AN OLD WEIR ON THE WEY.
To Chilworth succeeds the wide common of Shalford, leading close by the winding Wey to Guildford town. Here that little river, evidently not so little, ages ago, has cut a deep cleft through the immense rampart of the North Downs, so that the road to the town is quite deeply recessed in a valley, and flat.
Do you know Guildford, and yet not love it—its quaint High Street, the steepest, they say, in all England, built along the slope of this cleft made by the Wey; its churches, Abbot’s Hospital, and that quaintest and most curious of old buildings, the Guildhall?
THE GUILDHALL AND HIGH STREET, GUILDFORD.
They do not build Guildhalls of this kind to-day, the architects who are called in to design such things. Perhaps they are not allowed. Nor are they called Guildhalls. “Perish the name!” say in effect the upstart towns of this expansive era, and nothing will serve their turn but “Municipal Buildings.” We know the Municipal Building order of architecture, and, sooth to say, we do not like it, whether it be named Classic or Victorian Renaissance, or labelled in any other style intended to cloak poverty of design and display a crazy patchwork of priggish eclecticism.
Compared with the frowning Keep of Guildford, the Guildhall is, of course, the merest parvenu, having been built in 1683, two years before Monmouth was dragged up to execution on Tower Hill after Sedgemoor fight. But the old Norman tower is four-square and stern, with only the picturesqueness that historic association can find; while the belfried turret of the Guildhall, and its boldly projecting clock, impending massively over the pavement of the High Street, are the pride of the eye and a delight to the artistic sense of all them that love their like.