XVII
Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet another toll-gate. “Frenches” Gate took its title from the old manor on which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the unenclosed or free (franche) land of which it was wholly or largely composed.
Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history. When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816, Redhill was—a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist well enough knows, and we will take on trust that red gravel whence its name comes; but since that time the town of Redhill, now numbering some 16,000 persons, has come into existence, and when we speak of Redhill we mean—not the height up which the coaches laboured, but a certain commonplace town lying at the foot of it, with a busy railway junction where there are always plenty of trains, but never the one you want, and quite a number of public institutions of the asylum and reformatory type.
The railway junction has, of course, created Redhill town, which is really in the parish of Reigate. When the land began to be built upon, in the ’40’s, it was called “Warwick Town,” after the then Countess of Warwick, the landowner, and the names of a road and a public-house still bear witness to that somewhat lickspittle method of nomenclature. But there is, and can be, only one possible Warwick in England, and “Redhill” this “Warwick Town,” by natural selection, became.
There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both look their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, “Mrs. Partington’s” remark that “comparisons is odorous” would be altogether in order.
Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne’s Asylum, housing between four and five hundred children of the poor.
“The Cutting” through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons, where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in another.
It is Holmesdale—the vale of holms, or oak woods—upon which you gaze from here; that
Vale of Holmesdall
Never wonne, ne never shall,