my peace of mind, only 165 wondering whether Frenchmen in England are so heavenly minded under the infliction of innumerable Waterloo and Wellington squares, streets, places, and bridges, and if Russians feel as little the wrongs of Boulevards Sébastopol in Paris, and cannon plantations in every town in England. Now, Euclid Avenue is a street without parallel as far as I know. It is not quite a street, but it is not easy to draw a line between a street and an avenue. ”

“ The business portion of Euclid avenue extends from the Park to Erie street, beyond which it is lined with handsome residences, elegant cottages and superb villas, the grounds around each being more and more extensive as it approaches the country. It is one of the finest avenues in the world, and is not less than ten miles in length, embracing during its course several suburbs which a generation since were remote from the city, and are now considerably surprised to find themselves brought so near it. ”

“ The church is just in the picturesque condition the artist loves and the restorer wants to sweep and garnish into newness.
PINNER.
A long road of three and a half miles runs straight across from Northolt to Eastcote, undulating all the way. Reaching the cross-roads, turn right for Eastcote, which is a hamlet of Ruislip. Here are ups and downs along a tree-shaded hamlet of a few park-like residences and pretty cottages, the road bordered by the lazy waters of the Colne, lying listless, like a moat. ”