Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

Leigh, that looks so picturesque from this hilltop, keeps that quality even at close quarters. It is a shrimping, winkling, cockling, and whelking town, and all along its maritime street, where beery fishermen, very deliberate in their movements, and broad and patchy in the stern, lounge and gossip, are the most perplexing little cottages and taverns and bothies, with spaces large and spaces small in between; and over all a generous and penetrating scent of shell-fish in process of being cooked. It is a smell that will not be denied, and no wonder, since in almost every one of these little sheds and bothies, and indeed often in the open air, shell-fish and shrimps are, in fact, being cooked by wholesale. That is the business of Leigh, as evidenced by the mountain ranges of winkle and other shells along the foreshore; permanent and indubitable evidence of the success of the local industry.

To reach this part of Leigh—having come from Hadleigh, and carefully negotiated the descent of Bread and Cheese Hill—we turn to the right in midst of the hilltop portion of the village, by the parish church, whose tower is so prominent a landmark, and then walk down the precipitous descent to the fishing community. Between the seashore of Leigh and that of Southend is Westcliff—Westcliff-on-Sea as it is proudly styled, or (still more proudly) “the New Eldorado.” Why styled by so auriferous a name only those responsible for the alluring advertisements of this newly developed building estate can tell; even supposing that they can give a reasonable explanation. Who that has waited weary half-hours at London railway stations has not seen coloured pictorial advertisements of Westcliff; the trees very green, the houses very red, the sea of a more cerulean blue than the Mediterranean in the Bay of Naples, and all the roads as yellow as fine gold? Well, here is the place itself, for comparison.

Southend—maligned Southend, curiously regarded by superior persons as being throughout the year infested with crowds of the worst type of tripper—lies basking in the sunshine, sheltered from northerly winds by rising ground, and looking southward, across where the Thames and the sea mingle, to the Kentish shore and Sheppey, six miles away. Excursion trains and steamboats notwithstanding, Southend, apart from Saturdays in summer and the usual Bank Holiday rush, is not the Cockney pandemonium it is generally represented to be, but a goodly sized and cheerful watering-place, greatly in favour as a residence with many City men, and, with its mild and dry air, one of the healthiest of places for children. The cautious scribe would be afraid to state how far the sea recedes here at the ebb, and certainly one would not like to say how long Southend Pier is now. Some years ago it was a mile and a quarter in length, but since then it has been lengthened, for the purpose of giving a landing-place for steamers at the pier-head at all times of the tide. A pilgrimage from end to end of this structure—doubtless the longest of its kind in England—would be a weariness but for the electric railway that runs its length.

We have now journeyed forty-three miles from London, but if the summer days be long and weather propitious, there is no reason why the tour should not be extended, to include that Isle of Sheppey whose shores are visible from here. Steamers constantly make the passage between this and Sheerness.

Comparatively few cyclists know Sheppey, which is, in fact, very much of an unknown member of the British Isles, even to those who are in a favourable position for reaching it. Does the average man, indeed, stop to consider that the British Isles, all told, large and small, number considerably over two hundred? Of them Sheppey is one of the least remote in point of mileage, but among the loneliest in actual fact, even although its capital—Sheerness—is a large and growing dockyard town.

It is a redundancy to talk of the “Isle of Sheppey,” because its name, deriving as it does from the Saxon “Sceapige” (the “Isle of Sheep”), includes the designation of “island.” It is eleven miles in length, and five miles across its broadest part, and includes the two so-called “isles” of Harty and Elmley, which, once divided from it by slimy creeks, are now practically joined, since modern drainage works have been in progress. Sheppey is a place of the very greatest interest. Its scenery, divided into the marshes that border the Swale, which separates it from the mainland, and into a high ridge or backbone that runs the greater length of the isle, from Sheerness to Warden, is of a peculiarly weird quality, whether you are looking at the low-lying marshlands or at the dull-hued clayey cliffs that face the North Sea, and are continually crumbling away. Trees are few, and grow only in the more sheltered parts of the island. Landing at the jetty by Sheerness railway station, under the guns of the guardship swinging at anchor in the roadstead, and well covered by a circular iron fort springing out of the water, we are in the dockyard town and maritime port of Sheerness, a place, like most towns of the dockyard kind, squalid and mean, coal-gritty and unlovely. There is, it is true, another and a better quarter, Bluetown by name, where the dignified heads of departments and their kind reside, but it does not lie on our line of exploration.

Queenborough, off to the right, is worth seeing by those who have the time. It lies somewhat apart from modern developments, and looks absolutely the same now as when Hogarth drew it, over a hundred years ago, on that down-the-Thames Cockney trip he made with his friends. That is to say, it consists of one long, broad, empty, Dutch-like street, lifeless, and looking quite unlike a place with a history. Originally “Kingborough,” its name was changed by Edward the Third to the one it still bears, in honour of his Queen, Philippa.