The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South

by Charles G. Harper

SMITHAM

Until 1898 Smitham Bottom remained a fortuitous concourse of some twenty mean houses on a windswept natural platform, ghastly with the chalky “spoil-banks” thrown up when the South Eastern Railway engineers excavated the great cuttings in 1840; but when the three railway-stations within one mile were established that serve Smitham Bottom—the stations of Coulsdon, Stoat’s Nest, and Smitham—the place, very naturally, began to grow with the magic quickness generally associated with Jonah’s Gourd and Jack’s Beanstalk, and now Smitham Bottom is a town. Most of the spoil-banks are gone, and those that remain are planted with quick-growing poplars; so that, if they can survive the hungry soil, there will presently be a leafy screen to the ugly railway sidings. Showy shops, all plate-glass and nightly glare of illumination, have arisen; the old “Red Lion” inn has got a new and very saucy front; and, altogether, “Smitham” has arrived. The second half of the name is now in process of being forgotten, and the only wonder is that the first part has not been changed into “Smytheham” at the very least, or that an entirely new name, something in the way of “ville” or “park,” suited to its prospects, has not been coined. For Smitham, one can clearly see, has a Future, with a capital F, and the historian confidently expects to see the incorporation of Smitham, with Mayor, Town Council, and Town Hall, all complete.

It is here, at Marrowfat, now “Marlpit,” Lane, that the new link of the Brighton line branches off from Stoat’s Nest.[8] One of the first trials of the engineers was the removal of three-quarters of a million cubic yards of the “spoil,” dumped down by the roadside over half a century earlier; and then followed the spanning of the Brighton Road by a girder-bridge. The line then entered the grounds of the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum, through which it runs in a covered way, the London County Council, under whose control that institution is carried on, obtaining a clause in the Company’s Act, requiring the railway to be covered in at this point, in case the lunatics might find means of throwing themselves in front of passing trains.

Leaving the asylum grounds, the railway re-crosses the road by a hideous skew girder bridge of 180 feet span, supported by giant piers and retaining-walls, and then crosses the deep cutting of the South Eastern, to enter a cutting of its own leading into a tunnel a mile and a quarter in length—the new Merstham tunnel—running parallel with the old tunnel of the same name through which the South Eastern Railway passes. At the southern end of this gloomy tunnel is the pretty village of Merstham, where the hillside sinks down to the level lands between that point and Redhill.

At Merstham one of the odd problems of the new line was reached, for there it had to be constructed over a network of ancient tunnels made centuries ago in the hillside—quarry-tunnels whence came much of the limestone that went towards the building of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The old workings are still accessible to the explorer who dares the accumulation of gas in them given off by the limestone rock.

The geology of these five miles of new railway is peculiarly varied, limestone and chalk giving place suddenly to the gault of the levels, and followed again by a hillside bed of Fuller’s earth, succeeded in turn by red sand. The Fuller’s earth, resting upon a slippery substratum of gault, only required a little rain and a little disturbance to slide down and overwhelm the railway works, and retaining-walls of the heaviest and most substantial kind were necessary in the cuttings where it occurred. Tunnelling for a quarter of a mile through the sand that gives Redhill its name, the railway crosses obliquely under the South Eastern, and then joins the old Brighton line territory just before reaching Earlswood station.

CHIPSTEAD CHURCH.

All these engineering manifestations give the old grim neighbourhood of Smitham Bottom a new grimness. The trains of the Brighton line boom, rattle, and clank overhead into the covered way, whose ventilators spout steam like some infernal laundry, and from the 80-foot deep cuttings close beside the road, steamy billows arise very weirdly. Presiding over all are the beautiful grounds and vast ranges of buildings of the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum, housing an ever-increasing population of lunatics, now numbering some three thousand. Sometimes the quieter members of that unfortunate community are seen, being given a walk along the road, outside their bounds, and the sight and the thoughts they engender are not cheering.

Along the road, where the walls of the cutting descend perpendicularly, is the severely common-place hamlet of Hooley, formerly Howleigh, consisting of the “Star” inn and some twenty square brick cottages. Just beyond it, where a modern Cyclists’ Rest and tea-rooms building stands to the left of the road, the first traces of the old Surrey Iron Railway, which crossed the highway here, are found, in the shallower cutting, still noticeable, although disused seventy years ago. Alders, hazels, and blackberry brambles grow on the side of it, and its bridges are ivy-grown: primroses and violets, too, grow there wondrously profuse.