City of London

“ Such are the Livery Companies of the City of London, the history of which teems with vivid pictures of bygone times and manners, and the accounts of their pageantries, their feasts, and customs furnish us with curious glimpses of ancient civic life. When we visit the ancient homes of these venerable societies, we are impressed by their magnificence and interesting associations. Portraits of old city worthies gaze at us from the walls and link our times with theirs, when they, too, strove to uphold the honour of their guild and benefit their generation. ”

“ No city that I have ever visited will compare with London for the number of its street peddlers, hawkers, booth proprietors, open-air performers, ballad singers, mountebanks, and other street itinerants.
From daybreak until dark, and long into the night, in the ramification of Streets and Lanes, Squares, Mews, and Ovals, the ear of the stranger is saluted with the harshest and most discordant sounds which emanate from the throats of a street-selling population of both sexes, large enough alone to make the population of a fifth-rate city. ”

“ How is London ceased, that rich, that joyous city! One corner, indeed, is left; but more than as many houses as were within the walls, are turned into ashes.
The merchants now have left the Royal Exchange; the buyers and sellers have now forsaken the streets: Gracechurch-street, Cornhill, Cheapside, Newgate-market, and the like places, which used to have throngs of traffickers, now are become empty of inhabitants; and instead of the stately houses which stood there last summer, they lie this winter in ruinous heaps. The glory of London is fled away like a bird ”

“ In London streets, the unexpected is always happening; thus, through the hideous plate glass of a bar parlour, you may catch glimpses of waving trees and grey towers, and even the dreadful glare of London advertisement hoardings does not "wholly abolish or destroy" the ancient charm of the crowded, irregular City streets. A City of parallel lines and squares, such as the Colonials love! Perish the thought! Let them widen Southampton Row if they will, remove Holywell Street and King Street if they list; but let us at any rate keep to our old and devious ways through the heart of the City! ”

“ The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs, and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of London, prove that London still is a great city—the greatest city in the world: and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it is, cannot overcome London, entirely. ”

“ Paulus Jovius, in his description of the most remarkable towns of England, says, ‘All are obscured by London; which, in the estimation of many, is Cæsar’s City of the Trinobantes, the capital of all Britain, famous for the commerce of many nations; its houses are elegantly built, its churches fine, its towers strong, and its riches and abundance surprising. The wealth of the world is wafted to it by the Thames, swelled by the tide, and navigable to merchant ships, through a safe and deep channel for 60 miles, from its mouth to the City. ”

“ With this signal triumph of the people, to which the city of London had contributed so much, the present work is brought to a close. No good end would be served by entering the domain of contemporary politics. Enough has been set out in these pages to convince the impartial reader that the city of London is no mean city; that it possesses a record equal, if not indeed superior, to that of any other city in the Universe, ancient or modern, and that its wealth and influence have ever been devoted to the cause of religious, social and political freedom. ”

“ But, up to the Tower, the neighbourhood we have gone over lies like a mere edging on the great skirt of London, compared to the labyrinths of streets that spread north and west—to say nothing of the Surrey side of the Thames. A mere glance at the map of London appals us. We shall therefore select a picturesque object here and there after having quitted the city, just as fancy guides the way.
Turning our back on the Docks, and taking the nearest cut to the Mile-end-road, we will at once dash into Whitechapel; for all behind us belongs to the suburbs, and our present descriptions lie not there. ”

“ What book has ever been written, nay, has ever attempted to be written, about the general architecture of London? The largest city in the world,—the metropolis of many cities in one city,—the aggregate of a hundred towns, each as big as Oxford, as Cambridge, as Winchester,—why should its stones be thus (p. 448) neglected? And, except for a sprinkling of traditional gibes, an annual dole of scornful references, what attention does the architecture of London receive from its inhabitants? or, indeed, from outsiders? Every one, on the contrary, considers himself at liberty to fling a stone at it. ”

“ Where is London, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles, and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? ”

“ The time is coming—is already come, when, as most intelligent men turn over the pages of the world's history, they award the palm of the noblest civilization to London, a city full of merchants and artisans, rather than to Rome, a city full of soldiers, flushed with the pride of victory, and drunk with the blood of the slain. ”

“ London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky—with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway. ”

“ No stranger can say that he has seen the vastness of London until he has mounted the hundreds of steps which lead to the Golden Gallery, and looked out upon the outstretched city and suburbs below. It is a sight never to be forgotten; the passengers underneath scarcely appear a foot high, and the omnibuses so diminished, that you fancy you could take one under your arm and walk off with it easily. But it is the immense range of country which the eye commands that astonishes the stranger. ”

“ How different from the London of the present day—from the splendid streets and shops which stretch from Temple-Bar to Whitechapel, and westward from those ancient City gates to a land of theatres, squares, and palace-like buildings—were the old narrow streets, with their high houses and overhanging gables, that rose tier above tier, their huge projecting signs, even at noon-day making a dim dreamy kind of twilight ”

“ NEWGATE. ROUND and within London lies a land chequered with lights and shadows, close city courts, and stifling suburban alleys, in which the sunshine only lingers for a few minutes during the day (where it seems imprisoned and in a hurry to escape above the dusky chimneys) ; and in this vast metropolis these scenes are contrasted with broad green, airy parks, and long lines of palace-like streets, which stretch westward and dip into the open and surrounding country. Its living crowds are ever in motion—now to witness a royal procession ”

“ For me, three of the loveliest and most strangely touching sights of London are the stars shining very high in the blue and very quietly when you look up at them from the roaring depths of a crowded, naphtha-flaring, poverty-stricken market street; a sunrise brightening over the Thames below London Bridge, while the barges are still asleep with the gleam of [Pg 25] their lamps showing pale in the dawn; and the blurred lights and ghostly buildings of a long city road that is clothed in mystery and transfigured by a brooding, dream-haunted fog. ”

“ The ever-growing suburbs of the great city, the West End, the fashionable quarter, Southern London across the river, with Lambeth and its memories of archbishops—all this, and much else that deserves an honoured place in the chronicles of the metropolis, we must perforce omit in our survey. Some of the stories are too modern to please the taste of those who revel in the past; and if the curious reader detects omissions, he may console himself by referring to some of the countless other books and guides which the attractions of London are ever forcing industrious scribes to produce. ”

“ Have we not dissolute millionaires enough to give us at least one fine city?
London and Paris stand out in bold contrast, the one for utility, the other for beauty. Both are adepts in their respective arts. The city proper of London has better buildings and cleaner streets than when St. Paul was erected; otherwise it is much the same. Elsewhere in London, however, are spacious parks and imposing palaces, with now and then a fine bit of something to look out upon, as the bridges of the murky Thames, the Parliament houses, the Abbey, Somerset house, and Piccadilly, perhaps. ”

“ Tucked away in the heart of the busiest part of the roaring city, overshadowed by tall, hard-looking, modern banking and insurance buildings and all but a thin strip of it hidden from view, is a veritable piece of old London. ”

“ You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the history of London’s commercial rise and progress gets adequately written it will read like a series of stories out of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ Still, we must take our stones as we find them, and I do not agree with the intelligent foreigner who thinks London a mean city. Many of us find the fine Continental cities, such as new Paris, new Barcelona, and new Frankfurt, as painful to live in as might be the Agricultural Hall. The houses are too high, their flanks too white, their alignment dull as a righteous life. When one considers towns like New York, one wonders how the inhabitant finds his way home. ”

“ In London, because it is the capital of the world, are the mysteries of many lands. London is a city of refuge for the outcasts of the Continent. It is an international Alsatia, where the laws from which the alien inhabitants have fled cease to run. There are quiet cafés and restaurants and clubs hidden away in back streets in which men and women meet and eat, drink, dance, and play cards according to their mood, and plot between whiles the deeds that will be ranked with the master crimes of the age. ”

“ The British town, then a mere inclosure, containing a few huts, has swelled into a city teeming with a population of above two millions, crowded with public buildings and costly habitations, filled with commerce, wealth, and luxury, the mirror of modern civilization, the metropolis of a mighty empire, and the wonder of the world—while the Roman city, then the mightiest and most splendid on the face of the earth, and the mistress of the globe, so far as its regions were discovered, retains no traces of her glory, and is chiefly interesting on account of her ancient name and associations. ”

“ All these before we come to the houses of the rich merchants. Let your vision of London under the Plantagenets be that of a city all spires and towers, great churches and stately convents, with noble houses as great and splendid as Crosby Hall scattered all about the City within the walls and lining the river bank from Ludgate to Westminster. ”

“ London has nearly four millions of inhabitants—more than the six States of New England put together! It is the monstrous growth of our modern civilization. 41 With its enormous size, it contains more wealth than any city in the world, and more poverty—more luxury on the one hand, and more misery on the other. To those who have explored the low life of London, the revelations are terrific. The wretchedness, the filth, the squalor, the physical pollution and moral degradation in which vast numbers live, is absolutely appalling. ”

“ We have passed over two hundred years. We left London under the Three Edwards. We find it under Elizabeth. It was a City of Palaces—monasteries, with splendid churches and stately buildings: town houses of bishops, abbots, and noble lords, every one able to accommodate a goodly following of liveried retainers and servants: the mansions of rich City merchants, sometimes as splendid as those of the lords: the halls of the City Companies: the hundred and twenty City churches. Look at London as Shakespeare saw it. ”

“ London is in itself a Pageant. The street names, the buildings, cathedral, churches, prisons, theatres, the river with its bridges, and countless other objects, all summon up the memories of the past, and form a Pageant that is altogether satisfying. Many books have been written on the greatest city of England's Empire—some learned and ponderous tomes, others mere guide books; some devoted to special buildings and foundations, others{viii} to the life, manners, and customs of the citizens. ”

“ The stones for paving London are mostly brought from the quarries of Scotland, by ships; p. 50and very few towns or cities in Europe are better paved than the City of London. Indeed, every year seems to add improvements, for the health and comfort of the inhabitants. ”

“ No other part of London offered such variety and scope in the study of humanity. The City was stodgy, the Strand too uniform, Piccadilly too fashionable, and the select areas for bachelor chambers, such as the Temple and Half Moon Street, were backwaters as remote from the roaring turbulent stream of London life as the Sussex Downs or the Yorkshire Moors. ”

“ London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic want of charm. ”