East London

by Walter Besant

Hampstead Heath, Looking “Hendon Way.”

Five miles from St. Paul’s cathedral lies a broad heath on the plateau of a hill. This is Hampstead Heath. Two hundred years ago, on the edge of the heath was a Spa, with a fashionable assembly-room and a tavern. The Spa decayed, and the place became the residence of a few wealthy merchants, each with his stately garden. Some of these houses and these gardens survive to this day; most of them are built over, and Hampstead is now a suburb of eighty thousand people, standing on the slope and top of a long hill rising to the height of nearly five hundred feet. The heath, however, has never been built upon. It is a strangely beautiful place; not a park, not a garden, not anything artificial, simply a wild heath covered with old and twisted gorse bushes, with fern and bramble, and in spring lovely with the white-thorn and the blackthorn and the blossoms of the wild crab-apple, Britain’s only native fruit. The heath is cut up into miniature slopes and tiny valleys; a high causeway runs right across it; the place is so high that there is a noble view of the country beyond, while at rare intervals, when the air is clear, the whole valley of the Thames lies at the spectator’s feet, and London, with her thousand spires and towers is clearly visible, with St. Paul’s towering over the whole.

The heath is the favorite resort of the holiday makers of Easter Monday; a kind of fair is permitted on one side, with booths and the customary bawling. There are never any shows on Hampstead Heath—I know not why. The booths are for rifle galleries, for tea and coffee and ices, for cakes and ginger-beer, for crafty varieties in the game of dropping rings or pretty trifles for bowls and skittles, and for “shying” sticks at cocoanuts. No stalls are allowed for the sale of strong drink. Here the people assemble in the morning, beginning about ten, and continue to arrive all day long, dispersing only when the sun goes down and the evening becomes too cold for strolling about. They may be numbered by the hundred thousand. Here are the factory girls, going about in little companies, adorned with crimson and blue feathers; they run about laughing and shrieking in the simple joy of life and the exhilarating presence of the crowd; they do not associate with the lads, who dress up their hats with paper ribbon and hurl jokes, lacking in originality as in delicacy, at the girls as they run past. There are a great many children; the policemen in the evening bring the lost ones, disconsolate, to the station. Some of them have come with their parents; some of them, provided with a penny each, have come alone; it is wonderful to see what little mites run about the heath, hand in hand, without any parents or guardians. There are young married couples carrying the baby. All the people alike crowd into the booths and take their chance at what is going on; they “shy” at the cocoanuts as if it were a new game invented for that day, they dance in the grass to the inspiring strains of a concertina, they swing uproariously in the high wooden carriages, they are whirled breathlessly round and round on the steam-conducted wooden cavalry, and all the time with shouting and with laughing incessant. For, you see, the supreme joy, the true foundation of all this happiness, is the fact that they are all out again in the open, that the winter is over and gone, and that they can once more come out all together, as they love, in a vast multitude. To be out in the open, whether on the seashore or on Hampstead Heath, in a great crowd, is itself happiness enough. There is more than the joy of being in a crowd; there is also the joy of being once more on the green turf. Deep down, again, in the hearts of these townbred cockneys there lies, ineradicable, the love of the green fields and the country air. So some of them leave the crowd and wander on the less frequented part of the heath. They look for flowers, and pick what they can find; the season is not generally so far advanced as to tempt them with branches of hawthorn, nor are the fields yet covered with buttercups; the buds are swelling, the grass puts on a brighter green, but the spring as yet is all in promise. There are other country places of resort, but Hampstead is the favorite.

For those who do not go out of London on Easter Monday there are more quiet recreations. On that day Canon Barnett opens his annual exhibition of loan pictures at his schools beside his church at Whitechapel; to the people of his quarter he offers every year an exhibition of pictures which is really one of the best of the yearly shows, though the West End knows nothing about it, and there is no private view attended by the fashionable folk, who go to see each other. There is a catalogue; it is designed as a guide and an aid to the reader; it is therefore descriptive; in the evening ladies go round with small parties and give little talks upon the pictures, explaining what the artist meant and how his design has been carried out. Such a party I once watched before Burne-Jones’s picture of “The Briar Rose.” The people gazed; they saw the brilliant coloring, the briar-rose everywhere, the sleeping knights, the courtyard—all. Then the guide began, and their faces lit up with pleasure and understanding, and all went home that evening richer for the contemplation and the comprehension of one great work of art.

At the People’s Palace there are concerts morning and evening; perhaps also there is some exhibition or attraction of another kind; there are other loan exhibitions possible besides those of art.

Some of the people, but not many, go off westward and wander about the halls of the British Museum. I do not know why they go there, because ancient Egypt is to them no more than modern Mexico, and the Etruscan vases are no more interesting than the “Souvenir of Margate,” which costs a penny. But they do go; they roam from room to room with listless indifference, seeing nothing. In the same spirit of curiosity, baffled yet satisfied, they go to the South Kensington Museum and gaze upon its treasures of art; or they go to the National Portrait Gallery, finding in Queen Anne Boleyn a striking likeness to their own Maria, but otherwise not profiting in any discoverable manner by the contents of the gallery. And some of them go to the National Gallery, where there are pictures which tell stories. Or some get as far as Kew Gardens, tempted by the reputation of the houses which provide tea and shrimps and water-cresses outside the gardens, as much as by the Palm House and the Orchid Houses within.

The streets on Easter Monday present a curious Sunday-like appearance, with shops shut and no vehicles except the omnibus, but in the evening the theater and the music-hall are open, and they are crammed with people.

Therefore, though Easter Monday is the greatest of the people’s holidays, it is so chiefly because it is the first, and because, like the May-day of old, it stands for the end of the long, dark winter and the first promise of the spring. Even in the streets, the streets of dreary monotony, the East Londoners feel their blood stir and their pulses quicken when the April day draws out and once more there comes an evening light enough and long enough to take them out by tram beyond the bricks.

The holiday of early summer is Whit-Monday, which is also a movable feast, and falls seven weeks after Easter, so that it is due on some day between May 12th and June 12th. I have already observed that the cold east wind, which retards our spring, generally ceases before the middle of May, though in our climate nothing is certain—not even hot weather in July and August. When it falls reasonably late, say in the first week of June, there is some probability that the day will be warm, even though there may be showers; that the woods will be resonant with warblers, the fields golden with buttercups, the hedges bright with spring flowers, the bushes white and pink with May blossom, and the orchards glorious with the pink of the apple and the creamy white of the cherry and the pear. On this day the East Londoner goes farther afield; he is not content with Hampstead Heath, and he will not remain under cover at the Crystal Palace. Trains convey him out of London. He goes down to Southend, at the mouth of the Thames; there, at low tide, he can gaze upon a vast expanse of mud or he can walk down a pier a mile and a half long, or, if it is high tide, he may delight in the dancing waters with innumerable boats and yachts. Above all, at Southend he will find all the delights that endear the seaside to him; there is the tea with shrimps—countless shrimps, quarts and gallons of shrimps; he is among his own kind; there is no one to scoff when, to the music of the concertina, he takes out his companion to dance in the road; he sings his music-hall ditties unchecked; he bawls the cry of the day, and it is counted unto him for infinite humor. Southend on Whit-Monday is a place for the comic man and the comic artist; it is also the place for the humorist.