WIMBLEDON COMMON.
AN appeal, which we sincerely hope will be successful, is being made on behalf of a scheme to extend the commons of Wimbledon and Putney. Between Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, in what is known as Putney Vale and Kingston Vale, lies a belt of open fields. It is part of an area of farmland which also extends along the western bank of the Beverley Brook. This farmland, as part of the private property of the Fitz-George estate, has now come into the market as a building site, and unless it can be saved the probable consequences are only too plain. The speculative builder will descend as be has descended elsewhere. The ancient ploughland will disappear; the trees will go to the saw-pit. Wooden palings will mark the " cleared" ground like a chessboard ; rows of yellow brick boxes will be placed behind the palings. Between Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, to-day linked by open fields and unspoiled water, there will stretch a wedge of slate roofs and asphalt pavement. The process is familiar ; it is going on, in varying degrees and under varying conditions, in a hundred places round London to-day. But there is no place near London where a repetition of the process would do more irreparable mischief, or where, for that matter, so much could be saved at a cost relatively low.
Those who know the ground well will appreciate the danger of allowing the open spaces of Kingston Vale to be built over. Casual passers-by, or people who only occasionally visit Rich- mond Park or Wimbledon Common, may not realise what exactly is threatened. We have become so long accustomed to the look of the farm fields lying under the Common and under Coombe Wood on its western side that it is difficult to think at once what would be the alteration if they were gone. The best way to understand is to go to the spot and walk over the ground. There is hardly a more charming walk near London ; none more delightful in the spring, and few with so many attractions of wild country and open spaces even in the wind and rain of February. Let any one who wishes to know how much is still left of untouched English woodland and meadow within four miles of Clapham Junction go down to Wimbledon Common and walk from Caesar's Camp about the hill. Caesar's Camp, to be sure, which was probably not Caesar's, and has been argued to belong to Cassivelaunus, he will not find as a camp at all. An unfor- givable act of wanton destruction levelled the dykes and mound in 1875, and to-day there remain only heather and sand. But from where the camp stood there stretches north and west a succession of wooded slopes which might he set in country as deep as there is to be found in Southern England. North of the camp in a group of pines a spring of water has been built in with a stone basin, and runs clear over a bed of flints to a drinking-pool below. Beyond that the water chatters down the hill under oak and birch and holly ; the birches of Wimbledon Common must be some of the finest in the country. Here is a tangle of wild rose as solid as a
clipped hedge ; here is a pool of water, stayed in a hollow of the soaking slope, and specked over its dark surface with the cone-scales which carry the blown birch-seeds ; here we come suddenly out on a wide space of green grass, with geese walking over it, as naturally as ponies in a glade of the New Forest. The view from the high ground by Caesar's Camp is one of the finest in the north of the county of Surrey, stretching as it does clear away to the Surrey hills ; but the views on this lower ground have their own charm. That is especially true of the fields and the walks which run by the little Beverley Brook along the western side of the Common. Except for one or two scattered cottages, the Beverley runs between banks free from any sort of building; cn one side is the Common, and on the other grass or ploughland away up to the boundary trees of Coombe Wood. Only in the distance, when you are nearing the Kingston Road, do you catch sight of glimpses of the villas which line the far side of the highway. Except for those'in the distance, the Beverley by Wimbledon Common runs between banks which see nothing of the town or of what the town brings with it. Whitethorn and blackthorn and elder and honey- suckle arch over it and along the walk by its banks, and walking there, you may remember that the Beverley Brook is the last and only stream near London left undefiled.
A practical scheme is on foot to acquire enough ground to safeguard Wimbledon Common, the belt between Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, and not least the Beverley itself, from the encroachment of the speculative builder. Negotia- tions have been entered into by which the necessary amount of ground can be purchased in successive parcels, the purchase- money for the several sections being required to be raised by October 31st, 1910, April 30th, 1911, and July 31st, 1911, respectively. These parcels comprise in all about a hundred and seventy-two acres; but of these thirteen acres have already been bought by certain public-spirited residents of Wimbledon, to protect the banks of the Beverley. These thirteen acres are to be repurchased, it is hoped, from those who have so generously come forward with the necessary funds, on the completion of the sum required to purchase the whole area. The strip already acquired lies along the western bank of the Beverley, from Coombe Bridge northwards for nearly a mile and three-quarters to where the brook passes under the Kingston Road. The area which remains to be acquired is situated partly to the west of the thirteen-acre strip, supple- menting and extending it, and partly in a solid block of land which now lies in the form of arable ground and pasture in Putney Vale between Putney Cemetery and the Beverley Brook, almost, but not quite, fronting the Kingston Road on the north. The price required for the whole area of a hundred and seventy-two acres, including the thirteen already bought, is £52,771, the average price per acre being £306. This is relatively a low price, the cost of the latest addition to Hampstead Heath being £537 per acre. But it is low only because it would require a large sum of money to develop the land by draining, road- making, tram-laying, &c., and it may be taken for certain that if the opportunity of buying is let slip to-day, the roads and tramways will be pushed forward as soon as possible, and another large building enterprise will have begun,—an enter- prise to build where no building should be. For, apart from aesthetic considerations, it is plain on looking at the map that the land which now lies between Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park belongs, geographically, to those two stretches of open country. It links the two ; it is a necessary part of the green belt which encircles London on the south-west, and which, if the last generation had seen as far into the future as Wimbledon saw in the " sixties," would be a complete ring, instead of a ring with gaps, round the whole of London to-day. We are glad, then, to make the appeal which is now being made by Wimbledon known to a larger public, including London, which breathes the more purely by very reason of this circle of green round her. Already, before the appeal has been issued, sums amounting to £1,500 have been given or promised ; we hope the fund will grow rapidly. A strong Committee has been formed, with Mrs. Barnett, Lord Meath, and Lord Eversley as vice-presidents ; it was Lord Eversley, it maybe remembered, who as Mr. Shaw-Lefevre had so much to do in 1865 with acquiring Wimbledon Common itself, when Lord Spencer brought forward his Enclosure Bill. Subscriptions may be sent to the bankers of the fund, Messrs. H. S. King and Co.,
9 Pall Mall, S.W., or direct to the honorary treasurer, Sit Robert Hensley, Glenton House, Putney ; and the honorary secretary, Mr. Richardson Evans, The Keir, Wimbledon, will be glad to forward pamphlets giving information with maps and plans. We may hope that the central authorities and the County Councils will feel that they are justified in recom- mending grants to the fund, as they recommended grants in the case of the Hampstead extension ; but it is necessary always, of course, that local and private subscriptions should show by the largeness of the sum collected that the need for which funds are asked is felt to be imperative.
Wimbledon residents have especial reason to be grateful to those who have made it certain that, at all events where it flows by Wimbledon Common, the Beverley Brook shall not be made hideous with the backs of squalid buildings, and by being made the receptacle of the rubbish of a dozen parishes, as the Wandle has been. Who would believe, looking at the Wandle from the South-Western Railway, that it was there, where the filth of a thousand houses washes to the tidal Thames, that Nelson wandered with a trout-rod P The Beverley Brook has been saved, or partially saved. With both banks in possession of the Common it will be possible now to cleanse the few spots on the western bank where it has been spoiled, and here and there, perhaps, to open out the bank a little from the trees. A stream, like everything else in the country, is best in the sunshine, and the Beverley, although it is shaded by hawthorn and whitethorn, would be better now and then for running open to the sky.
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