HALF-PRICE CHURCHES
Lambeth was at that time a suburban and a greatly expanding parish, and was one of those that accepted this offer, and took what came eventually to be called Half Price Churches. It gave a large order, and took four: those of Kennington, Waterloo, Brixton, and Norwood, all ferociously hideous, and costing £15,000 apiece; the Government granting one moiety and the other being raised by a parish rate on all, without distinction of creed. The Government also remitted the usual taxes on the building materials, and in some instances further helped the people to rejoice by imposing a compulsory rate of twopence in the pound, to pay the rector or vicar. All this did more to weaken the Church of England than even a century of scandalous inefficiency:
Abuse a man, and he may brook it,
But keep your hands out of his breeches pocket.
The major part of these grievances was adjusted by the Act of 1868, abolishing all Church rates, excepting those levied under special Acts; but the eyesores will not be redressed until the temples are pulled down and rebuilt.
Brixton appears in Domesday as “Brixistan,” which in later ages became “Brixtow”; and the Brixton Road follows the line of a Roman way on which Streatham stood. Both the Domesday name of Brixton and the name of Streatham are significant, indicating their position on the stones and the street, i.e., the paved thoroughfare alluded to in “Brixton causeway,” marked on old suburban maps.
The Brixton Road, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a pretty place. On the left-hand side, as you made for Streatham, ran the river Effra. It was a clear and sparkling stream, twelve feet wide, which, rising at Norwood, eventually found its way into the Thames at Vauxhall. Its course ran where the front gardens of the houses on that side of the road are now situated, and at that period every house was fronted by its little bridge; but the unfortunate Effra has long since been thrust underground in a sewer-pipe, and the sole reminiscence of it to be seen is the name of Effra Road, beside Brixton Church.
The “White Horse” public-house, where the omnibuses halt, was in those times a lonely inn, neighboured only by a farm; but with the dawn of the nineteenth century a new suburb began to spring up, where Angell Road now stands, called “Angell Town,” and then the houses of Brixton Road began to arise. It is curious to note that the last of the old watchmen’s wooden boxes was standing in front of Claremont Lodge, 168, Brixton Road, until about 1875.
There is little in the Lower Brixton Road that is reminiscent of the Regency, but a very great deal of early suburban comfort evident in the old mansions of the Rise and the Hill, built in days when by a “suburban villa” you did not mean a cheap house in a cheap suburban road, but—to speak in the language of auctioneers—a “commodious residence situate in its own ornamental grounds, replete with every convenience,” or something in that eloquent style. For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon Marché, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! Solid comfort resides within those four-square walls, and reclines in saddle-bag armchairs, thinking complacently of big bank balances, all derived from wholesale dealing in the City, and now enjoyed, and added to, in the third and fourth generations; for these solid houses were built a century ago, or thereby. They are not beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of good yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted with age, and sparsely relieved, it may be, with stucco pilasters picked out with raised medallions or plaster wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably permanent—and large. They are, indeed, of such spaciousness and commodious quality that an auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing those characteristics to houses which do not possess them feels a vast despair possess his soul when it falls to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And yet I think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building plots for what we now understand by “villas”—a fate that has lately befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour thirty or forty little modern houses—why, then an unwonted respect is felt for it and its kind.
BRIXTON HILL