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HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
IN
LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
[Illustration: _Crossing at Piccadilly Circus._]
_HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
IN
LONDON_
BY MRS. E. T. COOK
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HUGH THOMSON AND
F. L. GRIGGS
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1920
_COPYRIGHT._
_First Edition_, 1902.
_Reprinted_, 1903, 1907, 1911, 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 1
CHAPTER II
THE RIVER 22
CHAPTER III
RAMBLES IN THE CITY 53
CHAPTER IV
ST. PAUL'S AND ITS PRECINCTS 84
CHAPTER V
THE TOWER 100
CHAPTER VI
SOUTHWARK, OLD AND NEW 121
CHAPTER VII
THE INNS OF COURT 137
CHAPTER VIII
THE EAST AND THE WEST 162
CHAPTER IX
WESTMINSTER 187
CHAPTER X
KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA 210
CHAPTER XI
BLOOMSBURY 238
CHAPTER XII
THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON 273
CHAPTER XIII
LONDON SHOPS AND MARKETS 298
CHAPTER XIV
THE GALLERIES, MUSEUMS, AND COLLECTIONS 324
CHAPTER XV
HISTORIC HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS 358
CHAPTER XVI
RUS IN URBE 385
CHAPTER XVII
THE WAYS OF LONDONERS 414
CHAPTER XVIII
THE STONES OF LONDON 447
INDEX 473
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CROSSING AT PICCADILLY CIRCUS _Frontispiece_
SANDWICH-BOARD MEN 6
THE SHOEBLACK 11
WHEN THE STRAND IS UP 16
WATERLOO BRIDGE 22
SIGHTSEERS 34
THE "TOP" SEASON 40
AN UNDERGROUND STATION 53
CLOTHFAIR 57
ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S, SMITHFIELD 66
FIGHTING COCKS 85
ST. PAUL'S FROM THE RIVER 87
ST. MICHAEL'S, PATERNOSTER ROYAL 96
A BEEFEATER 102
CRICKET IN THE STREET. THE LOST BALL 127
A COUNTY COURT 130
PEPYS AND HIS WIFE 140
LINCOLN'S INN 152
FETTER LANE 157
A RAILWAY BOOKSTALL 163
THE CITY TRAIN 165
BANK HOLIDAY 171
IN REGENT STREET 180
PICCADILLY 182
SPESHUL! 187
VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER 206
ANGLERS IN THE PARKS 211
KENSINGTON PALACE AND THE ROUND POND 214
EARL'S COURT 221
THE GERMAN BAND 239
THE PAVEMENT ARTIST 249
MUDIE'S 267
THE "GODS" 281
ICE-CREAM BARROW 291
THE ORGAN-GRINDER 293
A SALE AT CHRISTIE'S 298
THE DOG FANCIER!!! 304
IN THE CHARING CROSS ROAD 306
SATURDAY NIGHT SHOPPING 313
AN AERATED BREAD SHOP 321
A SKETCH IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE 325
AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY 339
RECRUITING SERJEANTS BY THE NATIONAL GALLERY 345
AT THE CLUB 359
WYCH STREET 365
CRICKET IN THE PARKS 385
ROTTEN ROW 389
ROTTEN ROW 391
THE SERPENTINE, HYDE PARK 393
TEA IN KENSINGTON GARDENS 396
A FOUNTAIN IN ST. JAMES'S PARK 398
THE REFORMER 403
A JURY 414
'BUS DRIVER 415
INSIDE 419
"BENK, BENK!!" 421
THE HANSOM 424
A DOORSTEP PARTY 428
HOP-SCOTCH 433
THE RETURN, BANK HOLIDAY 435
FLOWER GIRLS 438
THE MEN IN BLUE 447
THE HORSE GUARDS 456
"I confess that I never think of London, which I love, without
thinking of that palace which David built for Bathsheba, sitting in
hearing of one hundred streams,--streams of thought, of intelligence,
of activity. One other thing about London impresses me beyond any
other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing roar one
hears always in the air; it is not a mere accident, like a tempest or
a cataract, but it is impressive, because it always indicates human
will, and impulse, and conscious movement; and I confess that when I
hear it I almost feel as if I were listening to the roaring loom of
time."--_Lowell._
HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
IN
LONDON
CHAPTER I
HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
"London: that great sea whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more,
Yet in its depths what treasures!"--_Shelley._
"Citizens of no mean city."
The history of London is--as was that of Rome in ancient times--the
history of the whole civilised world. For, the comparatively small
area of earth on which our city is built has, for the last thousand
years at least, been all-important in the story of nations. Its
chronicles are already so vast that no ordinary library could hope to
contain all of them. And what will the history of London be to the
student, say, of the year 3000 A.D., when our present day politics,
our feelings, our views, have been "rolled round," once more, in
"earth's diurnal force," and assume, at last, their fair and true
proportions?
In "this northern island, sundered once from all the human race," has
for centuries been lit one of the torches that have illumined
humanity. Not even Imperial Rome shone with such a lustre; not even
the Caesars in all their purple ruled over such a mighty, such an
all-embracing empire.
The history of this mighty empire is bound up with the history of
London. For, the history of London is that of England; it was the
river, our "Father Thames"--her first and most important highway, a
"highway of the nations,"--that brought her from the beginning all her
fame and all her glory. Partly by geographical position, partly by
ever-increasing political freedom, and partly, no doubt, by the
efforts of a dominant race, that glory has, through the centuries,
been maintained and aggrandised.
And why, some may ask, is London what it is? Why was this spot
specially chosen as the capital? Surrounded by marshes in early Roman
times, periodically inundated by its tidal river, densely wooded
beyond its marshes, it can hardly have seemed, in the beginning, an
ideal site. Why was not Winchester--so important in Roman times, and,
later, the capital of Wessex--preferred? Why were not Southampton or
Bristol--apparently equally well placed for trade--favoured? We cannot
tell. The site may have been chosen by Roman London because it was the
most convenient point for passing, and guarding, the ferry or bridge
over the Thames, and for keeping up the direct communication between
the more northerly cities of Britain, and Rome. Or, the nearer
proximity to the large Continent, the better conditions for trade
offered by the wide estuary of the Thames, possibly account for
London's supremacy.
The early Roman city on this time-honoured site, the poetically named
"Augusta,"--that replaced the primitive British village--flourished
greatly in the early days of the Christian era, and was large and
populous; though the Romans did not consider it their capital, and
never--we know not why--created it a "municipium," like Eboracum
(York), or Verulamium. It was founded some time after the visit of
Julius Caesar to Britain, B.C. 54, and it occupied a good deal of the
area of the present _City_, extending, however, towards the east as
far as the Tower, and bounded on the west by the present Newgate. The
old Roman fort stood above the Wallbrook. Here in old days ran a
stream of that name, long fouled, diverted, forgotten, and, like the
Fleet River, only now remembered by the name given to its ancient
haunt. The city of Augusta--or _Londinium_ as Tacitus calls it--has
left us hardly a trace of its undoubted splendour. In London, ever
living, relics of the past are hard to find. The lapse of centuries
has deeply covered the old Roman city level, and what Roman remains
exist are generally discovered, either in the muddy bed of the Thames,
or at a depth of some twelve to nineteen feet below the present
street. Of Roman London there is scarce a trace--a few meagre relics
in Museums, a few ancient roots of names still existing, an old bath,
traces of a crumbling wall, the fragment that we call "London Stone,"
the locality of Leadenhall Market (undoubtedly an old "Forum"), and a
portion of the old Roman Way of "Watling Street"--the ancient highway
from London to Dover--running parallel with noisy Cannon Street.
All this seems, perhaps, little when we think of the undoubted wealth
and power of the old "Londinium," or "Augusta." But it has always been
the city's fate to have its Past overgrown and stifled by the
enthralling energy and life of its Present. It is as a hive that has
never been emptied of its successive swarms. This is, more or less,
the fate of all towns that "live." The Roman town was, of course,
strongly walled, and the names of its gates have descended to us in
the present "Ludgate," "Moorgate," "Billingsgate," "Aldgate,"
&c.--names very familiar to us children of a later age--and now mainly
associated with the more prosaic stations on the Underground Railway!
Nevertheless, prosaic as they are, these stations commemorate the old
localities. Roman London was at no time large in circumference,
extending only from the Tower to Aldgate on one side, from the Thames
to London Wall on the other. And when the Romans left, and the Saxons,
after a brief interval, took their place, the city still did not grow
much larger, nor did the blue-eyed and fair-haired invaders contribute
much to the decaying fortifications; though it is said that King
Alfred--he whose "millenary" we have recently commemorated--restored
the walls and the city as a defence against the ravages of the Danes.
Saxon London, however, which in its time flourished exceedingly, and
existed for some 400 years, is, so far as we are concerned, more dead
even than Roman London. Successive fire and ravage have obliterated
all traces of it. Norman London, which after the Conquest replaced
Saxon London, did not, apparently, differ greatly in externals from
its predecessor. The churches were now mainly built of stone, but the
picturesque houses were, as we know, despite successive destroying
fires, still constructed of wood. From Norman London, we retain the
"White Tower,"--that picturesque "keep" of London's ancient
fortress--the crypt of Bow Church, and that of St. John's,
Clerkenwell, with part of the churches of St. Bartholomew the Great,
Smithfield, and St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate. Little escaped the many
great fires that in early times devastated the city.
As for the ancient highways of London, very possibly these did not
differ greatly in their course from our modern ones; for the
Anglo-Saxon race has always been very conservative in rebuilding its
new streets, regardless of symmetry or directness, on the lines of the
destroyed ones. At any rate, we know that the original church of St.
Paul's--the first of three built on this site, founded by Ethelbert
about the year 610--and that of Westminster--altered, rebuilt, and
enlarged by successive kings--must have early sanctified these spots,
and necessitated thoroughfares between the two. Nay, even in Roman
times, temples of Diana and Apollo are believed to have adorned these
historic sites. It is strange, indeed, that the old, long-vanished
Roman wall, pierced only by a few gates, and the ancient street-plans
laid down by the Roman road surveyor, should still keep modern traffic
more or less to the old lines. A few new streets have recently been
made from north to south, but still the main traffic goes from east to
west, owing to the paucity of intersecting thoroughfares. The city of
London, as laid out in Roman times, remained, through Saxon and Norman
dominion, practically of the same extent and plan as late as the time
of Elizabeth, in whose reign there were as many houses within the city
walls as without them. Roman influence is still dominant in modern
London. The large block of ground without carriage-way about Austin
Friars is a consequence of the old Roman wall having afforded no
passage. And possibly many of the narrow, jostling City streets have
in their day reflected the shade and sun of Roman "insulas," each with
its surrounding shops, just as, later, their dimensions may have
shrunk between the overhanging, high-gabled houses of Tudor times, to
widen again under the tall Stuart palaces of the Restoration.
[Illustration: _Sandwich-board Men._]
The high antiquity and conservatism of London are shown in nothing
more than in these narrow, crooked streets--streets so different from
those of any other big metropolis--streets that our American cousins,
in all the superiority of their regular "block" system, permit
themselves to jeer at! We know, however, little for certain of the
actual topography of London streets, until the important publication
of Ralph Aggas's map in 1563, soon after Elizabeth had begun to reign.
This map of "Civitas Londinium" is strange enough to look at in our
own day. Its main arteries are the same as ours: the ancient highway
of the Strand is still the Strand; those of "Chepe" and "Fleete" still
flourish; Oxford Street, then the "Oxford Road" and "The Waye to
Uxbridge," ran between hedgerows and pastures, in which, according to
Aggas, grotesque beasts sported; the thoroughfare of the "Hay
Market,"--not yet, indeed, "a scene of revelry by night,"--curves
between vast meadows, in one of which a woman of gigantic size appears
to be engaged in spreading clothes to dry; Piccadilly, at what is now
the "Circus," is merely called "The Waye to Redinge," and is
innocently bordered by trees. In these infantine beginnings of the now
populous "West End," there are, indeed, occasional plots occupied by
"Mewes," but St. Martin's Church (then a small chapel) stands
literally "in the Fields," and St. Martin's Lane is altogether rural.
In a later map--one of the year 1610--the main arteries are still the
same; but, though the town had grown rapidly with the growth of
commerce in Elizabeth's reign, "London" and "Westminster" are still
represented as two small neighbouring towns surrounded by rural
meadows; while "Totten-court" is a distant country village, Kensington
and "Marybone" are secluded hamlets, Clerkenwell and "St. Gylles" are
altogether divided from the parent city by fields, and "Chelsey" is in
the wilds.
It is strange that London fires--and London, in the middle ages, was
specially prolific in fires--have never altered the course of the
city's highways. Sir Christopher Wren wished, indeed, after the Great
Fire of 1666, to be allowed to alter the plan of the desolated town
and make it more symmetrically regular: with all due admiration of his
genius, one cannot, however, help feeling a certain thankfulness that
destiny averted his schemes, and that in the prosaic London of our own
day we can still trace the splendour, the romance of its past. Thus,
even in the grimy city "courts" we can still imagine a Roman
"impluvium," or the ancient gardens of Plantagenet palaces; in the
blind alleys of "Little Britain," the splendours of the merchants'
mansions; in the ugly lines of mews and slums, the limits of the
vanished Norman convent closes. The boundaries are still there, though
nearly all else has gone. For, though Londoners are generally
conservative with regard to their chief sites and the lines of their
streets, they have, so far as their great buildings are concerned,
always been by nature iconoclastic. Not that we of the present day
need give ourselves any airs in this matter. Although, indeed, for the
last half-century the spirit of antiquarian veneration has been
abroad, yet the great majority of Londoners are hardly affected by it,
and the pulling down of ancient buildings continues almost as gaily as
ever at the present day. It may be said that we pull down for
utilitarian reasons; well, so did our forefathers; Londoners have
always been practical. Religious zeal may occasionally have served to
whet their destructive powers, but the results are pretty much the
same. Perhaps Henry VIII.--that Bluebeard head of the Church and
State--has, in his general dissolution of the monasteries and
alienation of their property, been the greatest iconoclast in English
annals; yet even he must have been nearly equalled by the Lord
Protector Cromwell, whose Puritanical train wrought so much havoc
among London's monuments of a later age. Reforms and improvements, all
through the world's history, have always been cruelly destructive.
For, while churches and palaces were destroyed as relics of Popery,
while works of art were demolished, and frescoes whitewashed in
reforming zeal, fresh life was always sprouting, fresh energy ever
filling up gaps, ever obliterating the traces of the past, the relics
of the older time. Sir Walter Besant, in his picturesque and vivid
sketch of English history, has realised well for us the city's past
life:--
"It is (he says of the Reformation) at first hard to
understand how there should have been, even among the baser
sort, so little reverence for the past, so little regard for
art; that these treasure-houses of precious marbles and rare
carvings should have been rifled and destroyed without
raising so much as a murmur; nay, that the very buildings
themselves should have been pulled down without a
protest.... It seems to us impossible that the tombs of so
many worthies should have been destroyed without the
indignation of all who knew the story of the past.... Yet
... it is unfortunately too true that there is not, at any
time or with any people, reverence for things venerable,
old, and historical, save with a few. The greater part are
careless of the past, unable to see or feel anything but the
present.... The parish churches were filled with ruins, ...
the past was gone.... The people lived among the ruins but
regarded them not, any more than the vigorous growth within
the court of a roofless Norman castle regards the donjon and
the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the
ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away
the stones and sold them for new buildings."
Yet, though in London's history there were, as we have seen,
occasional great upheavals, such as the Reformation, the Fires, the
Protectorate, it was more the rule of change that went on unceasingly
between whiles--change, such as we see it to-day, the incessant beat
of the waves on the shore--that has obliterated the former time. "The
old order changeth, giving place to new"; and strange indeed it is,
when one comes to think of it, that anything at all should be left to
show what has been. The monasteries, the priories, the churches, that
once occupied the greater portion of the city, and filled it with the
clanging of their bells, so that the city was never quiet--these, of
course, had mainly to go. The Church had to make way for Commerce; the
Monasteries for the Merchants. The London of the early Tudors was
still more or less that of Chaucer, and contained the same Friars,
Pardoners, and Priests. The paramount importance of the Church is
shown by the old nursery legends that circle round Bow bells; and the
picturesque figure of Whittington, the future Lord Mayor, listening,
in rags and dust, to the cheering church bells that tell him to "turn
again," is really the connecting link between the Old and the New Age.
A few of the great monastic foundations of London escaped Henry
VIII.'s acquisitive zeal, and have, as modern school-boys have reason
to know, been devoted to educational and other charitable aims. It
was, indeed, eminently suitable that in the classic precincts of the
ruined monastery of the "Grey Friars" should arise a great school--the
School of Christ's Hospital (colloquially termed the "Blue-Coat
School")--where, till but the other day, the "young barbarians" might
be seen at play behind their iron barriers, backed by the fine old
whitely-gleaming, buttressed hall that faces Newgate Street. It was
fitting, too, that the early dwelling of the English Carthusian
monks--the place where Prior Houghton, with all the staunchness of his
race, met death rather than cede to the tyrant one jot of his ancient
right--should become not only a great educational foundation, but also
a shelter for the aged and the poor. We know it as the "Charterhouse";
as a picturesque, rambling building of sobered red-brick, built around
many courtyards, its principal entrance under an archway that faces
the quiet Charterhouse Square. The place has a monastic atmosphere
still; to those, at least, who reverently tread its closes and
byways--byways hallowed yet more by inevitable association with the
sacred shade of Thomas Newcome; shadow of a shade, indeed! fiction
stronger, and more enduring, than reality!
Yet the Charterhouse is, so to speak, an "insula" by itself in London,
a world of its own; possessing an ancient sanctity undisturbed by the
neighbouring din of busy Smithfield, the unending bustle of the great
city. More essentially of London is the curious unexpectedness of
buildings, places, and associations. What is so strange to the
inexperienced wanderer among London byways is the manner in which bits
of ancient garden, fragments of old, forgotten churchyards, isolated
towers of destroyed churches, deserted closes, courts and slums of
wild dirt and no less wild picturesqueness, suddenly confront the
pedestrian, recalling incongruous ideas, and historical associations
puzzling in their very wealth of entangled detail. The "layers" left
by succeeding eras are thinly divided; and the study of London's
history is as difficult to the neophyte as that of the successive
"layers" of the Roman Forum.
[Illustration: _The Shoeblack._]
It is sometimes refreshing to note that, even in the City and in our
own utilitarian day, present beauty has not been altogether lost
sight of. There is in modern London, as a French writer lately
remarked, "no street without a church and a tree"; this is
especially true of the City, where, even in crowded Cheapside, the
big plane-tree of Wood Street still towers over its surrounding
houses, hardly more than a stone's throw from the shadow cast by the
white steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, glimmering in ghostly grace above
the busy street. So busy indeed is the street, that hardly a
pedestrian stays to notice either church or tree; yet is there a
more beautiful highway than this in all London? It is satisfactory
to reflect--when one thinks of the accusation brought against us
that we are "a nation of shopkeepers"--on what this one big
plane-tree costs a year in mere lodging! Wandering northward from
Cheapside down any of the crowded City lanes with their romantic
names, through the mazes of drays and waggons--where porters shout
over heavy bales, and pulleys hang from upper "shoots"--you may
find, in a sudden turn, small oases of quiet green churchyard
gardens--for some unexplained reason spared from the prevailing
strenuosity of bricks and mortar--where wayfarers rest on
comfortable seats, provided by metropolitan forethought, from daily
toil. In these secluded haunts are many spots that will amply reward
the sketcher. Specially charming in point of colour are the gardens
of St. Giles, Cripplegate; these, though closed to the general
public, are overlooked and traversed by quiet alleys, affording most
welcome relief from the surrounding din of traffic. Here sunflowers
and variegated creepers show out bravely in autumn against the
blackened mass of the tall adjoining warehouses, whence a
picturesque bastion of the old "London Wall" projects into the
greenery, and the church of St. Giles, with its dignified square
tower, dominates the whole. The author of _The Hand of Ethelberta_
has, in that novel, paid graceful homage to the church and its
surroundings. The little bit of vivid colour in the sunny churchyard
(it is part rectory garden, and is divided by a public path since
1878), affords a standing rebuke to the unbelievers who say gaily
that "nothing will grow" in London. A delightful byway, indeed, is
this parish church of Cripplegate! Its near neighbourhood shows, by
the way, hardly a trace of the disastrous fire it so lately
experienced. From the corner of the picturesque "Aerated Bread
Shop"--of all places--that abuts on to the church, a delightful view
of all this may be had. This ancient lath-and-plaster building will,
no doubt, in time be compelled to give way to some abnormally
hideous new construction, but at the present day it is all that
could be wished; and, though so close to the hum of the great city,
so quiet withal, that the visitor may, for the nonce, almost imagine
himself in some sleepy country village. And thus it is in many
unvisited nooks in the busy City. "The world forgetting, by the
world forgot," is truer of these byways than of many more rural
places. For the eddies of a big river are always quieter than the
main stream of a small canal. In the world, yet not of it, are, too,
these strangely old-fashioned rectories, sandwiched in between
tall, overhanging city warehouses.
But the sprinkling of old churches, with their odd, abbreviated
churchyards, that are still to be found amid the busy life of the City
of London, hardly does more than faintly recall that picturesque and
poetic time when the church and the convent were pre-eminent. The
great temporal power of the Church in London, that held sway during
long centuries, is vanished, forgotten, supplanted as if it had never
been. Do the very names of Blackfriars and Whitefriars suggest, for
instance, to us, "the latest seed of time," anything more than the
shrieking of railway terminuses, or the incessant din of printing
machines? For, while the memory of the "Grey Friars" and that of the
Carthusians is still honoured and kept green in the dignified
"foundations" of Christ's Hospital and of the Charterhouse,--the
orders of the "White" and "Black" Friars, of the Carmelites, and the
stern Dominicans, have descended to baser and more worldly uses.
Destroyed at the Reformation, its riches alienated, its glory
departed, the splendid Abbey Church of the Dominicans came to be used
as a storehouse for the "properties" of pageants; "strange fate," says
Sir Walter Besant, "for the house of the Dominicans, those austere
'upholders of doctrine.'" For the dwelling of the "Carmelites," or
"White Friars," an Order of "Mendicants" these,--another destiny
waited--a destiny for long lying unfolded in the bosom of our
"wondrous mother-age." Mysterious irony of Fate! that where the
Carmelite monks, in their Norman apse, prayed and laboured; where the
Mendicant Friars wandered to and fro in the echoing cloister, the
thunder of the printing-press should have made its home:
"There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There, where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness----"
--The "_Daily Mail_ Young Man"--that smart product of a later
age--has now his home in Carmelite Street; the "Whitefriars' Club" is
a press club; the gigantic machines that print the world's news shake
the foundations of St. Bride's; and the shabby hangers-on of Fleet
Street--though of a truth, poor fellows, often near allied to
mendicants--are yet, it is to be feared, only involuntarily of an
ascetic turn. The contrast--or likeness--has served to awaken one of
Carlyle's most thunderous passages: "A Preaching Friar,"--(he
says),--"builds a pulpit, which he calls a newspaper:
"Look well" (he continues),--"thou seest everywhere a new
Clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some bare-footed, some
almost bare-backed, fashion itself into shape, and teach and
preach, zealously enough, for copper alms and the love of
God."
Carlyle, apparently, nursed an old grudge against the press,--for this
is not the only occasion when he fulminates against the new order of
Mendicants. The theatres, also, that succeeded the monasteries of
Blackfriars were, here too, supplanted by the Press; under
Printing-House-Square only lately, an extension of the _Times_ Office
brought to light substantial remains.
But the Church was not the only mediaeval beautifier of London; as her
temporal power and splendour waned,--the splendour of the merchants
grew and flourished. For the great supplanter of the power of the
Church was, as already hinted, the power of the City Companies. These
immense trades-unions began to rise in the fourteenth century, when
the old feudal system gave way to the civic community;--and they
increased greatly in strength after the dissolution of the
Monasteries. These companies incorporated each trade, and had supreme
powers over wages, hours of labour, output, &c. In the beginning they
were, like everything else, partly religious, each company or "guild"
having its patron saint and its special place of worship;--the
Merchant Taylors, for instance, being called the "Guild of St.
John";--the Grocers, the "Guild of St. Anthony"; while St. Martin
protected the saddlers, and so on. These guilds in time receiving
Royal charters, became very rich and powerful, till the year 1363
there were already thirty-two companies whose laws and regulations had
been approved by the king. If any transgressed these laws, they were
brought before the Mayor and Aldermen. We have still the Mayor and
Aldermen, but the city companies (whose principal function was the
apprenticing of youths to trades), have merely the shadow of their
former authority, and their business is now mainly charitable,
ceremonial, and culinary. Yet though their powers are diminished,
their splendid "halls" are still among the most interesting "sights"
of the City. Visits to these massive and solid palaces, some of them
of great splendour, and rising like pearls among their often (it must
be confessed) unsavoury surroundings, give a good idea of the immense
wealth of those mediaeval merchant princes, and help the stranger to
realize the strength of that power that was able to resist the
attempts of kings to break its charter. Such sturdy independence, such
insistence on her civic rights, has always been a main element of
London's greatness.
[Illustration: _When the Strand is up._]
I have only touched at the mere abstract of London's voluminous
history,--only enumerated a poor few of her Highways and Byways; the
subject, in truth, is too great to exhaust even in a whole library
of books. It is, indeed, the principal drawback to the study of
London that she is too vast--that the student is ever in danger of
"not seeing the forest for the trees." Her byways are as the sands
of the sea in multitude; her history is the history of the world. It
is, perhaps, better that the stranger to the metropolis should take
in hand a small portion at a time,--and try to grasp that
thoroughly,--than lose himself in an intricate maze of buildings and
associations. To read the history of London aright,--to see and feel
in London stones all that can be seen and felt, requires not only
untiring energy, but also knowledge, sympathy, intuition,
patriotism, one and all combined. To know London really well, one
should gain an intimate acquaintance with her from day to day, not
being contented with the common and well-known ways, but ever
penetrating into fresh haunts. From all the great highways of
London, from the Strand, Fleet Street, Piccadilly, Holborn, Oxford
Street, convenient excursions may be made into the surrounding
neighbourhood; which often, in different parts of London, is, so far
as inhabitants, appearance, manners and customs go, really a
complete and distinct city by itself. Does not "Little Britain"
differ widely from its neighbouring Clerkenwell? Soho as widely from
its adjacent Bloomsbury? and the immaculate Mayfair from the more
doubtful Bayswater? Who does not recall what Disraeli--that born
aristocrat in his tastes--said of the people who frequent the
plebeian, though charming, Regent's Park?
"The Duke of St. James's," (he says),--"took his way to the
Regent's Park, a wild sequestered spot, whither he
invariably repaired when he did not wish to be noticed; for
the inhabitants of this pretty suburb are a distinct race,
and although their eyes are not unobserving, from their
inability to speak the language of London they are unable to
communicate their observations."
So far from being merely one town, London is really a hundred townlets
amalgamated. The visitor can there find everything that he wants; he
must, however, know exactly what it is that he wants to find. Does he
desire to see pictures? many galleries of priceless works of art are
within a stone's throw, free, ready, waiting only to be seen; does he
prefer realism and life? the "street markets" of Leather Lane and of
Goodge Street are instinct with all possible types of humanity; does
he yearn for peaceful solitude, historic association? the quiet nooks
of the Temple invite him; is it solitary study that his soul craves?
the immense library of the British Museum offers him all its
treasures; does he merely wish to perambulate vaguely? even the
prosaic Oxford Street presents a very kaleidoscope of human life.
Nevertheless, in his perambulations, the wanderer should receive a
word of warning: let him beware of asking for local information (save
indeed, it be of a policeman), for two reasons. Firstly, because no
born Londoner of the great middle class ever knows, except by the
merest accident, anything whatever about his near neighbourhood; and,
secondly, because if he do get an answer, he is morally certain to be
misdirected. The wanderer should always start on his expeditions with
a distinct plan in his own mind of the special itinerary he wishes to
adopt,--be that itinerary Mr. Hare's, or any other man's,--and he
should never allow himself to be drawn off from it to another tangent.
Even this crowded highway of Oxford Street, "stony-hearted
stepmother," old gallows-road, passing from Newgate Street to Tyburn
Tree, and bearing so many different names in its course,--beginning,
as "Holborn," in City stress and turmoil, intersecting the very centre
of fashion at the Marble Arch, and continuing as the "Uxbridge Road,"
to High Street, Notting Hill,--passes through all sorts and conditions
of men and things. Tottenham Court Road, that glaring, fatiguing
thoroughfare, which through all its phases ever "remains sordid,
sunlight serving to reveal no fresh beauties in it, nor gaslight to
glorify it," begins in comparative honour in New Oxford Street, to
descend through bustle and racket to the noisy taverns and purlieus of
the Euston Road. That sylvan village and manor of "Toten Court," where
city folk repaired in old days for "cakes and creame," seems far
enough away now! Fenchurch Street,--or rather its continuation Aldgate
Street,--as it merges into the long "Whitechapel Road," becomes more
and more dreary; not even its soft-gliding, cushioned tram-cars
lending enchantment to the depressing scene. Waterloo Road and
Blackfriars Road, "over the water," as they trend southwards pass
through strange and often unsavoury purlieus. Every district has its
special idiosyncrasies. Piccadilly and St. James's are always
aristocratic. Pall Mall has a severe and solid dignity; while the
Strand and its continuation, the narrow and tortuous Fleet Street, are
instinct with ancient honour and literary association. Yet, even here,
if the visitor have not the "seeing eye" that discerns the past
through the present, he may "walk from Dan to Beersheba and find all
barren."
The great charm, however, of London lies in its unsuspected courts
and byways. From most of these big thoroughfares you may be
transported, with hardly more than a step, into picturesque nooks
of sudden and almost startling silence, or, rather, cessation from
din. All who know and love London will recall this. From busy
Holborn to the aloofness of quiet Staple Inn, with its still,
collegiate air, what a change from the turmoil of Fleet Street to
the closes of little Clifford Inn, with its old-world, forgotten
air. From High Street, Kensington, too, that town with all the air
of a smart suburb, how many charming excursions may not be made on
Campden Hill and in Holland Park--a neighbourhood full of artistic
and literary charm. In Westminster, what quiet, secluded nooks, and
green closes, abound for the sketcher, and how lovely are the
gardens of the Green Park and St. James's Park, bordered by the
stately palaces of St. James's, and the picturesque houses of Queen
Anne's Gate. And all along the river embankment, from Westminster to
the Tower, are interesting streets and nooks full of historic and
literary association. The embankment, running, at first, parallel
with the noisy Strand; reaching classic ground in the quiet Temple,
by that garden where the "red and white rose" first started their
bloody rivalry, becomes then muddy and uncared for before the
newspaper land of Whitefriars; beyond, again, are blackened wharves,
which gradually degenerate into the terrible and utterly
indescribable fishiness of Billingsgate, and unpoetic Thames Street!
Then, the "Surrey side" of the river,--Southwark and Chaucer's Inns,
or what yet remains of them,--would form several delightful
excursions; to say nothing of the Tower, with its innumerable
historic associations,--and, perhaps, a visit to Greenwich in summer
time. The old churches of the City would, as I have hinted, take
many days to explore thoroughly; the Holborn and Strand Inns of
Court and of Chancery, especially the Temple and Staple Inn, should
be known and studied well; nothing can exceed the charm of these
quiet and secluded "haunts of ancient peace."
Space, however, is limited; I have now said enough to give some idea,
even to the uninitiated, of London's many highways and byways, with
their suggestions and associations. Yet one word of caution I would
add: London must be approached with reverence; her cult is a growth of
years, rather than a sudden acquisition. And the love of London
stones, once acquired, never leaves the devotee. Whether he walk
blissfully through Fleet Street with Johnson and Goldsmith, linger by
the Temple fountain with Charles Lamb or Dickens, or traverse the
glades of Kensington Gardens with Addison and Steele, "where'er he
tread is haunted, holy ground." Here, on Tower Hill, once stood spikes
supporting ghastly heads of so-called "traitors"; there, at
Smithfield, were burned numberless martyrs. Even the London mud has
its poetic associations. We may all tread the same road as that once
trodden by Rossetti and Keats; strange road:
"Miring his outward steps who inly trode
The bright Castalian brink and Latmos' steep."
Yes, the love of London grows on the constant Londoner. He will not be
long happy away from the comforting hum of the busy streets, from the
mighty pulse of the machine. In absence his heart will ever fondly
turn to "streaming London's central roar," to the spot where, more
than anywhere else, he may be at once the inheritor of all the ages.
How interesting would it be if one could only--by the aid of some Mr.
Wells's "Time Machine"--take a series of flying leaps backward into
the abysm of time! Strange to imagine the experience! Beauty, one
reflects, might be gained at nearly every step, at the expense, alas!
of sanitary conditions, knowledge, and utility. Let us, for a moment,
imagine how the thing would be.... First, in a few rapid revolutions
of the wheel, would disappear the hideous criss-cross of electric
wires overhead, the ugly tangle of suburban tram-lines, and the
greater part of the hideous modern growth of suburbs.... Another whirl
of the machine, and every sign of a railway station would disappear,
every repulsive engine shed and siding vanish ... while the dull
present-day rumble of the metropolis would give place to a more
indescribably acute and agonising medley of sound.... Again a little
while, and the hideous early Victorian buildings would disappear,
making way for white Stuart facades, or sober red-brick Dutch
palaces.... With yet a few more revolutions, the metropolis will
shrink into inconceivably small dimensions, and the atmosphere of the
city, losing its peculiar blue-grey mist, will gradually brighten and
clear--a radiance, unknown to us children of a later day--diffusing
itself over the glistening towers and domes, no longer blackened, but
gleaming, Venetian-like, in the Tudor sunlight.... The aspect of the
river too has changed; no more ugly steamers, but an array of princely
barges deck its waters, gay with the bright dresses of ladies and
gallants.... Its solid embankments have crumbled to picturesque
overgrown mud banks, its many bridges shrunk to one; the little
separate towns of "London" and "Westminster" presenting now more the
appearance of rambling villages, adorned by some palaces and
churches.... Another turn of the machine, and lo! the imposing facades
that adorned the Strand have in their turn given way to picturesque
rows and streets of overhanging gabled houses with blackened
cross-beams, their quaint projecting windows almost meeting over the
narrow streets ... stony streets with their crowds of noisy, jostling,
foot-passengers.... Again a long pause ... and now the scene changes
to Roman London, the ancient "Augusta," with its powerful walls, its
slave ships and pinnaces, its mailed warriors, ever in arms against
the blue-eyed Saxon marauders. Then--a final interval--and we see the
primitive British village, its mud huts erected by the kindly shores
of our "Father Thames," their smoke peacefully rising heavenwards
above the surrounding marshes and forests.
[Illustration: _Waterloo Bridge._]