drove them back to the Sutton route, even at the cost of facing the steep windings of Reigate Hill.
This road through Sutton and Reigate seems to have been the standard one when the Prince Regent’s patronage made Brighton’s fortune. The lumbering stages of older days took a whole long day to go all the way round by Lewes; but early in the century lighter vehicles began to ply on a shorter route, their wheels soon greased by competition. Among the many faults Cobbett has to find with George IV.’s reign, one is that “great parcels of stock jobbers” live at Brighton with their families, who “skip backwards and forwards on the coaches” to business in the City. He speaks of at least twenty coaches running daily on three or four routes, by which the Brighton resident, “leaving not very early in the morning, reaches London by noon, and starting back two and a half hours after, reaches Brighton not very late at night.” If 7 A.M. would answer to this matutinal worthy’s idea of a not very early start, that allows five hours for a journey recorded to be done once, under William IV., in the exceptionally short time of three hours forty minutes. A more precise writer of Cobbett’s date gives six hours as a good rate for sixteen regular coaches plying all the year—besides eight “butterflies” in summer—the “Times,” the “Regulator,” the “Rocket,” the “Patriot,” the “True Blue,” and so forth. In our own day of coaching revival a record run has been a little under eight hours to Brighton and back, with the disadvantage of more thronged thoroughfares to be traversed at either end. The cyclists’ record seems to be about seven hours for the double journey, which is only a little more than that of an amateur Dick Turpin on horseback. The famous Stock Exchange walk to Brighton was won in nine and a half hours. One can hardly say in what time the motor-car could devour this way, if it got a fair chance and a clear road, as the rail has for its rush of an hour or so. One of the latest appearances on the Brighton road has been a motor omnibus, that modestly professed to take four hours to Brighton. For some time the Post Office has been carrying its heavy traffic this way by a motor vehicle, which once encountered the old-fashioned peril of highway robbery. There has been talk of a special road from London to Brighton, reserved as a track on which such careering vehicles may consume their own dust at their own pace.
The Sutton route is certainly the best in that it soonest brings one out into something like open country. Once clear of tram lines at Tooting or Streatham, roads from the west end and the city converge by Figgs Marsh on the flats of Mitcham. This is a widely straggling sucker of the metropolis which clings to relics of its rustic character, showing clumps of cottages, old inns, and patches of open ground not yet squeezed out of existence, while it has a fame of its own for the manufacture of tobacco and for the culture of aromatic herbs, that are distilled at Carshalton not far off. About several villages around, indeed, the air is perfumed by crops of lavender and peppermint, the essence of which makes an export to France. This neighbourhood had also an old name for walnuts, as mentioned by Fuller; and it still has room for gardens as well as golf ground. Let us trust that only scandal-mongering jealousy prompted a reproach once current among its neighbours:—
Sutton for mutton,
Carshalton for beef;
Croydon for a pretty girl,
And Mitcham for a thief!
It may be that Mitcham got this bad reputation through the gypsies that long hung about it, and other undesirable aliens who gathered to the revels of Mitcham Fair.
Outside of Mitcham, when the road has passed a very pleasant glimpse of the Wandle, it becomes truly rural, running for two or three miles by hedges, trees, and park palings, with as yet few hints of suburban expansion. Yet, truth to tell, this is but a commonplace prospect of Surrey; and the cyclist or pedestrian might do well to make a bend by the left for a more varied route, by Mitcham Common, Hackbridge, and Carshalton, with its old Church and the pond wept over by Ruskin, who would have mourned more loudly had he lived to see its well-timbered park invaded by the builder. Carshalton—spelt Casehorton in Georgian books, Cash-Haulton by Fuller—is one of those places that has a wilful pronunciation of its name, this and the spelling perhaps worn down from Cross Old Town; and it is old enough to figure in King Alfred’s will. Eastwards, by Wallington and Beddington, this choice place of residence almost runs into Croydon, to which a pretty walk may be taken by the bank of the Wandle opposite Beddington Park, where the stately Hall of the Carews, that has entertained Queen Elizabeth, is now an Orphan Asylum, and may be visited on week-day afternoons. In the gardens here it is said that oranges were acclimatised for a century, till an unusually severe frost proved too much for them. The spirit of the nineteenth century turned part of Beddington Park into a sewage farm; but still this vicinity has some pretty peeps not yet blocked out by bricks and mortar.
Even in George I.’s time, Defoe tells us, the edge of the Downs hereabouts, as “the most agreeable spot on all this side of London,” was thickly set with citizens’ houses, some “built with such a Profusion of Expense that they look rather like Seats of the Nobility.” In our day, the merits of a high and dry site have spread building farther on to the chalk heights. Coming by Carshalton, one strikes Sutton in its centre, where beside the railway station the road, till not long ago, was spanned by the sign of the “Cock,” that held out longer than the turnpike gate below it. The high-road runs right through this long place, for two miles or so, first descending then ascending on the chalk slopes, where so many Londoners seek healthy homes that this must be the largest of our scores of South towns, one of the commonest place-names in England. Newtown is still more frequent, and not far behind Sutton comes Weston, whereas Nortons and Eastons appear comparatively rare.
The Sutton of Surrey seems more prosperous than picturesque, its old features overlaid, and its parish monuments packed away into a handsome new Church. But a mile to the west, Cheam has more rural features scattered round a spire below which stands the chancel of the old Church, enshrining some stately monuments; then from this village one can walk on through Nonsuch Park to Ewell on the Epsom road. Cheam is perhaps best known by what seems the oldest private school in England, now a nursery for Eton, but it has passed through various phases, and was at one time kept by the Rev. William Gilpin, whose search for the picturesque came to be caricatured in the tours of Dr. Syntax.