Suppose you were walking down that delicious slope of Piccadilly, the
Green Park rails on your left, and suddenly you saw Sir Claude, the
wicked young squire, chucking a shepherdess under the chin while he
slapped his riding boots with a hunting crop. Suppose...
This happens! Turn down Whitehorse Street, and in two seconds bald
heads in club windows, pretty sandy-legged ladies, the flood stream
of omnibuses, are forgotten. They have never existed. They are two
hundred comfortable years off in the womb of Time. You stand in the
eighteenth century, in a London of maypoles and gallantry and much
sly sin, of coaches and cavalcades, inn parlours and buxom serving
wenches. Even your spats feel elegant. You desire to snap an ivory
snuffbox, to wave a fine cambric handkerchief, and to kiss a
good-looking chambermaid. Odds truth, sir, you are under the
influence of Shepherd Market! At any moment my Lord Maxbridge may
turn the corner on the arm of Sir Timothy Strophe, poet and wit, and
you will, of course, stand, leaning on your ebony cane, promising to
look in at the Cocoa Tree to-night and to join my lord later (bow) at
his box at Vauxhall. And did you hear what the Prince said last
night of Lady T., and how young Charles H. took it? And did you know
that Captain X. lost nine hundred guineas at cards on a single throw
at White's, and that the Marquis de St. A. has sent his seconds to
Lord M., and that Sir Richard T. has been black-balled at Brooks'?
Gad, sir!
That, at least, is how it takes me!
Looked at with the eyes only, Shepherd Market reveals itself as a
queer, haphazard warren of streets packed with little shops whose
onions overflow on the pavement, whose cabbages sometimes collapse
into the gutter, whose fish and meat are much in evidence. Here you
have the atmosphere of the Pantiles and the formation of any square
in any old county town you care to remember.
This is picturesque. Behind any grand modern street you seem to see
a surveyor or an architect bending over a blue paper, drawing
straight lines. These shops and squares have grown up naturally, as
a clump of flowers grows--some here, some there; some big, some
small. What splendid individuality.
Here, within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, shopkeepers display big
galvanized dust-bins on the pavement. You might be in Salisbury
marketplace. A china shop sells pretty little teapots of the kind
which spinster ladies drive into Ipswich to procure on market day.
All manner of antique shops sleep in the shadows. In one window I
saw really good china, in others Georgian silver and rushlight
holders.
It is Georgian or Victorian, according to taste. You can people the
uneven pavements with ghosts of your own choosing. No matter how
many gallants and dames you discover, there are a few later
characters whom you expect to meet at every turn. The colonel's
wife! Where is she? You look round anxiously. She should be
walking stiffly round with her cane, a couple of Sealyhams rolling
affectionately at the hem of her tailor-made skirt. The bishop's
lady, too, a tall, lined woman in a religious black hat; the dean's
daughter, romantic and anæmic and addicted to green velvet; Lady
Potts, from "The Hall," in a dog-cart, large, florid, and
suspiciously golden; the three hefty unmarriageable daughters of the
major-general (retired), with their bicycles; the pretty wife of a
junior subaltern--all the stock characters of an English cathedral
city or garrison town.
Instead, so strange is this rural atmosphere, go London folk, smart
women from flats in Curzon Street, and men passing through on their
way to their clubs.
* * *
How did this patch become insulated from the fierce current of London
life? I will tell you. They used to hold a fair here every May as
far back as Edward I. Then, in 1738, a Mr. Shepherd built a cattle
market on the spot. The butchers' shops had theatres on the second
storeys, so that the dwarfs and drolls and vagabonds might in
fair-time amuse the crowds. In 1750 so many regrettable things
happened here that the fair was suppressed as a public scandal. (It
must have been very wicked!)
So this is the heritage of our Shepherd Market, this concentrated
essence of old England set down within sound of the wheels of
Mayfair. If you visit it, notice how the old butchers' shops linger
on, relics of the Shepherd Market of 1738. I imagine that there is
here more prime Welsh mutton to the square yard than in any other
street in London.
Romantic mutton!