I
The road to Hastings is measured from what, in these times, seems the unlikely starting-point of London Bridge, and is identical with the Dover Road as far as New Cross, where it turns to the right and goes through Lewisham, the Dover Road continuing by Deptford and Blackheath.
Few would now choose such a starting-point for a journey to Hastings, but there is reason in most things, and when this road was first travelled there was a very special reason for this choice. London Bridge was, until 1750, the only bridge that crossed the Thames between London and Putney, and the sole way to the southern counties therefore lay through Southwark.
But in those comparatively early times the historian finds no mention of the “Hastings” Road at all. Travellers very rarely wanted to journey from London to that fisher village; and it is the road to Rye for which the inquirer after these things must look in the classic seventeenth-century pages of Ogilby’s “Britannia.” In that very elaborate and accurate work, published in 1675, the Hastings Road appears as the “road to Rye,” and thus, after Flimwell, 44¾ miles down, where it makes as straight as may be for that once-busy port, the chance pilgrim for Hastings had to find his way across country as best he could by the directions of the country folk.
It is twenty miles from Flimwell to Hastings, and as I do not suppose the rustics were nearly so well informed then as now as to routes and distances, and as their knowledge on those matters is even now not profound, I think we shall do well to feel sorry for that wayfarer of long ago, thus left without a guide.
By the time the coaching age had arrived, and the road-books of Cary and Paterson and a host of others began to be published, the “Hastings” Road, rather than the road to Rye, had been invented, but still the way lay over London Bridge, and was measured from the south side of it, whence the distance is 63½ miles.
The traveller of to-day would probably find Westminster Bridge Road, St. George’s Road, and the New Kent Road the best way out of London, but it will be allowed that the best is bad.
As the imagination—whatever may be the facts—refuses to associate the Borough High Street and the Old Kent Road with the sylvan beauties of the road to Hastings, I do not propose here to recount the description of those beginnings, given already in the pages of the Dover Road; but will, as Astley of the Circus suggested to the mere dramatist, literally “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses,” i.e., a consideration of the coaching history of the road.