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 properties, that is to say small
houses built by small property owners and let by the week, sprang up
also in the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the London
Road. A single national school in an inconvenient situation set itself
inadequately to collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing,
grimy offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages of
Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely four
miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions
and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of locality or
community had gone from these places long before I was born; hardly any
one knew any one; there was no general meeting place any more, the old
fairs were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies, van showmen, Cheap
Jacks and London roughs, the churches were incapable of a quarter of the
population. One or two local papers of shameless veniality reported the
proceedings of the local Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen
who were interested in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet
"Bromstedian" as one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in
the general mind a weak tradition of some local quality that embraced
us all. Then the parish