Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of the Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, prominent at the angle of the roads—a memento mori, ever since the twenties, for travellers down the road.
Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well as joy and everything else human, passes, is one in shape like a biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton Hill, accompanies name and date:
O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere
Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here;
The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale
From this sad turf whene’er he reads the tale,
That one so young and lovely—died—and last,
When the sun’s vigour warms, or tempests rave,
Shall come in summer’s bloom and winter’s blast,
A Mother, to weep o’er this hopeless grave.
An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in 1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight assignations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton snores.
On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here, unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this hill-top, and London seemed far away.
And so to Streatham, once rightly “Streatham, Surrey,” in the postal address, but now merely “Streatham, S.W.” A world of significance lies in that apparently simple change, which means that it is now in the London Postal District. Even so early as 1850 we read in Brayley’s “History of Surrey” that “the village of Streatham is formed by an almost continuous range of villas and other respectable dwellings.” Respectable! I should think so, indeed! Conceive the almost impious inadequacy of calling the Streatham Hill mansions of City magnates “respectable.” As well might one style the Alps “pretty”!
But this spot was not always of such respectability, for about 1730 there stood a gibbet on Streatham Hill, by the fifth milestone, and from it hung in chains the body of one “Jack Gutteridge,” a highwayman duly executed for robbing and murdering a gentleman’s servant here. The place was long afterwards known as “Jack Gutteridge’s Gate.”
Streatham Common