This multiplicity of ways meant that, in the variety of winding lanes which led to the Sussex coast, long before the fisher village of Brighthelmstone became that fashionable resort, Brighton, there were places on the way quite as important to the old waggoners and carriers as anything at the end of the journey. They set out the direction, and roads, when they began to be improved, were often merely the old routes widened, straightened, and metalled. They were kept very largely to the old lines, and it was not until quite late in the history of Brighton that the present “record” route in its entirety existed at all.

Among the many isolated roads made or improved, which did not in the beginning contemplate getting to Brighton at all, the pride of place certainly belongs to the ten miles between Reigate and Crawley, originally made as a causeway for horsemen, and guarded by posts, so that wheeled traffic could not pass. This was constructed under the Act 8th William III., 1696, and was the first new road made in Surrey since the time of the Romans.

It remained as a causeway until 1755, when it was widened and thrown open to all traffic, on paying toll. It was not only the first road to be made, but the last to maintain toll-gates on the way to Brighton, the Reigate Turnpike Trust expiring on the midnight of October 31st, 1881, from which time the Brighton Road became free throughout.

Meanwhile, the road from London to Croydon was repaired in 1718; and at the same time the road from London to Sutton was declared to be “dangerous to all persons, horses, and other cattle,” and almost impassable during five months of the year, and was therefore repaired, and toll-gates set up along it.

Between 1730 and 1740 Westminster Bridge was building, and the roads in South London, including the Westminster Bridge Road and the Kennington Road, were being made. In 1755 the road (about ten miles) across the heaths and downs from Sutton to Reigate, was authorised, and in 1770 the Act was passed for widening and repairing the lanes from Povey Cross to County Oak and Brighthelmstone, by Cuckfield. By this time, it will be seen, Brighton had begun to be the goal of these improvements.

The New Chapel and Copthorne road, on the East Grinstead route, was constructed under the Act of 1770, the route across St. John’s Common and Burgess Hill remodelled in 1780, and the road from South Croydon to Smitham Bottom, Merstham, and Reigate was engineered out of the narrow lanes formerly existing on that line in 1807-8, being opened, “at present toll-free,” June 4th. 1808.

In 1813 the Bolney and Hickstead road, between Hand Cross and Pyecombe, was opened, and in 1816 the slip-road, avoiding Reigate, through Redhill, to Povey Cross. Finally, sixty yards were saved on the Reigate route by the cutting of the tunnel under Reigate Castle, in 1823. In this way the Brighton road, on its several branches, grew to be what it is now.

SKETCH-MAP
SHOWING
PRINCIPAL
ROUTES TO
BRIGHTON.

The Brighton Road, it has already been said, is measured from the south side of Westminster Bridge, which is the proper starting-point for record-makers and breakers; but it has as many beginnings as Homer had birthplaces. Modern coaches and motor-car services set out from the barrack-like hotels of Northumberland Avenue, or other central points, and the old carriers came to and went from the Borough High Street; but the Corinthian starting-point in the brave old days of the Regency and of George the Fourth was the “White Horse Cellar”—Hatchett’s “White Horse Cellar”—in Piccadilly. There, any day throughout the year, the knowing ones were gathered—with those green goslings who wished to be thought knowing—exchanging the latest scandal and sporting gossip of the road, and rooking and being rooked; the high-coloured, full-blooded ancestors of the present generation, which looks upon them as a quite different order of beings, and can scarce believe in the reality of those full habits, those port-wine countenances, those florid garments that were characteristic of the age.