These are just a few of the more important changes
that have taken place, with one exception, namely,
the disappearance of Christ Church. I almost
shed tears to see the demolition of this church and
landmark that had so many old associations. Some
of these were not always of a pleasant and joyous
character, for in days past the Sunday services were
very long, and the sermons anything but short.
I hope my memory has not “berayed” me
in making these little reminiscent remarks. I
did not make notes in my early days, and now in my
later years I may make little mistakes; but I do not
think I have tripped very much.
The city fringe.
It is my constant habit to take little runs into the
outskirts of our city, and when doing so I often stare
with all my eyes as I note what has taken place in
a limited number of years. Districts hardly more
than a mile or so from the centre of the city, which
in my boyhood were fields and meadows, are now laid
out into streets and covered with houses and shops.
Indeed, I sometimes feel very aged when I look upon
places where as a boy I went fishing for small fry,
and now find the river that afforded me such juvenile
sport is, owing to the enhanced value of laud, compressed
into the dimensions of a fair-sized gutter, with houses
and small factories closely packed on its margin covering
every foot of ground.
I go in another direction, and scarcely farther than
the distance just named, and I come to a spot where
once stood the fine large park (Aston) which I remember
was enclosed by a brick wall on every side. Scarcely
a trace of this extensive old wall can I now see,
and the site of the old park, or nearly the whole
of it, is now covered with streets and buildings.
Aston Hall, the grand old Elizabethan house built by
the Holtes in the time of Charles I., still stands
in a state of good preservation, and is fortunately
now the property of the city, together with some forty
acres of surrounding land, which is, as is well known,
used as a public recreation ground.
To speak a little more in detail, I am not the only
person living who remembers “Pudding Brook”
and “Vaughton’s Hole.” The name
of “Padding Brook” was, in my boyish days,
given to a swampy area of fields now covered by Gooch
Street and surrounding thoroughfares. Pudding
Brook proper was, however, a little muddy stream that
flowed or oozed along the district named and finally
emptied itself into the old moat not far from St.
Martin’s Church. Vaughton’s Hole,
to my juvenile mind, was represented by a deep pool
in the River Rea, where something direful took place,
in which a Mr. Vaughton was tragically concerned.
The real facts are—at least, so I read—that
there was a clay pit, sixty feet deep of water, situated
near the Rea, and in this pit at least one man was
drowned. The place was named after an old local
family named Vaughton, who owned considerable property
in the neighbourhood of the present Gooch Street.
