The village of Thames Ditton still keeps its rustic church, with curious old font, and the Swan by the waterside stands very much as it did when Theodore Hook wrote enthusiastic verses about it; but Surbiton, and Kingston, Hampton Court, Teddington, and Twickenham—what shall we make of these, now that electric tramways have girded them about with steel? Only by the actual riverside is Nature left very much to herself, and there, where the water roars over the weir of Teddington, you do find the river unspoiled. But it is only necessary to walk a few steps back from the river, into Teddington village that was, and is, alas! no longer—for a sadness to take possession of you. There you see not only a surburbanised village, but even perceive the original suburbanisation (an ugly word for an ugly process) of about 1870 to be now down upon its luck, in the spectacle of the villas of that date offered numerously to be let, with few takers. What is the reason of this? you ask. Electric tramways. They are the reason. Also, if you do but explore farther inland, you shall find more reasons, in the discovery that Teddington is now quite a busy town, and therefore offers no longer that charm of comparative seclusion it possessed when those villas of the seventies were built.
But there are yet other reasons, chief among them the very bulky and imposing one of the modern parish church of St. Alban, which rises like some great braggart bully, and utterly dwarfs the poor old parish church opposite, now degraded to the condition of a mortuary chapel, or the like, and doubtless to be demolished so soon as ever public opinion is found to be in an indifferent mood. It is not a beautiful old church, being indeed an Early Georgian affair of red brick, but it is representative of a period, and, with the Peg Woffington almshouses near by, is all that remains of old Teddington.
The neighbourhood of the great new church, built handsomely in stone, in a Frenchified variant of that First Pointed style we are accustomed to name “Early English,” is sufficient to frighten away any would-be resident, for it is as large as many a cathedral, and will be larger yet, when foolish people are found to subscribe toward the completion of its tower. If all this stood for religion instead of merely for religiosity—a very different thing—there would be nothing to say; but when we perceive the clergy, all over the country, striving for funds towards heaping up of stone and brick and mortar, all intended towards the end of aggrandising their own discredited order, and of again bringing about the imprisonment of men’s consciences, we can only imagine that the devil laughs and the Saviour grieves. Meanwhile, the great unfinished building dominates the place, and its long unbroken roof helps to spoil the view up-river, nearly two miles away.
If we may call Teddington a town, then, by comparison, Twickenham, adjoining it, is a metropolis. All this Middlesex side of the river is, in fact, spoiled, but the river itself, and the lawns and parks fringing it, are, happily, little affected, and none, wandering along the towing-paths, would suspect the existence of those great populations on the other side of quite a narrow belt of trees. The only inkling of them is when the wind sets from the streets and brings the strains of a piano-organ, the cries of the hawkers, or the squeaking of tramcar-wheels against curves, yelling like damned souls in torment.
A BUSY DAY, MOLESEY LOCK.