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The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are a part of every civilisation forbade much alteration, and the road still trickles and meanders through the town and divides into two channels and unites again, like some sluggish, undecided river. It is an infirmity of purpose that can be carried back to a very remote origin: to the time, in fact, when Bromley was only beginning to be a settlement amid the then widespreading wastes; when the prehistoric tribesmen drove their herds across the broomy heaths to water at the Ravensbourne, and tracked deviously to avoid boulders, trees, or boggy places. These were the circumstances that fixed throughout the ages the windings of Bromley’s streets. One somewhat important change was, however, made under the Improvement Act of 1830. A new road was cut to one side of the Market Place, starting just beyond the “Bell” and ending just short of the “White Hart.”
The historian seeking something of the old coaching days at Bromley pities himself. He finds the “Swan” very gay and attractive in summer with displays of geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelia, but he does not find the old house, and when he has found the “Bell,” in the centre of the town, he has come to a very beautiful building; but it is modern. The alleged fact that its doorway is on a level with the cross of St. Paul’s Cathedral does not seem to have the significance it would possess were the old house standing.
The old inn is the subject of a slight reference in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” where she makes Lady Catherine say: “Where shall you change horses? Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the ‘Bell’ you will be attended to.” The passage does not make my pulses leap.
Only the “White Hart” remains; appropriately enough white-faced, cool and clean-looking, with the white hart himself “couchant regardant, collared or,” as a herald might say, over the portico. Unhappily, gigantic modern red-brick buildings encompass the inn, rising to four times the height of it, and presently the old house itself will inevitably go.
Beyond this point is South Bromley, where the railway runs and modern expansion is most evident. You descend to it, and having descended immediately ascend again, up the not very Andean slope of Mason’s Hill.
At the time these lines are being written Mason’s Hill still remains old-fashioned. A few of its dignified Queen Anne mansions, standing with an old-world detachment behind their palisade of formal iron railings, are left; but they are to be sold for clearance and rebuilding, and so also are a group of ancient dormer-windowed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of a humbler type. They have all the added importance that comes from being situated above a footpath which itself is in places raised more than head and shoulders above the road for wheeled traffic. Old wooden railings protect children, boozy wayfarers, and sheer wool-gathering, star-gazing folk from falling off the pavement into the hollow road.
Having wriggled its way through Bromley and climbed Mason’s Hill, the Hastings Road sets out across Bromley Common, broad and straight and forceful, in a splendid forthright manner, about its ultimate business of getting to the coast. Most other roads show plentiful evidences of having, like Topsy, grown; but this, you can see at a glance, was obviously made. It occupies a ridge. Villas front upon it on leaving the town behind: villas of every type since such things began to be, and a leisurely walk past them is therefore something in the nature of a generous education in the varying ideals in domestic architecture since the days of the Regency.
THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON.
But presently these are all left behind, and the fields on either side of this modern road with an ancient Roman inflexibility are broken only by the house and grounds of that most beautiful and noble early eighteenth-century mansion, the Rookery, built of the most exquisite red brick.
The Rookery belongs to a time before this fine road came into being: to that time when travellers came painfully up the hill to that open common much dwelt upon by old county historians. Opposite the mansion in those days stood the two polled elms known from time immemorial as Great and Little Beggars’ Bush, and known most unfavourably, for in the shade cast by them at night not merely beggars, but those highwaymen of the meaner sort called footpads, lurked.
Time has a sardonic trick of turning the matter-of-fact descriptions of the old topographers into absurdly misleading statements. Thus, reading Lysons’ description of Bromley, written in 1796, we smile at his remarks that “the Anglo-Saxon Brom-leag signifies a field, or heath, where broom grows,” and that “the great quantity of that plant on all the waste places near the town fully justifies this etymology.”
Bromley Common was in great part enclosed soon after the middle of the eighteenth century, and most of the remaining two hundred and fifty acres were cut up and partitioned in 1822, amid much local satisfaction. With it went the broom near the town; although, to be sure, it is still plentifully to be found on the further commons towards Keston.
A piece of beautiful common-land through which the road runs at the extremity of the parish is still called “Bromley Common.” Down below it, in a hollow, is Lock’s Bottom, a hamlet whose pretty scenery is rather vainly endeavouring to bear up, under the infliction of some commonplace houses and a prominent police-station. There are picturesque alders in front of the “White Lion,” but the blue lamp of the police-station spoils the sentiment of it all. Why, you ask yourself, that in a place by way of being so pretty and so rural? A few steps onward give the answer, in the great workhouse and the casual-ward, and the expectant tramps reclining, more pictorially than they know, by the pond under the tall fir-trees opposite.