In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Merstham, one stop beyond Coulsdon South on the Brighton line. For positioningpurposes it lies at the foot of the North Downs, a couple of miles north of Redhill thus very much in Surrey. It's a truly ancient village whose long term expansion is mainly thanks to rocks, roads and railways, most recently the massive M23/M25 motorway interchange which despoils the immediate neighbourhood. If you can hear a muted roar throughout today's post, that'll be it.
Merstham is first mentioned in the 9th century, the name meaning 'dwelling of the people of the marsh'. It's a classic spring line village, i.e. located where water emerges from a chalk escarpment, and also strategically placed at the head of a valley long frequented by north-south traffic. The A23 London to Brighton road still winds through. Merstham's oldest surviving building is St Katharine's church, a splendid flinty number with a 13th century broach spire. It's long been a stopping off point on the Pilgrim's Way from Winchester to Canterbury, and these days the North Downs Way threads through the churchyard so you may well have walked past. I walked in.
It's always lovely when a quaint old church is unlocked for visitors, something St Katherine's tries to do most days. The interior looks rather more Victorian once you get through the door (and have located the light switches and turned them on). The font's properly medieval though, and above it is the colourful spider formed by the dangling bellropes that Jack and his team tug every Wednesday ('for fun and fitness', if you're interested in joining). I was particularly struck by the little yellow cards arrayed across the nave, two per pew, encouraging servicegoers to scan the QR code and give some money. I've seen 'tap to give' pads at the backs of churches before (in this case default £10), but the steady decline of ready cash is spurring a donation revolution in our places of worship.
For centuries parishioners returning to their homes in the village would have crossed Church Meadows but this was severed in the 1970s and they now cross a narrow footbridge suspended high above the M25. The motorway had to go somewhere and this stripe between the escarpment and the village proved the line of least resistance. Heading west a red sign warns of an upcoming 10% gradient, this the civil engineering compromise for climbing Gatton Bottom, and heading east a slip road opens up on the approach to mega-Junction 7. This is one of just three four-level stack interchanges in the UK (the others being the M4/M5 and the M4/M25), built when it was assumed the M23 would burrow deep into south London, and since surrounded by a shield of woodland.
The first road on the other side of the motorway is broad, ancient, veryattractive and has an excellent name - Quality Street. It used to lead to the local stately home, Merstham House, but that was demolished after the war so it's now a a very well-to-do cul-de-sac. The jumble of detached houses includes a former tavern, a converted village school, a half-timbered forge and a cottage dating back to 1609. The inhabitant of one house spotted me taking photos of Quality Street and addressed me with a challenge - "Do you know how it got its name?"
I very much did know because I'd done my research, but I played along all the same. "It's not the chocolates," I said, "it's the West End play." He smiled, thwarted, then asked for the name of the playwright hoping to catch me out. "That'd be J M Barrie," I said and he nodded, beaten. When Barrie's play Quality Street opened on Broadway in 1901 the lead actors were Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss, and after the married couple moved into The Old Lodge in 1904 the street was renamed in their honour. We chose to leave all that backstory unsaid, thankfully, but if you are ever challenged while walking down Quality Street on the North Downs Way you'll know how to respond.
The centre of Merstham lies on a bend in the A23 by the Feathers Hotel, a long pub whose many decorative balconies are currently behind a sheet of scaffolding. The village pond used to be where the bus shelter is, beside the drinking trough, near the boxing gym, opposite the tanning salon. Meanwhile beneath the village sign is a pair of rails recalling the time that Merstham was part of the first public railway in the world. The Surrey Iron Railway followed the River Wandle to Croydon and was extended to Merstham in 1805, transporting sandstone from the local quarry in horse drawn wagons. As with many pioneering technologies it couldn't compete with later innovations, but what really killed it off was that its rails were too weak to support steam locomotives and by the 1830s it was gone. The rails here alas are replicas made by local resident Mr Postlethwaite after the originals were stolen.
A proper passenger railway arrived in 1841 with a station on the eastern edge of the village, this still wonderfully convenient today. But most trains on the Brighton line speed by on an entirely separate line that carves a roughly parallel track all the way from just before Coulsdon to just after Redhill. The two lines now conspire to divide Old Merstham from the new, a large overspill estate built by the London County Council in the 1950s. You walk down School Hill past attractive tiled cottages, duck beneath a pair of viaducts and the conservation area swiftly metamorphoses into postwar pebbledash and brick. Thousands now live here amid a network of interlocking avenues, apparently the most deprived area of Surrey by some data measures, although quite frankly it looked like paradise compared to several parts of East London.
At the estate's heart is a modern shopping parade with a Co-Op and an independent convenience store called Londizz - no copyright infringement admitted - located on the footprint of a demolished pub. Churches were still being built when the estate opened so three denominations got lucky, in typically postwar architectural style, whereas these days more people worship at the culinary trinity of Merstham Kebab, Merstham Chippy and Merstham Tandoori. The newest facility appears to be a snazzy Community Hub where the library's been rehoused, while the oldest must be the remains of Albury Manor. This looks like a patch of undulating wasteland behind Bletchingley Close, whereas it's actually a scheduled monument with inner and outer banks and a dip where the moat used to be. Merstham FC play nextdoor at a ground called Moatside, which is a much better name than the nickname their supporters have which is The Mongos.
And all the time the M25 is close by, just over the brow of the boundary street. Thankfully the civil engineers placed it in a cutting which dampens the worst of the noise and they also left a broad stripe of grassland along the edge of the estate. Thus if you're walking your dog you can shadow the westbound carriageway through open space and woodland for the best part of a mile, right up to the edge of the monster interchange, or you can cross another footbridge onto a slice of semi-untouched chalk grassland. I walked all the way to the far end of the estate where the quarries were, now lakes and nature reserves but strictly inaccessible except to wildlife because, as the scary signs on the gate attest, 'Quarry Water Is Stone Cold And Can Kill'.
One of the last fields before the motorway has been pencilled in for 107 new homes and local residents are up in arms, claiming that this "huge increase in housing would bring Merstham's crumbling infrastructure to its knees". They've also successfully annulled the opportunity for 11 homes on the site of the former library because apparently it would overwhelm a service road, thus the old premises remain boarded up helping nobody. It's hard to be objective as an outsider unfamiliar with the level of local services, but it seems it only takes a few decades for the inhabitants of an overspill estate to become total nimbys lest any incomers might enjoy the same benefits they did. What a mixed bag Merstham is, and has inexorably become.
