THE NEW SUBURB
Turnham Green remained countrified until the railway came and took a slice off the so-called “Back Common,” and built a station, and thus established the first outpost of Suburbia. Then another railway came, and took another slice, and a School Board filched another piece; and then great black boards, with white letters, began to be planted in the surrounding orchards, setting forth how “this eligible land” was to be let on building lease. Presently men who wore corduroys and waistcoats with sleeves to them, and leather straps round their trousers below the knees came along, and, with much elaborate profanity, built what were, with much humour, termed “villas” there. Streets of them, and all alike! After this, a tramway was made along the high-road, starting at Hammersmith, and ending at Kew Bridge. That tramway was amusing to us schoolboys, so long as the novelty of it lasted. Our school—it had the imposing name of Belmont House—faced the high-road, and it was our greatest delight of summer evenings to throw pieces of soap at the outside passengers of the trams from the bedroom windows. The expenditure of soap was tremendous, and sometimes those “outsiders” were hit, whereupon there was trouble! There was a gloomy old mansion opposite our school, called “Bleak House,” and we used to think it was the veritable “Bleak House” of Dickens’s story. We know better now. It still stands, but a furniture warehousing firm have built warehouses on to it, and it is no longer romantically gloomy.
ROBIN HOOD AND LITTLE JOHN.
The school has gone, too, where I learnt, and promptly forgot, Latin and Greek; and a row of shops, with big plate-glass windows and great gas lamps, have taken its place; and where we construed those dead (and deadly) languages, the linen-draper’s assistant measures out muslins and calicoes. I have walked along these pavements during the last few days, and have noted more changes. There used to stand, beside the road, on the right hand as you go towards Gunnersbury, a little wayside “pub,” with bow windows, and a bent and hunch-backed red-tiled roof. It was called the “Robin Hood,” and an old-fashioned wooden post, supporting the swinging sign, stood on the kerb-stone, beside a horse-trough. I remember the sign well, for it had quite an elaborate picture painted upon it, representing Robin Hood and Little John. I can see quite clearly now that the artist of this affair obtained his ideas from the pictorial diplomas of the Ancient Order of Foresters; but, at the time, I thought it a very fine painting. The feathered hats impressed me very much indeed, although I always used to wonder why those two magnificent fellows hadn’t pulled up their socks. It was some time before I discovered that they were not socks, but the big bucket boots of romance. They have pulled this old house down, and have built a glaring, flaring, gin-palace on the site of it, just as they did some five years ago to the old “Roebuck,” not far off. The sign is gone, too, and wayfarers are no longer invited, if Robin Hood is not at home, to take a glass with Little John. What would happen, I often speculated, if both those heroes were away? Would, one take a glass, in that case, with Friar Tuck or Maid Marian?
THE “OLD WINDMILL.”
OLD SUBURBAN INNS
There is an old inn still standing in this same high-road—most appropriately, by the way, situated next door to the Police Station, which, in its time, has extended hospitality to many a bold “road agent” who found his living on the Bath and Exeter Roads. The “Old Windmill” is a shy, retiring house which lies modestly some way back from the line of houses fronting the road. It has an open gravelled space in front, and a swinging sign on a post, which, together with an immense sundial on the front of the house, proclaims that the “Old Windmill” dates back to 1717. These are vestiges of the time when the Chiswick High Road was bordered by hedges instead of houses. The house, although it wears a certain old-world air, can scarce be called picturesque. The huge sundial just mentioned, with its mis-spelled legend, “So Fly’s Life Away,” gives it an interest, and so does the record of how one Henry Colam was arrested here one night toward the close of last century, on the charge, “For that he did molest and threaten certain of His Majesty’s liege subjects upon the highway, in company with divers others, still at large.” Henry had, as a matter of fact, “with divers others,” attempted to rob the Bath Mail near this spot. He failed in his enterprise, but Bow Street had him all the same, and it does not require a very vivid imagination to conjure up a picture of his end.
Another old inn, which still stands at Turnham Green, although greatly altered, has a history not to be forgotten.