The very names of Brentford’s streets tell a tale of eld. It is only in these immemorially ancient places that such names as “Town Meadow,” “The Butts,” “The Hollows” “Old Spring Gardens,” “New Spring Gardens,” “The Ham,” “Ferry Lane,” or “Half Acre” are met with. They are names that tell of a dead and gone Brentford little suspected by the most of those who pass by. No unpleasing place this waterside town when the “Town Meadow,” that is now a slummy close, was really a piece of common land green with grass and doubtless giving pleasantly upon the river. And when Old and New Spring Gardens first acquired their name, perhaps about the age when Herrick wrote his charming poems, or that era when Pepys gossiped, they were no doubt idyllic spots where the springs gushed forth amid shady bowers. To-day they are old-world alleys, with houses declining upon a decrepit age that invites the attention of improving hands. There was an ancient congeries of crooked alleys and small cottage property near the corner of Half Acre known as “Troy Town.” It stood hard by where the District Council offices are now placed, but tall hoardings facing the road now disclose the fact that Troy Town is in process of being abolished. The name is curious, but not unique. It is found frequently in England, and seems generally to occur as the name of an old suburb of a much older town; some place of picnicking and merry-making, where there were arbours, and above all, a maze, either cut in the turf or planted in the form of a hedge, like that most glorious of mazes at Hampton Court. Such were the original “Troy Towns”; and whatever once were the clustered alleys in Brentford that were called by that name, certainly they have carried out to the full, and to the last, the mazy, uncharted idea.
But this old suburb of Old Brentford must at an early date have been swallowed up in the growth of New Brentford and at a remote time have lost everything of its original character except its old traditional name. Names, we know, survive when all else has vanished or been utterly changed.
Ferry Lane is one of Brentford’s many quaint corners. There is an old inn there, the “Waterman’s Arms,” and a stately old mansion, “Ferry House.” And there is a curious old malthouse, too, which, in the artistic way, simply makes the fortune of Ferry Lane, so piquant are the outlines of its roofs and its two ventilating shafts, like young lighthouses. Buildings of such simple, yet such picturesque lines do not come into existence nowadays.
And so to leave Brentford, with much of its story untold. To tell it were a long business that would lose the sense of proportion which to some degree, let us hope, distinguishes these volumes. So nothing shall be said of those two mysterious “Kings of Brentford” who shared, according to tradition, the throne; nothing, that is, but to note that a brilliant idea has of late occurred to antiquaries, puzzled beyond measure by these indefinite kings. It is now conceived that the legend originally was of the two kings at Brentford, and that so far from sharing one throne happily together, they were Edmund Ironside, the Saxon king, and Canute the invading Dane (or Cnut, as it seems we are expected to style him now), who was severely defeated here by Edmund, and driven out of Brentford across the river.
CHAPTER XI
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN—KEW—CHISWICK—MORTLAKE—BARNES
There is a waterside walk from Brentford to Kew Bridge, commanding a full view of that new and solid, perhaps also stolid, structure of stone, opened May 20, 1903. The old bridge was a more satisfactory affair to the eye, although its roadway was steep, rising sharply as it did from either end to an apex over the middle arch. The arches, boldly and beautifully semicircular, were delightful to look upon, not like the flattened-out segmental spans of the new bridge, which have a heavy and ungraceful appearance, looking for all the world as though they had settled heavily in the making upon their haunches and would presently fall, flop, into the river.