The High Street of Croydon really is high, for it occupies a ridge and looks down on the right hand on the Old Town and the valley of the Wandle, or “Wandel.” The centre of Croydon has, in fact, been removed from down below, where the church and palace first arose, on the line of the old Roman road, to this ridge, where within the historic period the High Street was only a bridle-path avoiding the little town in the valley.
The High Street, incidentally the Brighton Road as well, is nowadays a very modern and commercial-looking thoroughfare, and owes that appearance, and its comparative width, to the works effected under the Croydon Improvement Act of 1890. Already Croydon, given a Mayor and Town Council in 1883, had grown so greatly that the narrow street was incapable of accommodating the traffic; while the low-lying, and in other senses low, quarter of Market Street and Middle Row offended the dignity and self-respect of the new-born Corporation. The Town Hall stood at that time in the High Street: a curious example of bastard classic architecture, built in 1808. Near by was the “Greyhound,” an old coaching and posting inn, with one of those picturesque gallows signs straddling across the street, of which those of the “George” at Crawley and the “Greyhound” at Sutton are surviving examples. That of the “Cock” at Sutton disappeared in 1898, and the similar signs of the “Crown,” opposite the Whitgift Hospital, and of the “King’s Arms” vanished many years ago.
The “Greyhound” was the principal inn of Croydon in the old times. The first mention of it is found in 1563, the parish register of that year containing the entry, “Nicholas Vode (Wood) the son of the good wyfe of the grewond was buryed the xxix day of January.” The voluminous John Taylor mentions it in 1624 as one of the two Croydon inns, and it was the headquarters of General Fairfax in 1645, when Cromwell vehemently disputed with him under its roof on the conduct of the campaign, urging more severe measures.
Following upon the alteration, the “Greyhound” was rebuilt. Its gallows sign disappeared at the same time, when a curious point arose respecting the post supporting it on the opposite pavement. Erected in the easy-going times when such a matter was nothing more than a little friendly and neighbourly concession, the square foot of ground it occupied had by lapse of time become freehold property, and as such it was duly scheduled and purchased by the Improvements Committee. A sum of £400 was claimed for freehold and loss of advertisement, and eventually £350 was paid.
RUSKIN
I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways. I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is referred to in “Præterita”:
“... Of my father’s ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother’s more than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the ‘Old King’s Head’ in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint her Simone Memmi’s ‘King’s Head’ for a sign.” And he adds: “Meantime my aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the little house still standing—or which was so four months ago[7]—the fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop, in the second story” (sic).
There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts created ad hoc, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a handkerchief.
The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about the period of Croydon’s first expansion, when the οἱ πολλοί impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces, neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington.
Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration, after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon’s monument, however, still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.