PUTNEY—FULHAM BRIDGE—FULHAM
The way from Barnes into Putney is now, when once you have passed the Common, wholly cut up into a suburb of streets originally mean, and at last, by contact with the stern squalors of life in a striving quarter of London town, become little removed above the level of slums. But Barnes Common remains something considerable in the way of an asset, and through it still runs the Beverley Brook along the last mile or two of its nine-miles course from Cheam to its outlet into the Thames at Barnes Elms. I should say it would be a sorry business attempting to fish nowadays in the Beverley Brook; but regrets on that score are the sheerest futilities, and it should rather be a matter for congratulation that the brook has not been piped, and so altogether hidden from the eye of day. One, to be sure, regrets many things within this sphere of change; notably the very considerable slices the London and South-Western Railway has been allowed to appropriate from the very middle of the Common, not only for the purpose of running the line through it, which, it might possibly be argued, was a geographical necessity, but also for the building of its Barnes station there, which was nothing less than a sublime piece of impudence. What is left of Barnes Common is particularly beautiful in the way of towsled gorse and some pretty clumps of silver-birches. On a byroad leading off it into Putney—a route called Mill Hill road—is something very much in the nature of a surprise in these parts, nothing less than an old toll-house; a queer little building picturesquely overhung by bushy poplars. Its unexpected presence here (it must be now the nearest survival of its kind to London) hints that the days when Putney was really a village are not, after all, so long gone by.
Presently we come into Putney, and to the tramway terminus hard by the bridge and under the shadow of the church-tower, whose great sundial warns all and sundry that “Time and Tide Wait for no Man.” Is it a result of laying to heart this maxim, truism, self-evident proposition, or whatever else you choose to call it, that the tramway-cars and the motor-omnibuses hustle so impatiently round the corners of the bridge?
Those two church-towers, that stand so prominently here on either side of the river and seem to bear one another close company, although divided, as a matter of fact by a quarter of a mile, with the broad river running between, belong to the churches of Putney and Fulham, both now to be regarded as parts of London.
Putney Church, standing with its churchyard actually on the river bank, was almost wholly rebuilt about 1856, the exterior disclosing walls built of what was once white brick, reduced now to a subdued neutral tint. The old tower is left, and some few small and late and much-battered brasses, now preserved on the walls of a little north-eastern chancel chapel, which is a survival from an earlier building, and has a fine, though small, vaulted ceiling.
The usual absurd legends that seek to explain place-names to the ignorant and the credulous are, of course, not lacking here. The names of Putney and Fulham, and their situation directly opposite one another, on the Surrey and the Middlesex sides of the river, both so prominently marked by their church-towers, seem to the popular mind to need some story. The writer on places becomes tired in course of time at meeting those familiar rival “sisters” of legend, who are always found, in these strictly unveracious tales, to have been the competitive builders of the two churches occasionally found in one churchyard, of the twin towers possessed by some few parish churches, and indeed of most buildings which, for no very immediately apparent reason, have been duplicated within sight of one another.
THE OLD TOLL-HOUSE, BARNES COMMON.