Quality Street

A Memory of Merstham.

My mother always told me that Quality Street had been renamed in honour of an acting couple who had appeared in a play of that name. I've since googled this and found that Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss did indeed live in The Old Forge at the end of the street - you can even recognise the house in some of their publicity shots.
The impressive gates at the end of the street led to Merstham House and, if I remember rightly, The Rectory. There was a footpath to the right of the gates that led across Church Meadows, past a pond, to Gatton Bottom and St Katherine's Church. I'm afraid that my most vivid memory of this path is walking along it as a small child, one cold winter's day, and finding a dead pigeon frozen to a branch. I believe that the footpath still exists, but you now have to take a bridge across the M25 to reach the church.