This structure, which had stood for six hundred years, and had been a
noisy and populous thoroughfare all that time, was a curious affair, for
a closely packed rank of stores and shops, with family quarters
overhead, stretched along both sides of it, from one bank of the river
to the other. The Bridge was a sort of a town to itself; it had its inn,
its beer houses, its bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food markets, its
manufacturing industries and even its church. It looked upon the two
neighbors which it linked together—London and Southwark—as being well
enough, as suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important. It was a
close corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street
a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village population, and
everybody in it knew all his fellow townsmen intimately, and had known
their fathers and mothers before them—and all their little family
affairs into the bargain. It had its aristocracy, of course—its fine old
families of butchers, and bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the
same old premises for five or six hundred years, and knew the great
history of the Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange
legends; and who always talked bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts,
and lied in a long, level, direct, substantial bridgy way.