HALLIFORD.
WATERSPLASH NEAR HALLIFORD.
Leaving Walton behind, the Thames Valley is seen to have become the prey of those many water companies which some few years since were all merged into the Metropolitan Water Board. Between them and the spread of London, the once beautiful scenery of the reaches of the Thames has in long stretches been completely spoiled. Not sheer necessity, only bestial stupidity, has caused this truly lamentable condition of affairs. With the immense modern growth of the metropolis, it is specially desirable that the beauty of the river at its gates should have been jealously safeguarded, but it has been given over to those true spoilers, the waterworks engineer and the speculative builder; and the interesting and beautiful old-world villages and forgotten corners that survive do but increase the regret felt for those others that have been wantonly extinguished. The Surrey side of the river between Walton and Molesey has been made monotonously formal with the embankments of great reservoirs; and it is only when Molesey Lock is reached that their depressing society is shaken off. On the Middlesex-side, that part of Sunbury where the bizarre semi-Byzantine modern church of the place stands is the only unspoiled spot until Hampton Court comes in sight, and between the two we have perhaps the very worst exhibition of those outrages of which the water companies have been guilty. There, on either side of the road, a long, unlovely line of engine-houses and pumping-stations stretches; but hideous though it may be from the road, it is worse when seen from the river. There is always an entirely gratuitous ugliness in a water company’s engine-houses, and these examples are not by any means exceptions; being built in a kind of yellow-white brick, with a long series of chimneys and water-towers that have already been proved insufficiently tall and have each in consequence been lengthened with what look like exaggerated twin stove-pipes. It is a distressing and unlovely paradox that the buildings and precincts of waterworks are invariably dry and husky, gritty and coaly places, and these bring no variation to that rule. The roads are blackened with coal-dust, the chimneys belch black smoke, and the poor little strips of grounds that run beside the river, with lawns, and some few anæmic trees, seem parched up. The Thames Ditton and Surbiton front of the river is in the same manner defiled with engine-houses and intakes, with coal-wharves and filter-beds, and with nearly half a mile of ugly retaining-wall. The especial pity of all these things is that they were not at all necessary where they are. They would have been just as efficient if placed in some position out of sight, away from the river bank, and could so have been placed, with a small expenditure for additional piping, instead of being the eyesore they are.
SUNBURY.