By Wandle Banks
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY HAVING just come back from some halcyon weeks in Rome, I am once more impressed by the fact that almost all the charm of London lies concealed, or at any rate fails to leap to the eye. With a few exceptions— the view of the Thames from Westminster Bridge, for instance —no London effect is facile, and even at this time of year, when the pale cold winter light, alternating with thick shadowy days of fog, adds greatly to the beauty of the London scene f to be properly appreciated any area of London requires scrutiny. It is very easy to live in London and not to look at it, just as it is simple to dismiss some alien region of the metropolis out of conventional prejudice, so that the word " Peckham " or " Mitcham " produces nothing but a shudder of boredom or a contortion of distaste. This conventional attitude is peculiarly unrewarding, for as poets of Victorian London such as Frederick Locker or Henry Leigh proved, it is possible to find a kind of 'tarnished glamour in the most unpromising regions of the capital. When Leigh writes in the pretty jingling lines which open his Evening Song, published in 1869: Fades into twilight the last golden gleam Thrown by the sunset on upland and stream; Glints o'er the Serpentine—tips Notting Hill— Dies on the summit of proud Pentonville, does he not manage to make both Notting Hill and Penton- vile seem, at any rate momentarily, rather romantic and endearing? It all depends on how you look at any part of London, whether it is the part you live in, or some unknown region which you are examining with a tourist's attentive curiosity. Having had occasion earlier this year to visit Wandsworth intermittently, I took the opportunity of wander- ing about among the side-streets of that borough.
To the ordinary guide-book compiler "a large spreading industrial borough traversed by the river Wandle," Wands- worth, I have no doubt, seems to those who inhabit it a pleasing and a cheerful residential area. To motorists trying to fight their way out of London to the south-west, the name Wandsworth simply represents a bridge across the Thames and a wide expanse of leafy common, well-planted with groves of trees. To students of Georgian architecture it is a borough containing one of London's best Georgian churches, Robert Smirke's Saint Anne's, and to readers of Lytton Strachey it may perhaps be memorable as the residence during his English exile of Voltaire. And there are certainly many other aspects of Wandsworth than these.
Now sprawling across two hills, East Hill and West Hill. Wandsworth was originally built along the valley between these, where the little river Wandle (like the Falcon, the Effra and the Ravensbourne one of the many Thames tributaries which centuries ago created and watered the Great South Marsh), flows its dirty way. In Izaak Walton's time this scrubby little stream was clear, and filled with' marbled trout which he describes as having spots like those on tortoise shells. In the same period the village of Wandsworth became the centre of a strangely flourishing industry for making brass plate for kettles and frying-pans, set up by some enterprising Dutch immigrants, while later in the century French Huguenot silk. weavers, driven out of France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, chose Wandsworth as one of several English villages in which to settle and ply their trade. By the late eighteenth century the rot seems to have set in, for we find Wandswordh unprettily described as "the sink of the country" by The Ambulator, but in the nineteenth century the tone of the area was raised once more by the building of a cluster of large charitable institutions, housed in formidable buildings which may today be seen brooding over the fringes of Wandsworth Common. Chief amongst these Was the Fishmongers' Alms. houses, completed in the architecturally inauspicious year of 1851, and the asylums for orphan boys and girls established with part of that Royal Patriotic Fund instituted during the Crimean War to deal with the then novel national problem of war widows and their children. The same fruitful decade saw the creation in Spanish Road, near the Fishmongers' Alms- houses, of the Friendless Boys' Home, an institution rather mysteriously described by its founders as "a refuge for boys who have lost their character or are in danger of losing it." Another large Victorian institution, the Surrey Asylum for pauper lunatics, had been built on the Common ten years earlier, in a medley of styles in which " Domestic " and Gothic details were affixed to an E-shaped building of vaguely Eliza- bethan ground-plan. And in 1851, not far from the Asylum, was erected that most famous of all the borough of Wands- worth's free institutions, the great prison of dark brick, with its central lantern, monumental doorway of baronial propor- tions, and macadamised courtyard.
Averting one's gaze from this grim parade of examples of Victorian romantic architecture, it is possible to find many other features of interest in Wandsworth. The fact that the borough has now spread across the two hills which contain the Wandle means that in Wandsworth you seem always to be walking up or down hill. The High Street, with the eighteenth- century parish church and an ungainly example of modern municipal building, the Town Hall, has some nice brick Georgian houses in it, while a number of little alleys and side- streets lined by small, pleasant early nineteenth-century cottages lead off it. The house in which Fawkener entertained• Voltaire has evidently long since disappeared, nor does it seem any longer possible to identify the old Huguenot burial ground, still intact in the middle of the last century, and lying at the Junction of the roads to Clapham and Vauxhall. This con- tained many gravestones bearing seventeenth and eighteenth century inscriptions in French. But far the finest building in the borough is the church of Saint Anne, a Grecian temple standing behind the High Street on the shady summit of Saint Anne's Hill.
As modern experts have pointed out, Sir Robert Smirke, the architect of the British Museum, was, like Wilkins who designed the National Gallery, much underrated and indeed quite unfairly abused by his contemporaries and by subsequent Victorian generations. The spaciousness and proportions of the King's Library should alone justify Smirke's claim to be recognised as an exceptionally gifted and competent English architect, and the large church of Saint Anne, Wandsworth, adds further weight to that claim. Built , between 1820 and 1822, Saint Anne's preceded by a few years Smirke's other, better-known West London church, Saint Mary's, Wyndham Place. Like St. Mary's, the church at Wandsworth is built in Smirke's favourite Greek Ionic, with a cupola'd tower raised on a vestibule above an Ionic portico. It is a fine, calm church, kept in spotless condition inside and out, standing amongst plane trees on Saint Anne's Hill. Below the bill a quantity of small steep streets run downwards to an aqueduct which, built in the last century of yellowish brick, now looks weathered and indestructible. Along the top of the aqueduct there ran a path or open passage which the dwellers of Borrow- daile Road and Iron Mill Place could use as.a short cut, but this has now been wired off, and the gates are resolutely locked. The whole of this corner of 'Wandsworth seems curi- ously unlike a part of London: the small countrified public- house on the corner opposite the aqueduct, the village shops and quiet sloping streets of cottages more closely resemble some area of an expanding Midland town. There is no sense of being within half a mile of one of the Thames' busiest bridges, or indeed of being near the Thames at all. In many ways the residents of Wandswortlr may be envied, although it seems a pity that they have done so little to cleanse or clear the river Wand le, or to tidy up its refuse-crowded banks.
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