Beside that stream ran from 1805 until about 1840 the rails of that long-forgotten pioneer of railways in these parts, the “Surrey Iron Railway.” This was a primitive line constructed for the purpose of affording cheap and quick transport for coals, bricks, and other heavy goods, originally between Wandsworth and Croydon, but extended in 1805 to Merstham, where quarries of limestone and beds of Fuller’s earth are situated.
This railway was the outcome of a project first mooted in 1799, for a canal from Wandsworth to Croydon. It was abandoned because of the injury that might have been caused to the wharves and factories already existing numerously along the course of the Wandle, and a railway substituted. The Act of Parliament was obtained in 1800, and the line constructed to Croydon in the following year, at a cost of about £27,000. It was not a railway in the modern sense, and the haulage was by horses, who dragged the clumsy waggons along at the rate of about four miles an hour. The rails, fixed upon stone blocks, were quite different from those of modern railways or tramways, being just lengths of angle-iron into which the wheels of the waggons fitted:
. Thus, in contradistinction from all other railway or tramway practice, the flanges were not on the wheels, but on the rails themselves. The very frugal object of this was to enable the waggons to travel on ordinary roads, if necessity arose.
From the point where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at Wandsworth, along the levels past Earlsfield and Garratt, the railway went in double track; continuing by Merton Abbey, Mitcham (where the present lane called “Tramway Path” marks its course) and across Mitcham Common into Croydon by way of what is now called Church Street, but was then known as “Iron Road.” Thence along Southbridge Lane and the course of the Bourne, it was continued to Purley, whence it climbed Smitham Bottom and ran along the left-hand side of the Brighton Road in a cutting now partly obliterated by the deeper cutting of the South Eastern line. The ideas of those old projectors were magnificent, for they cherished a scheme of extending to Portsmouth; but the enterprise was never a financial success, and that dream was not realised. Nearly all traces of the old railway are obliterated.
The marvel-mongers who derive the name of Waddon from “Woden” find that Haling comes from the Anglo-Saxon “halig,” or holy; and therefrom have built up an imaginary picture of ancient heathen rites celebrated here. The best we can say for those theories is that they may be correct or they may not. Of evidence there is, of course, none whatever; and certainly it is to be feared that the inhabitants of Croydon care not one rap about it; nor even know—or knowing, are not impressed—that here, in 1624, died that great Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham. It is much more real to them that the tramcars are twopence all the way.
At the beginning of Haling Park, immediately beyond the “Swan and Sugarloaf,” the Croydon toll-gate barred the road until 1865. Beyond it, all was open country. It is a very different tale to-day, now the stark chalk downs of Haling and Smitham are being covered with houses, and the once-familiar great white scar of Haling Chalk Pit is being screened behind newly raised roofs and chimney-pots.
The beginning of Purley is marked by a number of prominent public-houses, testifying to the magnificent thirst of the new suburb. You come past the “Swan and Sugarloaf” to the “Windsor Castle,” the “Purley Arms,” the “Red Deer,” and the “Royal Oak”; and just beyond, round the corner, is the “Red Lion.” At the “Royal Oak” a very disreputable and stony road goes off to the left. It looks like, and is, a derelict highway: once the main road to Godstone and East Grinstead, but now ending obscurely in a miserable modern settlement near the newly built station of Purley Oaks, so called by the Brighton Railway Company to distinguish it from the older Purley station—ex “Caterham Junction”—of the South Eastern line.
It was here, at Purley House, or Purley Bury as it is properly styled, close by the few poor scrubby and battered remains of the once noble woodland of Purley Oaks, that John Horne Tooke, contentious partisan and stolid begetter of seditious tracts, lived—when, indeed, he was not detained within the four walls of some prison for political offences.
HORNE TOOKE