Middlesex. A. R. Hope Moncrieff
much-enamelled nymph wears, perhaps, a too monotonous dress of green, hay and market vegetables being now the chief crops of Middlesex, though time was when its “Pure Vale” had a name for the best wheat in England to make flour for the royal larder. Yet the supply of London Haymarkets and Covent Gardens has not blighted its most common beauty of “hedgerow elms on hillocks green.” It can be pronounced, indeed, a very well-wooded county, studded with parks and gardens, and richly laced with avenues,
looking like fragments of that great Middlesex forest which once covered all its heights, when the valleys were marshy wildernesses, and the most eligible residential quarters such island camps and clearings as have left their traces on Ludgate Hill and Brockley Hill at either end. For a good time back the advantages of ornamental planting have been liberally bestowed on a shire where Defoe could reckon not less than three thousand houses “which in other Places would pass for Palaces, and most if not all the Possessors whereof keep Coaches,” not to speak of myriads of gigmanity.
One glory may be claimed without question by London’s chief county—which, of course, is to be distinguished from the County of London—that English literature must be full of scenes and images drawn from fields that lay within a walk of Grub Street. Till the last generation or two we find our poets more at home on the north side of the Thames, not a few of them, indeed, born within the sound of Bow Bells. Milton, Pope, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lamb—such are the shades that at once come to mind as haunting this countryside. 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.
Population and industry have wrinkled and scarred the natural features of a county nimium vicina Cremonæ. London itself has spread leagues to the north since the day when one of Miss Burney’s cits used “to take a walk in Tottenham Court Road as far as the Tabernacle or thereabouts, and snuff in a little fresh country air.” Nearly a century earlier “Evelyn’s Diary” sighed over two new streets behind Piccadilly—“to such a mad intemperance was the age come of building about a city by far too disproportionate already to the nation.” Half a century later Mary Lamb could speak of Dalston as “quite countrified,” where her brother, in his half-serious way, boasted of walks to such “romantic” scenes as Hackney and Tottenham. 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.
Has any Lubbock or Maeterlinck ever had an opportunity of watching a new crop of London homes as it rises on the ground? Here is a goodly field that once fattened corn or turnips, but for long has been laid out in grass, making part of a dairy farm, a horse paddock, a golf course, or area for one of those open conical towers often standing up in the environs of our Babylon, which might be taken for Chaldean observatories or wickerwork idols, to be filled with hecatombs of captive victims, but the initiated recognise them as shooting-stands for the practice of Cockney sportsmen. Perhaps the ground is let to a cricket or football club, and that is more like to be a sign of the doom close at hand. 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. Yet here still peep out daisies and buttercups, “the little children’s dower”; and here hawthorn and hemlock bloom bravely on the ragged hedge or choked ditch, along which wander youth and maid, for whom nature’s poorest charms are made glorious by the sunshine of life’s May-days, and their feet tread here as lightly as on the heath of Hampstead or the rich lawns of Hampton, while still they can whisper that old story, “Old and yet ever new, and simple and beautiful always.”
But too soon wooers and playfellows are exorcised by short pipes and horny hands digging trenches, laying foundations, piling bricks and mixing mortar. 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. Lath and plaster, jousts and beams, stucco, slates take their place as if by hey presto! and where you walked on a spring evening along some puddled footpath, or some trickling rill, in the height of summer you must pick your steps on incomplete pavements of Brook Terrace or Oak Avenue, again coming upon that young couple who, earlier in the season, were all eyes for one another, but now are fain to bend their united looks upon the high-pitched proclamations of house-agents and the fluttering hopes of “orders to view.”
Almost as soon as run up the houses may be taken. Builders’ carts are succeeded by furniture-vans; bare window after window blossoms out with blinds, flower-pots, faces watching new neighbours coming in turn to their ordeal of broken crockery, broken promises of tradesmen, struggles with furniture that must be forced to fit, clashing of tempers and tastes that ought to harmonize, ends that should be made to meet. And as these young households settle down, so does the colony clear up its litter. Now the dovetailed dwellings may be numbered, that at first, perhaps, stood precariously independent as “Honeymoon Cottage” or what not, six-roomed “Chatsworths,” two-storied “Abbotsfords,” veritable “De Vere Mansions,” housing a dozen Smiths and Browns. Gaps are filled, rough edges are rounded off, roadways are beaten smooth; one by one are barred the footpath short cuts, on which smart or smug husbands and brothers, with some salt of youthful sport in them, made hasty morning spurts to the nearest station. Their evening return is guided by lines of gaslights to the welcoming door, at which will be handed in so many circulars, and among them, too soon, demand-notes for rates and taxes.
In the intervening hours, the rawly-paved streets are somewhat silent, but for cheery whistling of butchers’ and bakers’ boys, here and there echoed by the tinkling of pianos on the hire system, now and then drowned by the postman’s knock or the rattling of commercial Jehus, who by-and-by have to look out for perambulators. 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.
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; then spick and span fanes, in each shade of Anglicanism,