Hop-picking is over! Thank God, it is done!
I’ve wished myself dead ever since it begun.
—Henry H. Johnson, “Hop-Picking Time” (1902)

September marks the beginning of the end of the summer and all the open-air activities that attend it. Yet a century or two ago the arrival of September signaled, to England’s downtrodden and overworked souls, the beginning of an exhilarating and exhausting variety of rustic vacation. Wire- and shoemakers, match girls and costermongers alike marshaled their families and tramped off to Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, or one of the other English hop-growing regions. They came in such numbers the railways ran special lines, and the roadways were thick with their rough-hewn carts.

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