"TO TEAPOT BAY AND BACK."
Londoners who like but are weary of the attractions of Eastend-on-Mud, and want a change, can scarcely do better than spend twenty-four hours in that rising watering-place Teapot Bay. I say advisedly "rising," because the operation has been going on for more than forty years. In these very pages a description of the "juvenile town," appeared nearly half a century ago. Then it was said that the place was "so infantine that many of the houses were not out of their scaffold-poles, whilst others had not yet cut their windows," and the place has been growing ever since—but very gradually. The "ground plan of the High Street" of those days would still be useful as a guide, although it is only fair to say that several of the fields then occupied by cabbages are now to some extent covered with empty villas labelled "To Let." In the past the High Street was intersected by roads described as "a street, half houses, half potatoes," "a street apparently doing a good stroke of business," "a street, but no houses," "a street indigent, but houseless," "a street which appears to have been nipped in the kitchens," "a street thickly populated with three inhabitants," and last but not least, "a street in such a flourishing condition that it has started a boarding-house and seminary." The present condition of Teapot Bay is much the same—the roads running between two lines of cellars (contributions to houses that have yet to be built) are numerous and testify to good intentions never fulfilled. There is the same meaningless tower with a small illuminated clock at the top of it, and if the pier is not quite so long as it was thirty or forty years ago, it still seems to be occupying the same site.
