The subject of greatest metropolitan interest which has occurred for many years, is the introduction of wood paving. As the main battle has been fought in London, and nothing but a confused report of the great object in dispute may have penetrated beyond the sound of Bow bells, we think it will not be amiss to put on record, in the imperishable brass and marble of our pages, an account of the mighty struggle—of the doughty champions who couched the lance and drew the sword in the opposing ranks—and, finally, to what side victory seems to incline on this beautiful 1st of May in the year 1843.
Come, then, to our aid, oh ye heavenly Muses! who enabled Homer to sing in such persuasive words the fates of Troy and of its wooden horse; for surely a subject which is so deeply connected both with wood and horses, is not beneath your notice; but perhaps, as poetry is gone out of fashion at the present time, you will depute one of your humbler sisters, rejoicing in the name of Prose, to give us a few hints in the composition of our great history. The name of the first pavier, we fear, is unknown, unless we could identify him with Triptolemus, who was a great improver of Rhodes; but it is the fate of all the greatest benefactors of their kind to be neglected, and in time forgotten. The first regularly defined paths were probably footways—the first carriages broad-wheeled. No record remains of what materials were used for filling up the ruts; so it is likely, in those simple times when enclosure acts were unknown, that the cart was seldom taken in the same track. As houses were built, and something in the shape of streets began to be established, the access to them must have been more attended to. A mere smoothing of the inequalities of the surface over which the oxen had to be driven, that brought the grain home on the enormous plaustra of the husbandman, was the first idea of a street, whose very name is derived from stratum, levelled. As experience advanced, steps would be taken to prevent the softness of the road from interrupting the draught. A narrow rim of stone, just wide enough to sustain the wheel, would, in all probability, be the next improvement; and only when the gentle operations of the farm were exchanged for war, and the charger had to be hurried to the fight, with all the equipments necessary for an army, great roads were laid open, and covered with hard materials to sustain the wear and tear of men and animals. Roads were found to be no less necessary to retain a conquest than to make it; and the first true proof of the greatness of Rome was found in the long lines of military ways, by which she maintained her hold upon the provinces. You may depend on it, that no expense was spared in keeping the glorious street that led up her Triumphs to the Capitol in excellent repair. All the nations of the Orbis Antiquus ought to have trembled when they saw the beginning of the Appian road. It led to Britain and Persia, to Carthage and the White Sea. The Britons, however, in ancient days, seem to have been about the stupidest and least enterprising of all the savages hitherto discovered. After an intercourse of four hundred years with the most polished people in the world, they continued so miserably benighted, that they had not even acquired masonic knowledge enough to repair a wall. The rampart raised by their Roman protectors between them and the Picts and Scots, became in some places dilapidated. The unfortunate natives had no idea how to mend the breach, and had to send once more for their auxiliaries. If such their state in regard to masonry, we cannot suppose that their skill in road-making was very great; and yet we are told that, even on Cæsar's invasion, the Britons careered about in war-chariots, which implies both good roads and some mechanical skill; but we think it a little too much in historians to ask us to believe BOTH these views of the condition of our predecessors in the tight little island; for it is quite clear that a people who had arrived at the art of coach-making, could not be so very ignorant as not to know how to build a wall. If it were not for the letters of Cicero, we should not believe a syllable about the war-chariots that carried amazement into the hearts of the Romans, even in Kent or Surrey. But we here boldly declare, that if twenty Ciceros were to make their affidavits to the fact of a set of outer barbarians, like Galgacus and his troops, "sweeping their fiery lines on rattling wheels" up and down the Grampians—where, at a later period, a celebrated shepherd fed his flocks—we should not believe a word of their declaration. Tacitus, in the same manner, we should prosecute for perjury.
The Saxons were a superior race, and when the eightsome-reel of the heptarchy became the pas-seul of the kingdom of England, we doubt not that Watling Street was kept in passable condition, and that Alfred, amidst his other noble institutions, invented a highway rate. The fortresses and vassal towns of the barons, after the Conquest, must have covered the country with tolerable cross-roads; and even the petty wars of those steel-clad marauders must have had a good effect in opening new communications. For how could Sir Reginald Front-de-Bœuf, or Sir Hildebrand Bras-de-Fer, carry off the booty of their discomfited rival to their own granaries without loaded tumbrils, and roads fit to pass over?
Nor would it have been wise in rich abbots and fat monks to leave their monasteries and abbeys inaccessible to pious pilgrims, who came to admire thigh-bones of martyred virgins and skulls of beatified saints, and paid very handsomely for the exhibition. Finally, trade began, and paviers flourished. The first persons of that illustrious profession appear, from the sound of the name, to have been French, unless we take the derivation of a cockney friend of ours, who maintains that the origin of the word is not the French pavé, but the indigenous English pathway. However that may be, we are pretty sure that paving was known as one of the fine arts in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; for, not to mention the anecdote of Raleigh and his cloak—which could only happen where puddles formed the exception and not the rule—we read of Essex's horse stumbling on a paving-stone in his mad ride to his house in the Strand. We also prove, from Shakspeare's line—
"The very stones would rise in mutiny"—
the fact of stones forming the main body of the streets in his time; for it is absurd to suppose that he was so rigid an observer of the unities as to pay the slightest respect to the state of paving in the time of Julius Cæsar at Rome.
Gradually London took the lead in improving its ways. It was no longer necessary for the fair and young to be carried through the mud upon costly pillions, on the backs of high-stepping Flanders mares. Beauty rolled over the stones in four-wheeled carriages, and it did not need more than half-a-dozen running footmen—the stoutest that could be found—to put their shoulders occasionally to the wheel, and help the eight black horses to drag the ponderous vehicle through the heavier parts of the road. Science came to the aid of beauty in these distressing circumstances. Springs were invented that yielded to every jolt; and, with the aid of cushions, rendered a visit to Highgate not much more fatiguing than we now find the journey to Edinburgh. Luxury went on—wealth flowed in—paviers were encouraged—coach-makers grew great men—and London, which our ancestors had left mud, was now stone. Year after year the granite quarries of Aberdeen poured themselves out on the streets of the great city, and a million and a half of people drove, and rode, and bustled, and bargained, and cheated, and throve, in the midst of a din that would have silenced the artillery of Trafalgar, and a mud which, if turned into bricks, would have built the tower of Babel. The citizens were now in possession of the "fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ;" but some of the more quietly disposed, though submitting patiently to the "fumum," and by no means displeased with the "opes," thought the "strepitumque" could be dispensed with, and plans of all kinds were proposed for obviating the noise and other inconveniences of granite blocks. Some proposed straw, rushes, sawdust; ingenuity was at a stand-still; and London appeared to be condemned to a perpetual atmosphere of smoke and sound. It is pleasant to look back on difficulties, when overcome—the best illustration of which is Columbus's egg; for, after convincing the sceptic, there can be no manner of doubt that he swallowed the yelk and white, leaving the shell to the pugnacious disputant. In the same way we look with a pleasing kind of pity on the quandaries of those whom we shall call—with no belief whatever in the pre-Adamite theory—the pre-Macadamites.
A man of talent and enterprise, Mr Macadam, proposed a means of getting quit of one of the objections to the granite causeways. By breaking them up into small pieces, and spreading them in sufficient quantity, he proved that a continuous hard surface would be formed, by which the uneasy jerks from stone to stone would be avoided, and the expense, if not diminished, at all events not materially increased. When the proposition was fairly brought before the public, it met the fate of all innovations. Timid people—the very persons, by the by, who had been the loudest in their exclamations against the ancient causeways—became alarmed the moment they saw a chance of getting quit of them. As we never know the value of a thing till we have lost it, their attachment to stone and noise became more intense in proportion as the certainty of being deprived of them became greater. It was proved to the satisfaction of all rational men, if Mr Macadam's experiment succeeded, and a level surface were furnished to the streets, that, besides noise, many other disadvantages of the rougher mode of paving would be avoided. Among these the most prominent was slipperiness; and it was impossible to be denied, that at many seasons of the year, not only in frost, when every terrestrial pathway must be unsafe; but in the dry months of summer, the smooth surfaces of the blocks of granite, polished and rounded by so many wheels, were each like a convex mass of ice, and caused unnumbered falls to the less adroit of the equestrian portion of the king's subjects. One of the most zealous advocates of the improvement was the present Sir Peter Laurie, not then elevated to a seat among the Equites, but imbued probably with a foreknowledge of his knighthood, and therefore anxious for the safety of his horse. Sir Peter was determined, in all senses of the word, to leave no stone unturned; and a very small mind, when directed to one object with all its force, has more effect than a large mind unactuated by the same zeal—as a needle takes a sharper point than a sword. Thanks, therefore, are due, in a great measure, to the activity and eloquence of the worthy alderman for the introduction of Macadam's system of road-making into the city.
Many evils were certainly got rid of by this alteration—the jolting motion from stone to stone—the slipperiness and unevenness of the road—and the chance, in case of an accident, of contesting the hardness of your skull with a mass of stone, which seemed as if it were made on purpose for knocking out people's brains. For some time contentment sat smiling over the city. But, as "man never is, but always to be, blest," perfect happiness appeared not to be secured even by Macadam. Ruts began to be formed—rain fell, and mud was generated at a prodigious rate; repairs were needed, and the road for a while was rough and almost impassable. Then it was found out that the change had only led to a different kind of noise, instead of destroying it altogether; and the perpetual grinding of wheels, sawing their way through the loose stones at the top, or ploughing through the wet foundation, was hardly an improvement on the music arising from the jolts and jerks along the causeway. Men's minds got confused in the immensity of the uproar, and deafness became epidemic. In winter, the surface of Macadam formed a series of little lakes, resembling on a small scale those of Canada; in summer, it formed a Sahara of dust, prodigiously like the great desert. Acres of the finest alluvial clay floated past the shops in autumn; in spring, clouds of the finest sand were wafted among the goods, and penetrated to every drawer and wareroom. And high over all, throughout all the main highways of commerce—the Strand—Fleet Street—Oxford Street—Holborn—raged a storm of sound, that made conversation a matter of extreme difficulty without such stentorian an effort as no ordinary lungs could make. As the inhabitants of Abdera went about sighing from morning to night, "Love! love!" so the persecuted dwellers in the great thoroughfares wished incessantly for cleanliness! smoothness! silence!
"Abra was present when they named her name," and, after a few gropings after truth—a few experiments that ended in nothing—a voice was heard in the city, that streets could be paved with wood. This was by no means a discovery in itself; for in many parts of the country ingenious individuals had laid down wooden floors upon their farm-yards; and, in other lands, it was a very common practice to use no other material for their public streets. But, in London, it was new; and all that was wanted, was science to use the material (at first sight so little calculated to bear the wear and tear of an enormous traffic) in the most eligible manner. The first who commenced an actual piece of paving was a Mr Skead—a perfectly simple and inartificial system, which it was soon seen was doomed to be superseded. His blocks were nothing but pieces of wood of a hexagon shape—with no cohesion, and no foundation—so that they trusted each to its own resources to resist the pressure of a wheel, or the blow of a horse's hoof; and, as might have been foreseen, they became very uneven after a short use, and had no recommendation except their cheapness and their exemption from noise. The fibre was vertical, and at first no grooves were introduced; they, of course, became rounded by wearing away at the edge, and as slippery as the ancient granite. The Metropolitan Company took warning from the defects of their predecessor, and adopted the patent of a scientific French gentleman of the name of De Lisle. The combination of the blocks is as elaborate as the structure of a ship of war, and yet perfectly easy, being founded on correct mechanical principles, and attaining the great objects required—viz. smoothness, durability, and quiet. The blocks, which are shaped at such an angle that they give the most perfect mutual support, are joined to each other by oaken dowels, and laid on a hard concrete foundation, presenting a level surface, over which the impact is so equally divided, that the whole mass resists the pressure on each particular block; and yet, from being formed in panels of about a yard square, they are laid down or lifted up with far greater ease than the causeway. Attention was immediately attracted to this invention, and all efforts have hitherto been vain to improve on it. Various projectors have appeared—some with concrete foundations, some with the blocks attached to each other, not by oak dowels, but by being alternately concave and convex at the side; but this system has the incurable defect of wearing off at the edges, where the fibre of the wood, of course, is weakest, and presents a succession of bald-pated surfaces, extremely slippery, and incapable of being permanently grooved. A specimen of this will be often referred to in the course of this account, being that which has attained such an unenviable degree of notoriety in the Poultry. Other inventors have shown ingenuity and perseverance; but the great representative of wooden paving we take to be the Metropolitan Company, and we proceed to a narrative of the attacks it has sustained, and the struggles it has gone through.