116 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



the fasiiionablest in Market Street, having actually 

 two windows over the shop, in the second story " (sic). 

 There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon 

 is a highly civilised progressive place, and slums and 

 slum populations are the exclusive products of civilisa- 

 tion and progress, and a very severe indictment of 

 them. But they are new slums ; those poverty- 

 stricken districts created ad hoc. which seem more 

 hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be 

 as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great 

 towns as a hem to a handkerchief. 



The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the 

 slum condition at about the period of Croydon's first 

 expansion, when the ol iroWoi impinged too closely 

 upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces, 

 neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary 

 to Graces spiritual and temporal, retired to the 

 congenial privacy of Addington. 



Here stands the magnificent parish church of 

 Croydon ; its noble tower of the Perpendicular period, 

 its body of the same style, but a restoration, after the 

 melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It 

 is one of the few really satisfactory works of Sir 

 Gilbert Scott ; successful because he was obliged to 

 forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly 

 what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica 

 is the elaborate monument of Archbishop Wmtgift, 

 copied exactly from pictures of that utterly destroyed 

 in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon's monument, however, 

 still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred 

 and horrible face calculated to afflict the nervous and 

 to be remembered in their dreams. 



The vicars of Croydon have in the long past been 

 a varied kind. The Reverend William Clewer, who 

 held the living from 1660 until 1684, when he was 

 ejected, was a " smiter, an extortioner, and a 

 criminal ; but Roland Phillips, a predecessor by some 

 two hundred years, was something of a seer. Preaching 

 in 1497, he declared that " we " (the Roman Catholics) 

 " must root out printing, or printing will root out us." 



