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madeinatlantis
LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE
THE LIFE OF METROPOLITAN ENLAND
The life of Metropolitan England is chiefly conditioned by three circumstances: (1) nearly all the main roads and railways converge upon London; (2) the coast-line, extended from Norfolk to Cornwall, everywhere looks across the Narrow Seas to the neighbouring continent; and (3) there are no considerable sources of mechanical motive power. As a consequence nine-tenths of the army in Great Britain is stationed within Metropolitan England: the three great naval ports are there: the commercial as opposed to the industrial control is there: and the whole region has more or less of a residential character. Industrial England, on the other hand, has several important cross roads, but a less immediate connection with the continent. It has but a small population of the leisured classes, for rich and poor alike are workers, and as a result the prevalent opinions both in politics and religion differ not infrequently from those of the metropolis. Moreover, the social life of Metropolitan England is old and aristocratic, whereas that of Industrial England is new and more democratic, for Industrial England, as a great community, is even more recent than the New England of America.
Outside London, Metropolitan England falls naturally into four quadrants, south-eastern, north-eastern, northwestern, and south-western, and of these the last named must be subdivided into a nearer and a further section, for it extends to the remote Land's End.
The South-Eastern Quadrant, consisting of the three counties of Kent, Surrey, and Su ssex, is one of the most naturally compact sub-divisions of all Britain. Almost every detail of the topography is dependent upon two fundamental events in the physical history of the land, the uplift of the Wealden dome along an axis striking east and west, and the intersection of this diagonally from southwest to north-east by the erosion of Dover Strait. The core of the district, lying along the axis of the upfold from Horsham to Hastings, consists of the sandstone hills of the Forest Range which, with the surrounding clay bottoms, were formerly clothed with the dense Wealden Forest. The remaining features are, necessarily, bi-lateral, the Chalk Downs of the north being balanced by those of the south, and the clay flats along the Thames by those of the Sussex coast westward of Brighton. From the divide the drainage is carried northward to the Thames through gaps in the Downs of Surrey and Kent, and southward to the Channel through similar gaps in the Sussex Downs. At Beachy Head, at Hastings, and at the South Foreland, where the two belts of chalk and the sandstone range have been cut back by the Channel waves, the land is fronted by cliffs; but the relatively recent origin of the Strait of Dover is marked by the lack of any considerable subsequent streams draining directly to the sea. On the other hand, the relative antiquity of the denudation of the Weald is evidenced by the development of long subsequent tributaries from several of the consequents which breach the ranges of Down. This is notably the case with the Medway, which has thus become the largest river of the district.
Of minor elements in the topography, the most striking is the change in the direction of the North Downs from east-north-east in Surrey and west Kent, to south-east through eastern Kent. The accessory features of the north coast of Kent may be correlated with these separate limbs of the Downs. The Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey are the terminal coastal expression of the lie of the Surrey and west Kent Downs from the Hog's Back to Rochester, while the Isle of Thanet, beyond the marsh belt which represents the former channel of Wantsum, is connected with the east Kentish range. The chalk expands terminally so as to occupy all the eastern promontory of the county, from Folkestone to Deal and from Dover to Canterbury, and further to south, emergent from under the chalk, is a greensand ledge, which bears Folkestone and the old Cinque Port of Hythe. Beyond this again is Romney Marsh, an alluvial flat at the mouth of the Rother, due to the deposit of silt in the lagoon behind a shingle bar, which formerly bent evenly from Hastings past Romney to Hythe, and has now been cusped seaward into Dungeness by the combined action of the waves and tidal currents.
The county divisions, Surrey and Kent in the north and Sussex in the south, are expressive of the conditions under which the Jutes and Saxons took possession of the country. Having first occupied the two ranges of open chalk upland, the invaders ultimately met in the heart of the Wealden Forest, where the frontier line has ever since been drawn. The word weald is equivalent to the German word "wald," a forest, and there are here many other place-names, ending in "hurst," "den," and "field," which betoken a closely-wooded country. By closing the westward road to the Jutes of Kent, the Roman Provincials of London reserved the occupation of Surrey to be effected by the East and Middle Saxons, thereby originating the frontier between Surrey and Kent. Where Surrey marches with Berkshire is a great heath, now much planted with pine woods, due to the largest patch of the Bagshot sands. To-day the population of southeastern England is no longer chiefly gathered about the Downs, but is densest in the valley of the Thames, along the north coast of Kent, and upon the coastal flats of Sussex .
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