London 1981

Peter MARSHALL


Lewis Tea Cottage, Chertsey, Surrey, 1981
29d-61: cottage, tea room, Runnemede

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Lewis Tea Cottage was at 79 Bridge Road, Chertsey, next to the Bridge Hotel, part of which can be seen at right, and the space is now part of a raised car park.
 
The house looks to have been late Victorian, with the covered entrance way possibly a later addition, and of a particularly vernacular design, with crude woodwork supported on slender iron columns. The sign along its top is in an interesting fake antique-style font. The modern block wall perhaps was a replacement for railings removed for scrap in a wartime drive.
 
Tea cottages such as this surely belonged to the age of the bicycle craze, when people would ride out from the London suburbs to the Thames and come over Chertsey Bridge to take tea here, with scones or cake.
 
Our road system was developed for the bicycle, with smooth surfaces replacing the older tracks that were fine for horse-drawn traffic. Real motor roads only really arrived in the 1920s and 30s, with roads like the Great West Road with dual carriageways and separate cycle tracks at their side, but few were built. Fortunately for Chertsey, the Great Chertsey Road came to an abrupt halt a few miles short at Sunbury Cross, leaving this small town in something of a time warp. By the time the project was continued it was as the M3, which bypasses Chertsey to the north, its first exit some miles past and the historic town, one of the oldest market towns in England, was saved from being split in two and entirely killed by traffic.