VI THE Lea Bridge Road, although a broad and direct thoroughfare, makes a bad beginning, and branches off narrowly and in an obscure manner from the wide Lower Clapton Road. The present bridge was built in 1821. The road itself is a singular combination of picturesqueness and sordid vulgarity. Badly founded on the marshes that stretch, water-logged, on either side of the river Lea, its two miles’ length of roadway is full of ridges and depressions that no mere surface repairs will ever remedy, and nothing less than reconstruction from its foundations will ever cure the unequal subsidences of what should be the finest highway out of London into Essex. The Lea Bridge Road is in some ways an exceptional thoroughfare. Although of urban character, it is largely a road without houses; for the marshy fields through which it runs, elevated in the manner of a causeway, have kept the builder at a wholesome distance, and from the Lea Bridge and other points one looks over wide level tracts of green meadows to where Upper Clapton, and Stamford Hill beyond, not unpicturesquely crown the heights with villa roofs and church spires, and seem with a superior air of riches and high-class villadom to look down across the valley of the Lea on to the thronged wage-earning populations of clerkly and artizan Walthamstow. You think, as you gaze from this midway vantage-ground and consider these things, of the “great gulf” set between Lazarus and Dives—with the essential difference that here, at any rate, Dives had the advantage.