Elizabeth Montizambert

“ Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with the façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a magician’s carpet. ”

“ I am not afraid that if they once go to the Chapter House they will miss any of its beauties: my dread is lest they fail to go there, from the vision of a plethora of things they think they have no time to see. For I want more than anything else to prick the curiosity of the travellers up and down the streets of the city who miss so much pleasure that they might have so easily, because they are not alive to all the interesting and unexpected things that wait for their coming just round the corner. ”

“ It is meant for the people who do not realise one-eighth of the stories packed into the streets of London, the city which, as Sir Walter Besant, that great London lover, once said, has an unbroken history of one thousand years and has never been sacked by an enemy. For, in talking about the extraordinary beauty of London, I became aware of a vast public who have eyes and see not, who thoroughly dislike the idea of sight-seeing yet acknowledge their pleasure in a chance discovery made en route to tea at the Ritz,—people who are appalled at the very idea of entering a museum. ”

“ I do not know if Sir James Barrie is responsible for the feeling that you would not be surprised at anything that might happen in Kensington Gardens. Who would be bold enough to assert that when the last child has left the Peter Pan statue the squirrels do not come and play with their stone brothers? Kensington Gardens are the paradise of the child and the flower lover. There are ugly things in it, of course, like the Albert Memorial, though everyone does not think it ugly: I was once startled at hearing that souvenir of Victorian taste fervently admired by some fellow bus passengers. ”

“ There is one museum in London that I do not want to call a museum because in some ways it is so unlike one. Very few people ever go there. It is like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. If you shut your eyes at the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and try not to notice the tentacular Lyons that unblushingly intrudes its smug modern shopfront into this old-world square, but stroll through the gardens to the north side, you will see the Soane Museum at No. ”

“ When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,” go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carved oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. ”

“ My friendship with the garden is based on no intimate acquaintance, for not to every one is it given to pass the iron gates that guard its fragrant stillness. If you would do more than gaze through the iron bars at this enchanted space that dreams away the year round undisturbed, you must write to the Clerk of the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, 3 Temple Gardens, E.C.4, and ask for a ticket of admission to the most ancient Botanical Garden in England. ”

“ But a little further on you will discover, if you look for them, a bit of Roman London, a Renaissance chapel, a statue with a history, a lovely group of eighteenth-century houses, the water gate of a former fine mansion on the riverside, and a church that links us to the time of the Danish invasion.
The Londoner would probably tell you that Piccadilly Circus is the centre of his city; the historian, St. Paul’s; but to the foreigner, the visitor from overseas, or to the Anglo-Indian back from the East, the centre will always be Charing Cross. ”

“ Even more than of the British Museum I feel that it would be an impertinence to speak of Westminster Abbey as a London corner unnoticed by Londoners,—and yet I have known people who have left London and gone back across the seas with never a thought for the cloisters nor a “memorie” of Jane Lister, “dear childe,” who lies buried there, people who may have perfunctorily “done” the Abbey with a guide but have never lingered there at the uncrowded hours till the exquisite beauty{162} of its many corners has become a possession they can carry away with them. ”

“ I know few odder sensations than to walk in the City on a Sunday morning and hear all the sweet bells of the fifty-odd churches calling to prayer in the{88} silence of the solitary streets. Practical people would pull the half of them down and devote the money from the sale of their sites to other much-needed religious purposes. But, even if these little churches no longer serve their original object, they are still shrines of the past, each one with some special memory, some special charm, and typical all together of a great phase of English architecture. ”

“ TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET
“For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has
written yet.”
Richard Jefferies.
One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the Petty Customs in the Port of London. ”

“ It is so far removed from Mayfair that its glories have been neglected, but now that fashion has drifted north of Hyde Park and even Bloomsbury is having its recrudescence, Regent’s Park may wake up any day and find itself famous. ”

“ At ten of the clock the iron gate leading into Hatton Garden is duly fastened, and the “Mitre” is closed to the outside world.
I have kept the best and most amazing of the treasures of Ely Place until the last.
Walk down the left-hand side of the square to the far corner, and you will find your way into one of the most beautiful things in London,—a thirteenth century chapel practically intact. It is so beautiful that if it were necessary to pay a high entrance fee or write for cards of admission, it would probably be the Mecca of every artist and antiquarian. ”

“ Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone to wish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday afternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweating chamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaborate system of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in the Strand.
The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, was only built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two more unexpected links with the past. ”

“ People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spent if they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by, unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods, just because they may see them every day.
Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand,{43} is only a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historic memories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot could tell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its grey stone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there! ”

“ All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of the seventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerful lady,—one of the four abbesses who was a baroness ex officio, and she held the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share of men-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eight miles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of the nunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived the Great Fire and is still intact. ”

“ I love Chelsea Old Church better than any other London church. It has nothing of the heavy solidity that smacks of broadcloth and thick gold watch-chains. The congregation on a summer Sunday evening might be met with in any village in England. The very altar has no pomp of embroidered frontal and massive{16} ornaments; it looks almost like a Jacobean dining-room with its simple oaken table and dignified chairs on either side. ”

“ Foreigners coming to London for the first time always exclaim at their beauty, but the Londoners take them as a matter of course, and hardly anyone stops to inquire their history or even the reason for their names. Yet much of the city’s history is bound up with that of the parks, and their story is a mirror of the changing fashions of London. ”

“ Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have kept till the last. ”

“ There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since the thirteenth century{127}—the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll in their shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London where you can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery and recapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thought incompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things. ”

“ If you have no passion for discovering bits of ancient walls, there are other more beautiful things near the bottom of Seething Lane. One of them is very new, so new that when I saw it all the scaffolding had not been removed from the buildings at its base—I mean the great tower of the Port of London Authority. I hear that Sir Joseph E. Broodbank has just written a fascinating History of the Port of London, that will waken everyone who has three guineas to spare to the interest of London’s immense docks and the organisation that has power over seventy miles of the Thames. ”

“ I suppose in no country in the world is the study and practice of the law surrounded with such debonair amenities as in London. Who would not be a lawyer, since that profession is the Open Sesame to shady gardens, lodgings in history-haunted rooms, and a prideful possession in such rare buildings as the Church of the Knights Templars? ”

“ Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that few of London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in the Gray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, and it is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on the Central London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens more freely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped his Essays in your pocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the very garden that he made. ”

“ One hears of it vaguely as an orphan asylum where the children wear quaint costumes that may be seen at the service in the chapel on Sunday mornings, when the singing attracts many visitors.
But there are more reasons than that to take you to this corner off the beaten track of the West End. For one thing, it may not be there very long. Already there are rumours that the Foundling Hospital may be moved to the country and one more link with eighteenth-century London be snapped.
Institutions as a rule are about as dull to see as to live in, but the Foundling Hospital is an exception. ”

“ Even the unsightly cases cannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of the shaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows, filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to be modern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory of that great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley. ”

“ At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the Law Courts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you see an eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobean room, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignified atmosphere. ”

“ It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-century perpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see the Norman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of the litany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory of William Thynne and his wife.
This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in Westminster Abbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefe clerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first edition of the entire works of Chaucer. ”

“ If they were known to be very exclusive and costly, the thousands of excellent people with modest incomes and no occupation who live in Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court boarding-houses, would sigh for the privilege of sharing these hour-long strolls through the museum, when the lecturer gives no disconnected account of individual objects but deftly traces the development of the art of different countries and ages, illustrating his teaching by the treasures under his care. ”

“ The vogue of Ranelagh lasted many years and only ended when the rotunda was pulled down at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Every now and then one meets pessimistic creatures, usually artists, who shake their heads and say that Chelsea is going to the dogs—by which they mean that all the old studios are being taken by speculators with the intention of converting them into flats.
But the Chelsea of to-day is as charming as it ever was. There are just as many famous inhabitants. ”