Bond Street

“ The glory of Bond-street is no more. The title of Bond-street lounger has faded from our lips. In vain the crowd of equipages and the blaze of shops: the renown of Bond-street was in its pavement—its pedestrians. Art thou old enough, O reader! to remember the Bond-street Lounger and his incomparable generation? For my part, I can just recall the decline of the grand era. It was on its wane when, in the ambition of boyhood, I first began to muse upon high neck-cloths and Wellington boots. ”

“ Lord Beaconsfield, who knew and loved his London thoroughly, once wrote that, “Those who know Bond Street only in the blaze of fashionable hours can form but an imperfect conception of its matutinal charm when it is still shady and fresh, when there are no carriages, rarely a cart, and passers-by gliding about on real business.” ”

“ Anyone walking down it would have to draw heavily on his imagination, if he would try to realise that, as Bramston writes:—“Pease, cabbages, and turnips once grew where now stands New Bond Street ...”, so completely has time metamorphosed this once rural spot into a promenade of bricks and mortar, where the ends of the world seem to have been ransacked to fill its marts with all the riches of Nature and Art conceivable by the mind of man.
The shops of Bond Street have always been famous. ”

“ The troop of scurrilous critics, the class of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds, and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities, are barriers which an educated mind may well overlook, and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best examples of true civilization and refinement the world ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to the Park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May Fair.
May Fair! what a name for the core of dissipated and exclusive London! ”

“ It is difficult to realise that there is anything but shop-windows in Bond Street, but I like to think that, up there in those upper storeys which one never sees, there does dwell a self-contained little community to whom Bond Street is merely the village street, down which the housewives pass gossiping each morning to the greengrocer's or the fishmonger's and never purchase any pearls at all.
When the butcher comes back I think I shall join them.
A. P. H.
Father. ”

“ Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.*
‘That is all,’ she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. ”

“ But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first time and last, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. ”

“ The rattling of the carriages, the brilliance of the shops, and the continual hum of the passengers, contributed to heighten the scene.
“Bond Street,” said Dashall, “is not one of the most elegant streets in the vicinity of London, but is the resort of the most fashionable people, and from about two o'clock till five, it is all bustle—all life—every species of fashionable vehicle is to be seen dashing along in gay and gallant pride. ”

“ LONDON. It is near four o’clock, and in Bond street you might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants—at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood horses “marking time,” the coachman watchful for his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the delay, for she came there on purpose. ”

“ Early as was the hour, his dress was perfect in all its details, and the accurate folds of his immaculate cravat, and the spotless brilliancy of his boots, would have done credit to Bond-street in days when Bond-street cherished such glories. Let our modern critics sneer as they will at the dandyism of that day, the gentleman of the time was a very distinctive individual, and, in the subdued colour of his habiliments, their studious simplicity, and, above all, their unvarying uniformity, utterly defied all the attempts of spurious imitators. ”

“ Bond Street, with all its fripperies, is still in full swing: the drapers everywhere are paying big dividends—money is being squandered in luxuries by those who have never previously known such things; jewellers are flourishing, and extravagance runs riot through the land. Men and women go nightly to revues and join in rollicking choruses, even while the death-rattle sounds in the throats of Britain's bravest sons. ”

“ To begin one’s peregrinations at the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly seems at first sight a little arbitrary, but one soon realises that in starting from “Stewart’s,” and keeping within a half-mile radius of this centre, one is really covering by far the most interesting portion of the West End; while the old shop, which—during more than two centuries—has given its name to this corner of Bond Street, and which, as Mr. Chancellor declares, is to Americans one of the best known spots in Europe, is in itself a most interesting link with the past and present. ”

“ In the Arcadian autumn, no such device is necessary. Everybody loves, and openly and blamelessly loves. My landlord’s young man loves the whole of one side of the way of Old Bond-street, and is beloved several doors up New Bond-street besides. I never look out of window but I see kissing of hands going on all around me. It is the morning custom to glide from shop to shop and exchange tender sentiments; it is the evening custom for couples to stand hand in hand at house doors, or roam, linked in that flowery manner, through the unpeopled streets. There is nothing else to do but love ”

“ Tea companions seldom failed. When she had no evening engagements she was glad to get to bed, soon after the dinner in the downstairs restaurant, and to sleep the sleep of untroubled youth. And all the time the spell of London still held her captive. To walk the crowded streets, to join the feminine crush before the plate-glass windows of great shops, to watch the strange birds in the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, to wander about the Abbey and the Temple Gardens, to enter on the moment’s impulse a Bond Street picture gallery or a cinema—all was a matter of young joy and thrill. ”

“ Of the three streets that dispute the honour of being Alexandria's premier thoroughfare the Rue Rosette undoubtedly bears the palm for gentility. The Bond Street (I refer to Rue Chérif Pacha) is too shoppy to be genteel, and the Boulevard de Ramleh competes from this particular aspect not at all. In its length, its cleanliness, and the refined monotony of its architecture, Rue Rosette outdoes either of its rivals. They are tainted with utility: people use them to get something or somewhere. ”

“ They may have their gowns made in Bond Street without much trouble.’
‘Ah, my love, these are people who go to London once in three years, I dare say. Why, to miss a single season in town is to fall behind one’s age; one’s ideas get mouldy and moss-grown; one’s sleeves look as if they had been made in the time of George the Third. To keep abreast with the march of time one must be at one’s post always. One might as well be the sleeping beauty at once, and lose a hundred years, as skip the London season. ”

“ London, in the first days of spring, has buds that open and flowers that suddenly shake their petals—white, purple, or crimson—in competition with the display in the garden beds, although these city flowers are merely so many doors flung wide in Bond Street and the neighborhood, inviting you to look at a picture, or hear a symphony, or merely crowd and crush yourself among all sorts of vocal, excitable, brightly colored human beings. ”

“ So that Bond Street and Regent Street, the Boulevard des Capucines, the Corso, and Broadway will still be brilliant and crowded for many years for all the diffusion that is here forecast—all the more brilliant and crowded, perhaps, for the lack of a thronging horse traffic down their central ways. But the very fact that the old nucleus is still to be the best place for all who trade in a concourse of people, for novelty shops and art shops, and theatres and business buildings, by keeping up the central ground values will operate against residence there and shift the "masses" outwardly. ”

“ Anyone can go shopping in Bond Street. I knew a clergyman once who went in and asked for a back-stud. He was afterwards unfrocked for riotous living, but the stud was produced. You can buy a cauliflower in Bond Street—if you know the ropes. There is a shop which merely looks like a very beautiful florist's. There are potatoes in the window, it is true, but they are "hot-house" ones; inside there is no trace of a common vegetable. ”

“ Beside the other streets seem chalked out for a sect,—narrow-minded and devoted to a coterie. Thou alone art Catholic—all receiving. Regent-street belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk, whose characters are above scandal. Bond-street belongs to dandies and picture-buyers. St. James's to club-loungers, and young men in the Guards, with mustachios properly blackened by the cire of Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford-street, what class can especially claim thee as its own? Thou mockest at oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders! Thou art liberal as air—a chartered libertine! ”

“ From what Lady Torquilin told me, I gathered that Bond Street was a regular haunt for dearest places; but it would be impossible for any stranger to suppose so from walking through it—it is so narrow and crooked and irregular, and the shops are so comparatively insignificant after the grand sweep of Regent Street and the wide variety of the circuses. For one, I should have thought circuses would be the best possible places for business in London, not only because the address is so easily remembered, but because once you get into them they are so extremely difficult to get out of. ”

“ The beautiful house at Bowling Green was sold, with the new furniture which had lately been ordered to please his Julia, and which the children never saw uncovered; and the family removed to Bond Street, then at the upper end of New York City.
"Mr. Ward," said his friends, "you are going out of town!"
Bond Street in the twentieth century is an unlovely thoroughfare, grimy, frowzy, given over largely to the sale of feathers and artificial flowers; Bond Street in the early part of the nineteenth century was a different affair. ”

“ The interior improves. The principal street is really a noble one, and some of the shops made me most sentimentally recall the glories of Bond-street. But there is one shop, 'the most alluring one by far,' in which London stands unrivalled. The taste, the intellect displayed in her pastry-cook shops, place her country competitors at an immeasurable distance. I have entered on my journal—Leeds pastry-cooks one thousand and one years behind in civilization. Albeit, you see ribbons, gauzes, silks, satins, like moving rainbows in the streets, the people have a very plebeian appearance. ”

“ Nothing could be less enticing. Yet inside, I daresay, fortunes are made daily. I noticed no trace of this method at the Advertisers' Exhibition; they might give it a trial.
Now no doubt you fondly think that Bond Street is wholly devoted to luxuries; perhaps you have abandoned your dream of actually buying something in Bond Street? You are wrong. To begin with, there are about ten places where you can buy food, and, though there is no pub. now, there is a café (with a licence) . There are two grocers and a poulterer. There is even a fish-shop—you didn't know that, did you? ”

“ Fairnish, swung out into the roadway, monocle screwed into left eye, well-cut tweeds setting off the splendid figure of him, and looking for all the world like the leisured, perfectly turned-out exquisite who journeys so far out of his beaten track only in pursuit of a sport which vastly amuses him, and to whom Bond Street and the very outer edge of the Western Highlands are all one and the same thing, so long as he can get a day's amusement out of them. ”

“ As for the London of pleasure, the West End, it would have been quite impossible to conceive a man of the faintest social pretensions being seen abroad in anything else. And now, I go up and down Piccadilly, Bond Street, the Row at the height of the London season, and see—a few silk hats and morning coats, it is true—but the majority of well-dressed men in "lounge" suits and grey soft hats and black and grey bowlers. ”

“ Because, according to that incredibly stupid young man, Robert, Piccadilly, Bond Street and the Park will then be the back streets, in which no decent people, except out-of-date, old-fashioned fogeys like ourselves, would ever consent to be seen. ”

“ We may glance up Bond Street, the Rue de la Paix of London, at the house occupied by Messrs. Agnew. Bond Street is specially devoted to the craze for picture exhibitions, where there are a half-dozen, including the Grosvenor and Doré Galleries. The portico of the Grosvenor Gallery was originally that of some palace in Italy, and is admired for its elegance. It was purchased by the owner, and set up here. In the South Kensington Museum is the screen and balcony of a church, a beautiful work, which had been torn down and condemned, and was rescued in the same manner. ”