That parish church is a singular, and in general an unbeautiful, structure, built in 1777 on the site of an older, and enlarged at the east end, in the same hybrid “classic” style, in 1881. It has a great south porch, unmistakably Corinthian, though it would puzzle an architect to put a name to the rest. But the tower has a character all its own. Equally nondescript, it yet owns an engaging quaintness which one would with sorrow see improved away for the sake of something more pure in style. The lower stages of this tower are obviously the remains of the old Gothic building, for the buttresses, some of the windows, and a good deal of the old facing are left, while the upper part has either been rebuilt or re-cased in a style resembling the practice of the brothers Adam. Sculptured garlands in the famous manner of those architects give a daintily decorative effect, and, together with the four stone balls which occupy the places usually given to pinnacles, render Lewisham church-tower memorable and unmistakable among its fellows.
It is now, in short, with the neighbouring Colfe Almshouses, the most characteristic and distinctive thing left to Lewisham. The surrounding churchyard is very large, and the approach is made beautiful by a long arched yew walk, still charmingly rustic in appearance.
The almshouses, it seems, are doomed to destruction. They are relics of the times when it could yet be said with truth of Lewisham that “its convenient distance from the metropolis and its beautiful situation have rendered it a favourite place of residence, and the neighbourhood is thickly studded with gentlemen’s seats, many of which are splendid mansions, and with numerous handsome villas, the country residences of opulent merchants.”
Abraham Colfe, who founded these quaint old almshouses, was vicar of Lewisham about the middle of the seventeenth century. He died in 1657, and left property in trust for the purpose to the Leathersellers’ Company, who accordingly built them, as a tablet over the main entrance informs the passer-by, in 1664.
LEWISHAM.
Another survival is the handsome old late seventeenth-century vicarage, already mentioned, standing a little out of its element, as it were, beside the high road. It was built in 1692-3 by Dr. Stanhope, the then vicar, and, as his surviving accounts tell us, it cost him £739 13s. to build. Dr. Stanhope, if we may accept the estimate of his character given by his monument in the church, was one of the best, for (inter alia) his “piety was real and rational, his charity great and universal.... His learning was elegant and comprehensive, his conversation polite and delicate, Grave without Preciseness, Facetious without Levity. The good Christian and solid Divine and the fine gentleman in him were happily united.”
That, I think, is the ne plus ultra, the last word, in monumental eulogy. You cannot get better than the best, unless indeed you visit modern Lewisham and do your shopping at its popular “stores,” where a searching glance may discover “best fresh eggs” at one shilling and sixpence a dozen, and “superior” at two shillings.
For the rest, a few strips of garden here and there border the high road through modern urban Lewisham, sometimes owning elms that in the old days were tall wayside trees. Here a giant workhouse, neighbouring the Colfe Almshouses, serves by its presence to underline and emphasise the social distance travelled—whether it be upwards or downwards let those decide who will—between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, and a few scattered weather-boarded cottages are left, showing what manner of buildings were those that fringed the road in days for ever gone. Midway between the date of those humble old dwellings and the modern shops is one old-fashioned shop where they sell hay, corn, straw, beans, and sweet-smelling seeds of all kinds. The name over the fascia is “Shove,” singularly inapplicable to this quiet, unassuming frontage.[1] To gaze upon its small-paned windows, to see and scent the hay and the fragrant contents of its bins of beans, peas, and varied seeds, must surely, with the coming of every spring, set the prisoned wage-earners of Lewisham longing keenly for the banished country whose breath comes fragrant from within.
[1] Alas! since writing the above, the shop is closed, and the house to be demolished.