File:The Brighton road - the classic highway to the south (1922) (14779344864).jpg

Identifier: brightonroadclas00harp (find matches)
Title: The Brighton road : the classic highway to the south
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George), 1863-1943
Subjects: Horses Brighton (England) -- Description and travel England -- Social life and customs
Publisher: London : C. Palmer
Contributing Library: Webster Family Library of Veterinary Medicine
Digitizing Sponsor: Tufts University

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ISOs releasebecome ripe for building, and the mansion, the lake,and the beautiful grounds have been developed away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot willhave faded. Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, andabove the white hillside villas of Sydenham andGipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long body of theCrystal Palace ; that bane and obsession of mostview-points in South London, for ever spoiling theview in all its compass, as Ruskin truly says in Prreterita. I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphereof the building is stuffily reminiscent of half a centurysstale teas and buttered toast, and the views of it, nearor distant, are very creepily and awfully like thedreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of suchscriptural scenes as Belshazzars Feast and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects from Revelation. At Thornton Heath—where there has been nothingin the nature of a heath for at least eighty years past—the electric trams of Croydon begin, and take you
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108 THE BRIGHTON ROAD through North End into and through Croydon town,along a continuous line of houses. Broad Green once stood by the wayside, but nowadays the soletrace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue.At Thornton Heath, however, there is just one littlevestige of the past left, in Colliers Water Lane.The old farmhouse of Colliers Water, reputed hauntof the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, wasdemolished in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it,and the secret staircase it possessed was no doubtintended to hide fugitives much more respectable thanhighwaymen. The name of that lane is now the onlv reminder ofthe time when Croydon was a veritable Black Country. The colliers of Croydon, whose black trade gavesuch employment to seventeenth-century wits, hadno connection with what our ancestors of very recenttimes still called sea-coal —that is to say, coalshipped from Newcastle and brought round by water,in days before railways. The Croydon coal wascharcoal, made from the

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