Here, then, having come through all the hazards and chances of New Cross and the Lewisham High Road, we are arrived at the Ravensbourne and Lewisham. The Ravensbourne, although not a stream of great size, and with a course of but twelve miles, from its fountain-head on Keston Common to its mouth amid the mud of Deptford Creek, is yet a river of considerable historic, or legendary, importance, and—more important still—it is due to the Ravensbourne that the last surviving beauties of Lewisham are so beautiful. Legends tell how the river obtained its distinguished name, and in the telling take us back to those very distant days of Cæsar’s second invasion, B.C. 54. The story seems to support the theory of one school of antiquaries, that the lost Roman station of Noviomagus was at Keston; for it declares that Cæsar’s legions were encamped on what we now call Keston Common, and suffered greatly from lack of water until the constant visits of a raven to one particular spot attracted attention and aroused the hope that it was water which attracted him. The expectation proved correct, for there they discovered the spring forming the source of the stream. A well, called “Cæsar’s,” on that common still serves to keep the tradition alive.
We may, therefore, well look upon the Ravensbourne with interest, although it is true that a glance into it, over the bridge which here carries the busy London street across, sadly disappoints romantic anticipations. Deposits of mud, vestiges of pails past their prime, and outworn boots which the veriest tramp would scorn to own, line a discoloured stream, and grimy backyards abut upon it. To such a pass has civilisation brought the lower reaches of this once silvery watercourse, which is not so small but that it has tributaries of its own. Such an one is the river Quaggy, which embouches hereabouts into it. “Hereabouts,” I say, because only the local sewer authority could readily point out the exact spot; the Quaggy being, in fact, at the actual confluence, embedded in an underground pipe. But if you may not see the actual meeting of the streams, you may at least see the Quaggy on the other side of the road, a little distance before it joins forces with the Ravensbourne. There you shall perceive how only a little lesser indignity than a pipe has befallen it. Its little trickle still flows on in the eye of day, but it is made to flow in a formal concrete bed, here and there spanned by long stretches of pavement. A little higher up “Lee Bridge” crosses it, and there be those lesser Stanleys and Livingstones who have traced it to its source, even as those great explorers sought the beginnings of the Nile. A certain disappointment seems, however, to await those who seek the origin of the Quaggy, for those who have essayed, and accomplished, the feat describe how it rises on Shooter’s Hill “at the back of the Police-station”! Shooter’s Hill is well enough, but that last little piece of particularity destroys any lingering shred of romance.
I should not be greatly surprised to find the Quaggy the object of police suspicion, for that name is merely an alias, its real ancient title being the Ket Brook, whence the district of Kidbrook derives its name. The “Quaggy” is a later title, conferred descriptively by those who observed the quags, or marshy places, through which it descended from Shooter’s Hill to these levels.
Here, as already remarked, we are come to Lewisham. Many thousands of people remember Lewisham as still something of a village; and yet so quick-presto are the suburban changes around London that they now behold it not merely a thronged town, but much less distinguished even than that—just a limb of great, sprawling London, and thus stripped of most of its old-time individuality.
The place changes while you look. You turn your back awhile upon the few surviving fields, the hedgerows, the ditches, and when you glance upon the scene again they are gone, and carts are delivering loads of slack-baked place-bricks for the foundations of little £25 houses that will begin to settle down unsteadily and crack all down their fronts almost before the roofs are on. Change is rampant here, and Lewisham, that was once “Lewisham Village,” is a village no longer. The proverbial saying, “Long, lazy, lousy Lewisham,” that once attached to the place—a saying which, I doubt not, owed its existence more to easy alliteration than to actual fact—is, in one respect at any rate, out of date, for it is now become a very strenuous place indeed, where tradesfolk hustle for business and crowds throng the pavements. Modernity marches all over the place in its hobnailed fashion, and scarifies the soul out of existence. It cannot survive in a modern populous suburb of wage-earners who go forth at unconscionable hours of the morning to earn the means of existence and come home to their brick boxes, exhausted, merely to sleep; and so come to their prime, joylessly, and decline greyly to an obscure end. The spectacle frightens and saddens the observer who goes beneath the surface of things. He wonders what lies in the lap of futurity for the race thus dissociated from nature, nurtured on the pavements, and condemned to lifelong comings and goings in the restricted outlook of streets; and, looking upon old representations of what Lewisham was like in what he is apt to think the halcyon days of the “20’s” of the nineteenth century, he grieves for the spacious rusticities of days gone by.
V
How many, or how few, of Lewisham’s myriads ever idly speculate whence came the name of the place? According to authorities who are now, in these more scientific times, largely discredited, it comes from Anglo-Saxon words meaning “the dwelling among the meadows,” or the leas—the “leas home”—and was anciently spelled Levesham and Lewesham. Just a few vestiges of this ancient rurality remain, in the strips of meadows—now converted into what are shaping as beautiful parks—that fringe the course of the Ravensbourne on either bank, from Catford Bridge to Ladywell; but we are now bidden disregard those meadows in any relationship with the name of Lewisham. The place is first mentioned in a charter of Ethelbert of Wessex, dated A.D. 862, in which it is called “Liofshema”; and fifty-six years later, in a charter granted by Ethelswitha, daughter of Alfred the Great, it assumes the form of “Lieuesham,” which gives us exactly the modern pronunciation. This, it has been remarked, has nothing to do with meadows, leas, or pastures, but means literally “dear son’s home.” But, having reached that point, we come to a full stop, for no one can tell us who was that “dear son”; and the theory that the name of Leveson similarly derives from Liof-or Leof-suna, seems to have little bearing upon the history of the place.
Ladywell, just mentioned, is itself the name of a great crowded district, and it is thus curious to reflect that the name was utterly unknown until modern times. It arose from one of two closely neighbouring wells—one reputed to be medicinal—situated in what is now the road turning off the highway, past Lewisham old vicarage, to Ladywell railway-station and Brockley, which name itself—meaning, as it does, the “badger’s meadow”—enshrines the former rustic appearance of these parts. Ancient records and county histories may be searched in vain for mention of the “Lady Well,” which, oddly enough, seems to have acquired its name about the end of the eighteenth century. It was, about 1820, the subject of a published plate, showing it with a circular stone kerb, placed by the wayside of a pretty rustic road, embowered in trees. Thus it remained, amid ever deteriorating surroundings, until 1866, when it was destroyed in the course of sewer-making operations for the newly risen suburb that had grown around the South-Eastern railway-station of “Ladywell,” opened in January, 1857.
The well had long become a thing of the past, and its very site was merely a matter of vague tradition, when, in 1881, its stones were discovered in the course of repairs to the bridge over the railway. A signalman rescued them from being again covered over, and removed them to a position beside his cabin, where they remained until 1896, when the following notice appeared in a local paper: “It has now been decided by the Lewisham Baths Commissioners to re-erect the stones by the side of the public baths, where they will be used to surround a public fountain to which the youths and maidens of to-day may once more resort, and there whisper their hearts’ desire.” Accordingly, they may be seen to this day in the Ladywell Road.
It seems likely, under the circumstances thus recounted, that the well was given its name about a century ago by some forgotten fanciful local antiquary who, bethinking himself that the parish church of St. Mary, Lewisham, was but a hundred yards or so distant, dignified the hitherto unnamed spring by the name of Our Lady.