The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South

by Charles G. Harper

We first find Croydon mentioned in A.D. 962, when it was “Crogdoene.” In Domesday Book it is “Croindene.” Whether the name means “crooked vale,” “chalk vale,” or “town of the cross,” I will not pretend to say, and he would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate until 1750.

GROWTH OF CROYDON

By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still Croydon grows.

In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620 they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to be a “very obscure and darke place.” Archbishop Abbot “expounded” it by felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.

The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. It was the North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last few years; but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks “improvement”; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good Whitgift’s noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play monkey-tricks—when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.

Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, “The Hospital of the Holy Trinity,” inscribed high up on the wall, seems strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.

There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, the opposite side of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.

It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury and eloquent with the motto Qui dat pauperi non indigebit, the stranger has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old Aubrey quaintly puts it, “a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a college, by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late Archbishop of Canterbury.” The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation: twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each £40 and £30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital so long as of good behaviour, but “obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde of charmmynge, or witchcrafte” are punished by the statutes with expulsion.

THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.