OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE, 1890.
Battersea, then, is as “nook-shotten” a place as is the “isle of Albion” itself, according to Shakespeare. Gardens as old as the time of Queen Anne hide coyly behind walls that permit only the tops of the trees to be discerned. Houses, of the sedate red-and-brown brick that our ancestors loved, stand at oblique angles to the roadways, each with the silent history of vanished generations entombed beneath its ponderous, red-tiled roof. Ancient taverns or inns (call them not public-houses, still less hotels or gin-palaces)—goodly hostelries of the past, broad-frontaged, deep-windowed, large-chimneyed, many-gabled—invite the most temperate passer-by to refresh himself in the cavernous gloom of the bar. The old parish church—not so old as one could wish, but having a Georgian character that is beginning to acquire the interest of all departed modes—occupies a sort of peninsula on the river, the ripple of which speaks closely in the ears of dead parishioners. On the whole, Battersea has known better days. It is now chiefly given up to factories, to the humble dwellings of factory people, and to the houses and shops of the lower middle class. But, in the National Society’s Training College, it has a noble old mansion, standing in well-timbered grounds; and the free school of Sir Walter St. John (grandfather of Queen Anne’s famous minister) is also interesting. The school was founded in 1700, but the building is of the modern Tudor style. To a casual visitor, however, the most noticeable thing about the suburb is the river itself, with its belongings;—the straggling banks; the rickety water-side structures; the boat-builders’ yards; the heavy, black barges hauled on to the foreshore, undergoing repair, or being lazily broken up; the larger vessels, with sails of that rusty orange hue which tells of sun and breeze; and the prevalent smell of pitch, mingled with watery ooze.
Chelsea is becoming fashionable along the river frontage; but, although the stately red-brick mansions recently erected on the Embankment are sumptuous and noble, the chief interest of the locality is in the older parts. Advancing in the direction of town, historic Chelsea begins about the spot represented in our view of Cheyne Walk. The fine old house at the corner of Beaufort Street is an excellent specimen of the kind of suburban dwelling our forefathers used to build, when, the land being far less valuable than now, they spread out broadly and roomily, and were not constrained to pile storey upon storey, until the roofs seemed desirous of making acquaintance with the clouds. It is at this point that the Chelsea Embankment commences—a splendid promenade between avenues of plane-trees, which every season will make more umbrageous. Several years ago, before the late Sir Joseph Bazalgette began to reclaim the river-bank, there was no more picturesque spot in Chelsea, of the dirty, out-at-elbows order, than the bit extending eastward from Battersea Bridge to the old church. Its fantastic irregularity of roof and gable, its dormer windows, its beetling chimney-stacks, its red and brown, its look of somnolent old age and grave experience, had something of a Dutch character; but it was certainly not Dutch in point of cleanliness. Picturesque it is still; but the Embankment has swept away that side of the street which was towards the river, while the ragged tenements on the other side await the hands of the destroyer.
CHEYNE WALK.
Old Chelsea Church is familiar to every Londoner who goes up the river in a steamboat or a wherry. Its massive square tower, its red-tiled roofs, its external monuments in the bit of green churchyard, the dusky glow of its old brick, and its general aspect of having been entirely neglected by the restorers, attract attention, and to a great extent reward it. The edifice cannot be reckoned among the most beautiful specimens of ecclesiastical architecture in London; yet its appearance is venerable and interesting, and its associations might furnish matter for a whole chapter, or even for a book. The chancel is said to have been rebuilt in the early part of the sixteenth century, and the chapel at the east end of the south aisle was erected by Sir Thomas More. The date of this chapel is about 1520; the tower of the church belongs to the reign of Charles II.; and the building generally stands on the site of one which antiquarians refer to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and of which some portions still remain. The body of More (minus the head) is stated by Aubrey to have been interred in “Chelsey Church, neer the middle of the south wall;” but this is doubtful. At the place indicated, however—which is about the spot where he used to sit among the choir, and where he erected a tomb for himself during his lifetime—a tablet of black marble yet appears to his memory. More is the presiding deity of Chelsea. His house was not far from the church, in a north-westerly direction; and here he was visited by Holbein, who painted his portrait, and by Henry VIII., who on one occasion walked with him in the garden for the space of an hour, “holding his arm about his neck,” as his son-in-law Roper relates—the same neck which he afterwards caused to be divided by the headsman’s axe. Many persons of eminence, especially in connection with literature and science, lie buried in Chelsea Old Church, or in the adjoining graveyard; and the passer-by almost brushes against the urn, entwined with serpents, which marks the resting-place of Sir Hans Sloane. At the north side of the church is the grave of John Anthony Cavallier, the leader of the Camisards, a body of Protestants in the Cevennes, who, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, carried on a religious war in which Louis XIV. lost ten thousand of his best troops. Cavallier ultimately escaped to England, entered the British service, was for a time Lieutenant-Governor of Jersey, and died at Chelsea in 1740.
It was towards the close of the seventeenth century that Chelsea first became socially famous as a pleasant outlet from London; and some of the existing houses belong to that period. A few years later—in the reign of Anne—it was a place of great resort. Hither came the cits by boat, to stare at the curiosities of “Don Saltero’s” coffee-house in Cheyne Walk, or to visit the Chelsea China Works, established in Justice Walk by a foreigner, the products of which manufactory (now discontinued a hundred years or thereabouts), still haunt the old shops of the suburb, and command good prices. Here also people flocked to eat buns at the “Old Chelsea Bun-house,” which retained a distinguished reputation until its long existence ceased in 1839. Swift mentions these celebrated dainties in the “Journal to Stella,” and seems to have had a relish for them, together with a fondness for Chelsea generally, the distance of which from town he measured not only in miles, but in steps. Cheyne Walk is the most characteristic portion of the suburb. Many of the houses are ancient; some are extremely attractive, with their substantial look of old-world liberality and thoroughness, their massive piers and wrought-iron gates, their stone globes and sculptured ornaments, their shadowy trees and draping creepers. The two most interesting of these houses, by reason of the modern associations which mingle with their antiquity, are that formerly occupied by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti—truly a house of dream and vision—and that where “George Eliot” died, after a brief residence. But the greatest memorial figure in modern Chelsea is that of Thomas Carlyle, who lived for nearly fifty years in Great Cheyne Row, and died there in 1881. The Embankment has altered the character of Cheyne Walk, which looks scarcely so old-fashioned as it did in other days, when the river came up almost to the roadway, and boatmen lounged about on a scrap of beach, ready to take you to Putney or Hammersmith, if you disdained the steamer. There is a scene in one of Miss Thackeray’s novels, which portrays, with exquisite delicacy of touch and colouring, the Cheyne Walk of a somewhat recent, yet a bygone, epoch. Still, the alterations have given an added dignity to the place, and a beauty which forbids us to regret the past. The real injury to the old row has proceeded from the bad taste of some of its inhabitants, who have faced and coloured a few of the houses in a way entirely out of keeping with the general character of the neighbourhood.
Making our way down the river, we come to the Botanical Gardens, belonging to the Apothecaries’ Company of London, where all manner of simples have been cultivated since the year 1673. The ground was first enclosed in 1686, and some of the old walls remained until the alterations consequent on the making of the Embankment. An ancient look still hangs about the prim walks and orderly beds, where one seems to sniff the aromatics of departed generations. Old houses cluster round, and peer with blinking windows into the old nursery of herbs. In the centre is a statue by Rysbrack of Sir Hans Sloane, set up in 1733, in consideration of benefits conferred on the gardens by the great physician; and near the southern boundary is a rugged cedar, planted, together with another, in 1685. More interesting to the general public is Chelsea Hospital, the grounds of which should be reckoned among the parks of London. The Chelsea Pensioner, with his scarlet gabardine, flaming along the ways like a travelling fire, is a figure so peculiar to this neighbourhood that one scarcely ever sees it anywhere else. The retired soldier has a noble dwelling-house in the massive yet comely structure which Sir Christopher Wren reared for him. There is no finer specimen of brick architecture, with stone for the decorations, than the edifice which Nell Gwynne is said, by a doubtful tradition, to have assisted in founding. One might even detect a professional analogy in the style of building. The wings stretch out like troops in column; the main body is the army in mass, compact, steadfast, and impenetrable. But the battered old men have done with fighting now; they have come here to nurse their wounds and aches, and the prevailing sentiment is, as it should be, a blessed and a soothing calm. Within those iron gates, having the grounds and the river on one side, and the quiet old Queen’s Road on the other, it is almost like a sanctuary. The sunlight falls asleep in the quadrangles and passages. Caught between wall and wall, detained by trees, reflected from numerous angles, it seems to double back upon itself, and fill the air with somnolent heat and glow. Here is a true place of rest; on the edge of the great city, yet sequestered; substantial, ceremonious, prescriptive; shadowed with greenery, bright with flowers and lawns, lulled with the memory of ancient days, the tender comradeship of the past. Is it not right that all wayorn men should taste a little of the lotos-eater’s life ere they depart?—