The photographer has created a rural idyll with this Frith
publication. SS. Peter and Paul Parish Church is the focus
of the picture, viewed from a quiet country lane and framed
by the trees. What the image doesn't show are the early
twentieth century industrial buildings with their tall
chimneys that we can see in other photos from this time.
New Way runs along the side of the London - Portsmouth railway
track but pre-dates it by some years. Even today it is extremely
narrow, little more than a track in places, with few houses
along its length and the land rising steeply on one side.
The lane begins just past the bridge on Westbrook Road, where
the railway is initially on an embankment several feet above
it but then rises to the station's back entrance onto the
London bound platform. Although we can't see it, the line
is close to the bend in the road but is below road level.
Today (2019) the church can only be glimpsed through the
trees that have grown up in the intervening years and the
chimneys have gone, as have some of the factory buildings.
We first learn of New Way in 1844 when an unfortunate accident
was reported in the press: "On Tuesday evening last,
two young men were walking up a lane at the upper end of
the town, known as the new way, the path of which is banked
up six or seven feet from the level of the road, when one
of them by way of a joke, pushed his companion from him towards
the road, who taken by surprise, wont[sic] over, and falling
upon his head broke his collar bone. He was carried to his
home insensible and is still in a dangerous state"[1].
As a piece of social history it is interesting to note that
this card was sent by a young Charterhouse pupil to his father,
Rev. A E Gover, Carlton Rectory, near Newmarket from C EJ
G. The boy was thanking his father for the pheasant which
was "beautifully
tender", so clearly the school's
pupils received treats of dainty morsels from home. |
