But a long-existing privilege still belongs to the property, the landlord being the proprietor of a private toll-bridge leading across the Temple stream to Leyton. He exercises that right in virtue of some predecessor having long ago repaired the broken-down passage when three parishes whose boundaries meet here disputed and declined the liability. Accordingly, although foot-passengers pass freely, a penny is levied upon a bicycle, and upon each head of sheep or cattle, and twopence for carts, carriages, motor-cars, or motor-bicycles, at the little hut where the tollkeeper lounges in a very bored manner. Well may he look so, for although, in exceptional times of holiday, the toll has been known to yield, once or twice, so much as a pound in a day, five shillings is a more usual sum, and there are many days in winter when threepence has been the sum-total of the day’s revenue.
THE “VINE TAVERN,” MILE END ROAD.
A similar right is said to belong to the “White House,” where a substantial timber bridge spans the Lea itself, but it lies only on a little-used bridle-path, and the right does not appear to be exercised. The scene here has elements of picturesqueness, and could be made a good subject in colour.
In October, 1903, the “Vine,” the old inn that had stood so long and so oddly on “Mile End Waste,” was demolished. Although it had stood there for three hundred years, there was not the slightest trace about the building of any architectural embellishment, the front of it being merely an extremely unlovely and ill-cared-for example of a London public-house, while the back Was a weather-boarded relic of the vanished rural days of the Mile End Road.
Like the fly in amber,
The thing itself was neither rich nor rare:
We only wondered how the devil it got there.
The manner of it may be guessed. In the old, easy-going days some impudent squatter sat down on that wide selvedge of open space beside the road and built the primeval hovel from which the “Vine” sprang, and in the course of time, by the mere lapse of twenty-one years, acquired a title to the site. Hence the isolated building, standing in advance of the general line of houses. But, if the illustration be carefully scanned, it will be noted that at some very much later period the then owner, much more impudent than the original grabber of public, or “waste” land, seems to have stolen an additional piece. This is evident enough, not only in the different styles and periods of the building, but in the manner in which the little attic windows in the roof are obscured by the addition.