Connecting Chiswick with Brentford, and keeping up, as it were, the continuity of the traditions of the past, is the picturesque terrace of quaint old houses known as Strand-on-the-Green, extending for about half a mile along the banks of the river, which at high tide often invades it, washing over the defences that have been from time to time put up against it. Until about the beginning of the eighteenth century Strand-on-the-Green was but part of a fishing hamlet, but it gradually became transformed into a fashionable quarter, stately, well-built houses—in one of which lived the poet David Mallet, in another the artist Zoffany, and in another Joe Miller the jester—contrasting with picturesque cottages, such as the charming group still standing that were given to the poor in 1724 by a generous citizen, and rubbing shoulders with ancient inns, some of which are but little altered even now, and are frequented as of yore by fishermen and boatmen.
Brentford
From Strand-on-the-Green the view of the Thames is no less fascinating than that from Hammersmith and Chiswick Malls, for even at low tide, when gleaming stretches of mud line the banks on either side, the colour effects are charming. Higher up, too, where the little river Brent—that with the Brentford Canal forms part of a great system of inland waterways—flows into the Thames, a touch of poetry still lingers, in spite of the fact that the once beautiful village named after the ancient ford has become one of the most prosaic of the Middlesex suburbs. The three-arched bridge that spanned the Brent a little above its mouth, at which a toll used to be levied on all cattle and merchandise and all Jews and Jewesses crossing it on foot or on horseback, though Christians were allowed to pass over free, is replaced by a modern one with but one arch; the house in which the notorious Noy, chancellor to Charles IL, decided on the re-imposition of the hated ship-tax has been pulled down; the ancient market-hall, with its high-pitched roof, that had been the scene of many a hotly contested election, and in which resounded during the riots of 1769 the cry of 'Wilkes and Liberty!' was pulled down in 1850 to make way for the present town-hall, and a little later its fate was shared by the famous half-timbered hostelry of the Three Pigeons, that may possibly have been visited by Shakespeare when it was tenanted by one of the actors in his company, John Lowen. Vanished, too, is the house in which John Bunyan lived at the beginning of his crusade against vice in high places; but here and there, in what is still known as the Half Acre district, that is intimately associated with the memory of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress, and also in the modern High Street, a few ancient tenements, with lofty, many-gabled roofs, survive to bear witness to olden times. Moreover, about half a mile from what is now known as New Brentford, though it is really more venerable than the rest of the town, is another link with the past: Burton House, a mansion occupying the site of the manor-house of Burston, or Budeston, that belonged before the suppression of the monasteries to St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and was later owned by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
Brentford has more than once figured conspicuously in the history of England. Near to it, for instance, King Edmund Ironsides defeated the Danes in 1016, and in it a few days after the victory the gallant Saxon king was treacherously murdered. More than six hundred years later the town, then at the zenith of its prosperity, was besieged by Prince Rupert, and the parliamentary garrison driven out with great loss; but all too soon, in the opinion of the inhabitants, who were staunch partisans of the king, the tide turned again. Reinforcements arrived from London and encamped on the then open space of Turnham Green; Charles, who had started from Kingston to join Prince Rupert, was compelled to draw back, and presently Oliver Cromwell himself, fresh from victory, marched through Brentford in triumph.
After the Restoration Charles II. was several times in Brentford. Nell Gwynn is said to have lived there for some little time, as did also George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, a member of the infamous Cabal Ministry, who was the first to celebrate in literature the two kings of Brentford, whom he introduced in his comedy of the Rehearsal, a parody on one of Dryden's tragedies written in 1671. Who these kings were when they lived, or even if they ever existed, neither tradition nor history has attempted to prove, but in the Rehearsal they figure as close friends, who appear on the stage hand in hand, and reign amicably together till they are deposed by two equally united usurpers.
Brentford owns two important churches, one dedicated to St. George, founded in 1770, with nothing very distinctive about it but containing a painting of the Last Supper by Zoffany, presented by the artist; the other, named after St. Lawrence, built in the eighteenth century on to the tower of a much earlier place of worship. Chancellor Noy, whose house was close by, is buried in it, and it is associated with the memory of John Horne Tooke, who was curate of it from 1760 to 1773, before his meeting with John Wilkes led to his abandonment of the clerical profession.
As the chief marketing-place of the barge population, whose women, in their picturesque sun-bonnets and rough-and-ready costumes, may often be seen hurrying through its streets, the old town on the Brent is still to some extent in touch with rural England; but from the adjacent Ealing, that is its parent parish, and from its dependencies Acton and Gunnersbury, all individual character seems to have been eliminated, little remaining to recall the days when the manor-house of Ealing was one of the outlying residences of the Bishop of London, and the whole neighbourhood was dotted with the country seats of the great nobles. Acton, the name of which signifies the oak-town, now a singular misnomer, was once the proud owner of a fashionable spa, but is now chiefly given over to washerwomen; and Gunnersbury, the history of which can be traced back to Saxon times, for it is named after Gunyld, a niece of King Canute, has lost nearly all its historic landmarks, though the modern Gunnersbury House, on the site of a mansion designed by Inigo Jones, once occupied by Princess Amelia, preserves to it a certain distinction.