108 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



through North End into and through Croydon town, 

 along a continuous line of houses. " Broad Green ' 

 once stood by the wayside, but nowadays the sole 

 trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. 

 At Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little 

 vestige of the past left, in " Colliers' Water Lane." 

 The "old farmhouse of Colliers' Water, reputed haunt 

 of the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, was 

 demolished in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, 

 and the secret staircase it possessed was no doubt 

 intended to hide fugitives much more respectable than 

 highwaymen. 



The name of that lane is now the onlv reminder of 

 the time when Croydon was a veritable Black Country. 



The " colliers of Croydon," whose black trade gave 

 such employment to seventeenth-century wits, had 

 no connection with what our ancestors of very recent 

 times still called " sea-coal " — that is to say, coal 

 shipped from Newcastle and brought round by water, 

 in days before railways. The Croydon coal was 

 charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests 

 that once overspread the counties of Surrey and 

 Sussex, and was supplied very largely to London from 

 the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the 

 nineteenth. 



Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the 

 Croydon colliers famous. We are not to suppose that 

 his name was really Grimes : that was probably a 

 part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master 

 collier, who in the time of Edward the Sixth made 

 charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke and the 

 grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop 

 of Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an 

 unsuccessful attempt to abolish the kilns. I think we 

 may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled lawn- 

 sleeves. 



We first find Croydon mentioned in a.d. 962, when 

 it was " Crogdoene." In Domesday Book it is 

 " Croindene." Whether the name means " crooked 

 vale," " chalk vale," or " town of the cross," I will not 



