The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are a part of every civilisation forbade much alteration, and the road still trickles and meanders through the town and divides into two channels and unites again, like some sluggish, undecided river. It is an infirmity of purpose that can be carried back to a very remote origin: to the time, in fact, when Bromley was only beginning to be a settlement amid the then widespreading wastes; when the prehistoric tribesmen drove their herds across the broomy heaths to water at the Ravensbourne, and tracked deviously to avoid boulders, trees, or boggy places. These were the circumstances that fixed throughout the ages the windings of Bromley’s streets. One somewhat important change was, however, made under the Improvement Act of 1830. A new road was cut to one side of the Market Place, starting just beyond the “Bell” and ending just short of the “White Hart.” The historian seeking something of the old coaching days at Bromley pities himself. He finds the “Swan” very gay and attractive in summer with displays of geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelia, but he does not find the old house, and when he has found the “Bell,” in the centre of the town, he has come to a very beautiful building; but it is modern. The alleged fact that its doorway is on a level with the cross of St. Paul’s Cathedral does not seem to have the significance it would possess were the old house standing. The old inn is the subject of a slight reference in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” where she makes Lady Catherine say: “Where shall you change horses? Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the ‘Bell’ you will be attended to.” The passage does not make my pulses leap. Only the “White Hart” remains; appropriately enough white-faced, cool and clean-looking, with the white hart himself “couchant regardant, collared or,” as a herald might say, over the portico. Unhappily, gigantic modern red-brick buildings encompass the inn, rising to four times the height of it, and presently the old house itself will inevitably go. Beyond this point is South Bromley, where the railway runs and modern expansion is most evident. You descend to it, and having descended immediately ascend again, up the not very Andean slope of Mason’s Hill.