The Lea Bridge Road, and indeed Woodford also, and Epping Forest generally, are to be avoided by quiet folks on Saturdays, Sundays, and at times of public holiday, when the costermonger and his purple-faced “missus” drive their cowhocked ponies and attendant traps recklessly to the “Wake Arms,” to the “Robin Hood,” or to the pubs of Chingford, and all the waggonettes and all the beanfeasters in the East End of London are making merry in elephantine fashion.
The road finally leaves Walthamstow and the valley of the Lea at Knott’s Green and Whip’s Cross—at the present time an abject, down-at-heel compromise between a striving unsuccessful suburb and the open country. But in these latter days, when the neighbourhood of London changes with such startling rapidity, the true description of to-day may very reasonably be the misleading record of to-morrow, and that squalid air of failure which belongs to those places at the present time of writing may already, ere these lines attain the dignity of print, have given place to an era of substantial and prosperous expansion.
Nothing is more depressing than the unsuccessful suburb, created out of nothing by the too sanguine builder in one of his inflated moments. It brings disaster, not only upon the author of its being, who reaps the harvest of his rashness in foreclosed mortgages and the Bankruptcy Court, but upon those enterprising callow tradesfolk who, embarking upon businesses of their own with insufficient resources, cannot tide over the time of no trade, and leave a record of their failure in deserted shops still proclaiming the virtues of the tea that no one ever bought and the advantages of those “bargain sales” that failed to attract.
Whip’s Cross, as its name would imply, stands at a junction of roads. It forms the entrance to Epping Forest, and is said to have obtained the first part of its name from being the place whence the Forest deer-stealers were formerly whipped at the cart’s tail; but such things are now quite put out of sight and forgotten in these marchlands of town and suburbs.
This is Leyton, twin sister of Walthamstow. Vast populations are springing up, and interminable streets of little houses, the meaner and more pitiful because so pretentious. A little while, and the cheaply-built “villas” develop ominous cracks, the doors and windows warp and refuse to shut, or when shut decline to be opened, and the trivial brick gate-posts sink out of plumb. It would not be surprising in a few years to find that most of their slack-baked bricks had resolved into their native mud and road-scrapings.
For what do these huge populations exist? Life in the bulk must be very grey to them, whose individualities are sunk in the mass, who live in streets all precisely alike and in houses more kin to one another than the proverbial two peas. They exist, if you consider it, for truly great altruistic purposes; to be the corpus vile for governments, imperial or local, to experiment upon; and to be not only the milch-cow that supplies the funds for such governments, but the poor, senseless voting machine for whose support the candidates for Parliamentary and municipal honours struggle and lie and cheat. On their domestic and other needs thrive and wax fat the great trading companies that in their innumerable local branches are ousting the private shopkeeper and sending him in his old age to the Bankruptcy Court and the workhouse. For reasons such as these the swarming hives of wage-earners that ring round London and all the great cities make me melancholy. Let us away to the greenwood tree.
THE “EAGLE,” SNARESBROOK: THE NORWICH MAIL PASSING, 1832.
From a print after J. Pollard.
VII
The entrance to Epping Forest, the greenwood tree aforesaid, is by way of Snaresbrook, past the Eagle Pond, a pleasant lake which takes its name from that old coaching-house, the “Eagle,” pictured here in the old print after Pollard. It is more than seventy years since that Old Master of coaching subjects painted this view of the Norwich Mail passing by, but the old house still stands, not so very greatly altered. Pollard has made it and its surrounding trees look more of the Noah’s Ark order of architecture than ever they were.