the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High
Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front
doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square
glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps--
previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching
inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk, it long
remained talk,--of gas. The gasworks came in 1834, and about that
date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for
the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the real
suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still
engaged in business.

And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal;
there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the
east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural
placidities that had formerly come to the very borders of the High
Street were broken up north, west and south, by new roads. This
enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses,
irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the
same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and with much
hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works. Rates
became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several
chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in
commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the
residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.

The population doubled again and doubled again, and became
particularly teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about
the deep-rutted, muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks,
Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goods-yard. Weekly