Streatham—the Ham (that is to say the home, or the hamlet) on the Street—emphatically in those Saxon times when it first obtained its name, the Street—was probably so named to distinguish it from some other settlement situated in the mud. In that era, when hard roads were few, a paved way could be, and very often was, made to stand godfather to a place, and thus we find so many Streatleys, Stratfords, Strattons, Streets, and Stroods on the map. Those “streets” were Roman roads. The particular “street” on which Streatham stood seems to have been a Roman road which came up from the coast by Clayton, St. John’s Common, Godstone, and Caterham, a branch of the road to Portus Adurni, the Old Shoreham of to-day. Portions of it were discovered in 1780, on St. John’s Common, when the Brighton turnpike road through that place was under construction. It was from 18 to 20 feet wide, and composed of a bed of flints, grouted together, 8 inches thick. Narrowly avoiding Croydon, it reached Streatham by way of Waddon (where there is one of the many “Cold Harbours” associated so intimately with Roman roads) and joined the present Brighton Road midway between Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond, at what used to be Broad Green.
DOCTOR JOHNSON
There are no Roman remains at twentieth-century Streatham, and there are very few even of the eighteenth century. The suburbs have absorbed the village, and Dr. Johnson himself and Thrale Place are only memories. “All flesh is grass,” said the Preacher, and therefore Dr. Johnson, whose bulky figure we may put at the equivalent of a truss of hay, is of course but an historic name; but bricks and mortar last immeasurably longer than those who rear them, and his haunts might have been still extant but for the tragical nearness of Streatham to London and that “ripeness” of land for building which has abolished many a pleasant and an historic spot.
But while the broad Common of Streatham remains unfenced, the place will keep a vestige of its old-time character of roadside village. A good deal earlier than Dr. Samuel Johnson’s visits to Streatham and Thrale Place, the village had quite a rosy chance of becoming another Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham, for in the early years of the eighteenth century it became known as a Spa, and real and imaginary invalids flocked to drink the disagreeable waters issuing from what quaint old Aubrey calls the “sower and weeping ground” by the Common. Whether the waters were too nasty, or not nasty enough, does not appear, but it is certain that the rivalry of Streatham to those other Spas was neither long-continued nor serious.
Streatham is content to forget its waters, but the memory of Dr. Johnson will not be dropped, for if it were, no one knows to what quarter Streatham could turn for any history or traditions at all. As it is, the mind’s-eye picture is cherished of that grumbling, unwieldy figure coming down from London to Thrale’s house, to be lionised and indulged, and in return to give Mrs. Thrale a reflected glory. The lion had the manners of a bear, and, like a dancing bear, performed clumsy evolutions for buns and cakes; but he had a heart as tender as a child’s, and a simple vanity as engaging, beneath that unpromising exterior and those pompous ways. Wig awry and singed in front from his short-sighted porings over the midnight oil, clothes shabby, and linen that journeyed only at long intervals to the wash-tub, his was not the aspect of a carpet-knight, and those he met at the literary-artistic tea-table of Thrale Place murmured that he was an “original.”
He met a brilliant company over those teacups: Reynolds and Garrick, and Fanny Burney—the readiest hand at the “management” of one so difficult and intractable—and many lesser lights, and partook there of innumerable cups of tea, dispensed at that hospitable board by Mrs. Thrale. That historic teapot is still extant, and has a capacity of three quarts; specially chosen, doubtless, in view of the Doctor’s visits. Ye gods! what floods of Bohea were consumed within that house in Thrale Park!
They even seated the studious Johnson on horseback and took him hunting; and, strange to say, he does not merely seem to have only just saved himself from falling off, but is said to have acquitted himself as well as any country squire on that notable occasion.
But all things have an end, and the day was to come when Johnson should bid a last farewell to Streatham. He had broken with the widowed Mrs. Thrale on the subject of her marriage with Piozzi, and he could no longer bear to see the place. So, in one endearing touch of sentiment, he gave it good-bye, as his diary records:
“Sunday, went to church at Streatham. Templo valedixi cum osculo.” Thus, kissing the old porch of St. Leonard’s, the lexicographer departed with heavy heart. Two years later he died.
This Church of St. Leonard still contains the Latin epitaph he wrote to commemorate the easy virtues of his friend Henry Thrale, who died in 1781, but alterations and restorations have changed almost all else. It is, in truth, a dreadful example, externally, of the Early Compo Period, and internally of the Late Churchwarden, or Galleried, Style.