Things change, after all, but slowly here. Much has gone of late years, but much is still left. Here, for example, stands a riverside inn the “Oxford and Cambridge,” with a delightful little lawn, exquisitely green, behind a low wall that gives upon the towing-path. It has a very rural look, amid urban surroundings, and at the rear you may yet see a range of old malthouses, with cowled ventilators upon their old richly-red tiled roofs, in every way resembling their fellows far down in Kent. But they are to be let or sold, and for long past the side of them giving upon the road has served the purpose of an advertising station; so the end of these things is at hand.
Kew—called on some old maps “Cue”—across the bridge into Surrey, stands grouped around its green, as of old; the curious church, which is half Byzantine and half of the Queen Anne method, presenting an outline so remarkably suggestive of an early type of locomotive engine that one would scarce be surprised to find some day that it had steamed off.
Kew Green is charming, but there is a dirty little slum down by the riverside, with labyrinthine alleys and corners where children make dust-and mud-pies and women in aprons stand at doorways with arms akimbo and gossip. Here is a street of modern cottages with an odd old name: “Westerly Ware.”
I do not think Kew can be condemned as being go-ahead and ultra-modern. Time was, somewhere about 1880, when a tramway was laid along the Kew Gardens road from the foot of Kew Bridge into Richmond. It was regarded when new as a very rash and deplorable and innovating thing, and the tinkle of its horse-bells was anything but pleasing to the ears of the wealthy residents of the mostly peculiarly ostentatious villas on the way. But “circumstances alter cases,” as the old adage tritely tells us, and now that few provincial towns of any size are without their electric tramways, this little single-line horsed tramway is come to be regarded almost in the nature of a genuine antique. You take your seat upon one of the little cars and wait and wait, and still wait. It is very pleasant and drowsy in summer to wait until the next tram down has left the way clear at one of the occasional sidings, but if you are in a hurry, it is quicker to walk. I do not think any one really wants electric tramways into Richmond, though, no doubt, they will come.
When they do, there will be introduced an altogether undesirable element of hurry into a road that at present veritably exhales leisure. There is a certain æsthetic pleasure in lingering along this road, for although the architecture of those villas is perhaps not the last word in art, their gardens are beautiful and are easily to be seen. Would that Kew Gardens were so readily visible. But the churlish Government department that formerly had the management of the gardens built a high and ugly brick wall the whole length of the road, so only the tree-tops are visible over it, even to travellers on tramcar roofs; and no one has yet had the public spirit to demolish the useless thing and to substitute an iron railing in place of it. One opening, indeed, was made, about 1874, when a charming red-brick building by Eden Nesfield was erected, just inside the grounds, and the peep it gives into Paradise, so to speak, only makes one the more inclined to ask why any of the wall should be allowed to remain.
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN.
Strand-on-the-Green is the name of the picturesque waterside row of houses of many shapes and sizes that extends along the Middlesex foreshore from Kew Bridge towards Chiswick. It is a kind of home-grown Venice, and sometimes, when the Thames is in flood, its feet are dabbled in the water, and ingenious ways with planks and clay are resorted to for the keeping of the river out of ground floors. But since the Thames has become more and more curbed and regulated, these occasions have grown and are still growing fewer. I do not know where is the “Green” of Strand-on-the-Green, and the “strand” itself that stretches down to the river at low tide from the brick-and-asphalted walk in front of the village, or hamlet—by whichever name we are rightly to entitle the place—is mostly mud, where the rankly-growing grass ceases. Old boats and barges that long since grew beyond any more patching and mending, and were not worth even breaking up, have been left here to lie about, half in mud and half in water, grass growing in them.