London Road

“ The old highway to London is that which the daring sea-kings poetically called “the road of the swans”—the broad bosom of the sea,—and then along the majestic river which leads to her grey old fortress, the Tower. But the railroad has ploughed up the country, and this ancient “silver pathway” is abandoned to commerce and pleasure-parties; so rapid is the transit from every point of the coast, that few care to thread the winding river when they can reach London by the railroads almost as direct as “the crow flies.” Such remains of ancient London as fall in our way we shall again glance at ”

“ It is curious how the places and streets of London assume a character from one's own moods. All the big roads have a very sharp character of their own. If all other indications were lacking, one might know at once whether the place were Edgware Road or Old Ford Road, simply by the sounds and by the sweep of it. Pull down every house and shop, and still Oxford Street could never pass itself off as Barking Road. But they have, too, a message for you. I still believe that a black dog is waiting to maul me in Stepney Causeway. I still dance with delight down Holborn. ”

“ IF you leave King William-street just at the foot of London-bridge and turn to the right, you will find your way into a set of narrow and steep streets, few only of which admit of carriage and horse traffic. The lower stories of the houses are let out as offices, and the upper as warehouse floors; the pavement is narrow and the road as bad as broken stones and long neglect can make it; dirty boys in sailors’ jackets play at leap-frog over the street posts; legions of wheel-barrows encumber the broader parts of these thoroughfares ”

“ Anyone who looking along the alley of white road would want to sit down in the roadway or kneel amongst the undergrowth and shout and shout? In the north of London there were all those harsh street voices infesting the trees and the parks. No! they did not exist. There was no North London. Let them die. They did not know the meaning of far-reaching meadows, park-land, deer, the great silent Heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill against the far-off softness of the sky. ”

“ To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come, full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race. ”

“ These colossal creatures, indeed, projecting often far into the road, pull up the pedestrian with such alarming and human suddenness that it would surely require, in the uninitiated, a strong mind and a good conscience to travel this way alone on a dark night.
The keynote of London is ever its close juxtaposition of splendour and misery, "velvet and rags." ”

“ At every turn you come to the most beautiful prospects. When London will consume its own smoke, if that time ever does arrive, the view from Highgate, across the great city, will be the grandest in the world. On a clear day, standing in the Archway Road—that road esteemed such a wonder of engineering in its day, and forming such a disastrous property for its shareholders (the £50 shares may be bought at about 18s. a share) —you may see across the valley of the Thames as far as the Kent and Surrey hills looming obscurely in the distance. ”

“ THE COSTERMONGERS AND RAG FAIR.
HERE is a wide, short street, or rather road, in the heart of London. The buildings are mean, the people who cluster against their doorways and in the alleys and courts that branch from this short, wide street, are wretched in appearance; their garments are patched and in piecemeal, and when untorn they are greasy and besmeared with filth. ”

“ From the Southwark-bridge Road you may see the roofs of many of these great desolate houses; they are broken and open; and the massy oaken rafters are exposed to the summer sun and the snow of winter. Some of the lower floors are still inhabited; and at the ends of those courts{252} you will see standing, on a fine day, such characters as you will meet with nowhere beside in the neighbourhood of London. Their very dress is peculiar; and they frequent the dark and hidden public-houses which abound in these close alleys,—places where the gas is burning all day long. ”

“ An ideally smooth, hard, high road, with no more of uphill and down than a coach could travel over at a canter going up, and at a rattling trot, with the skid on, going downhill, it was a road that every sporting Londoner knew by heart, and many a London man and woman who cared nothing for sport.... The ancient glories of the road live for the author, and when he walks along the highway from London to Brighton, he seems to tread on holy ground. ”

“ Those who have admired the city of London from an eminence have indeed seen more extended lines of street bounded perhaps by a richer country, yet it is very deficient in that variety and boldness of feature which is so striking in this place. When it is wished to extend this walk to the eastward, the new road will lead the pedestrian commodiously to the bottom of Arthur’s Seat, round the eastern side of which a path to Duddingston, branching out in various directions in its course round to Salisbury Crags, might, in a very delightful manner, be imagined to complete an afternoon’s excursion. ”

“ But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days—O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand? I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter. Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it. ”

“ You have got in modern times that further curious reaction due to growing excellence of communications—that is, due to the growth of the Road—the pulse of the great modern city. Crowds of human beings pour out of Victoria or Liverpool Street into London and pour back from London in the evening. The station of St. Lazare in Paris is, in Europe, the most striking visual evidence of this strange modern development, great floods of human beings cascading into the city at the opening day and ebbing back at its close. ”

“ More than 1000 vehicles per hour pass through this street in the business period of an average day, besides foot-passengers! To ease the traffic in Cheapside, a spacious new thoroughfare, New Cannon Street, has been opened, from near London Bridge westward to St. Paul’s Churchyard. The third main line of route is not so much thronged, nor so interesting to strangers. It may be considered as beginning at the Bank, and passing through the City Road and the New Road to Paddington and Westbourne. ”

“ What is the best way to see London? "From the top of a 'bus," Mr. Gladstone is said to have sagely remarked. And if you can study London itself from the top of a 'bus, you can also, from the interior of the same convenient, if not always savoury, vehicle, study the ways of Londoners. For, as means of transit, omnibuses and road-cars are every decade, nay, every year, coming yet more into popularity. Soon the patient horses that drag them will disappear and they will transform themselves into "motor-omnibuses," but their general character will be still unaltered. ”

“ If it is difficult to offer any convincing argument [Pg 204] as to the age of the wall of London, it is possible to get a general idea of the walled city and its neighbourhood with some vividness and accuracy. We have the great tidal river, the background of forest, and the nearer fen-lands, which seem to have almost insulated the site. There is the great white posting-road from Canterbury and Dover, and, more remotely, from Rome, Lyons, Chalons, Auxerre, Troyes, Rheims, Amiens, Boulogne, striking straight from point to point. ”

“ Every town, however small its beginnings, and however large its developments is the subject of its own servants, I mean its roads.
In every kingdom certain towns establish themselves early in history as road centres. They may have sprung up at the junction of cross roads already existing as routes to other more important places—or they may as in the case of London be the object, the main and primary object, to which the roads tend.
At all events there came a time, early in our civilization, when London was a comparatively small centre of a comparatively large road radiation. ”

“ If, instead of the Strand and Piccadilly route, or the Holborn and Oxford Street route, a visitor takes the northernmost main route, he will find less to interest him. The New Road, in its several parts of City Road, Pentonville Road, Euston Road, and Marylebone Road, forms a broad line of communication from the city to Paddington, four miles in length. Though very important as one of the arteries of the metropolis, it is singularly deficient in public buildings. ”

“ From the mud-cottage towards London, it proceeded between Paradise-house, the residence of Mr. Greig, the engraver, and the Adam and Eve public-house, in the Holloway back-road, and by circuitous windings approached London, at the distance of a few feet on the eastern side of the City Arms public-house, in the City-road, and continued towards Old-street, St. Luke’s. It no where communicated with the back-road, leading from Battle-bridge to the top of Highgate-hill, called Maiden-lane.
Hagbush-lane is well known to every botanizing perambulator on the west side of London. ”

“ When one is asked, then, what is the matter with East London, and what lies behind those great thoroughfares, which look so broad and inviting on a fine summer's afternoon, one can only reply by taking one's questioner away from the broad thoroughfares into the crowded streets and alleys which lie behind them and between. Here is a photograph of a crowded back street, which gives an idea of what is going on, say, of a Sunday morning during the Bird Fair in Slater Street, or the Dog Fair at the top of Bethnal Green Road, or the old clothes sale down by Petticoat Lane. ”

“ In the Middle Ages there was a bridge between Staines and London on the river at Kingston, and Horsley thought that Cæsar crossed by a ford here.
[Pg 52]
CHAPTER III ROADS AND THE BRIDGE
Roads.—The Roman roads of the Antonine Itinerary which affect London are: Iter 2, the great road from Canterbury to London and St. Albans and beyond (the Watling Street) ; Iter 5, London to Colchester, and from thence to Lincoln; Iter 6, London to Lincoln, starting by the Watling Street; Iter 7, from Chichester through Silchester and passing the river at Staines (Pontes) , through Brentford to London. ”

“ New streets have been made, some of the principal of which are Queen Victoria Street, Southwark Street, Northumberland Avenue, Commercial Road, and the new thoroughfare from Oxford Street to Bethnal Green; many other leading thoroughfares, which had become inadequate for the increased traffic of the present day, have been widened and improved, greatly to the convenience and comfort of the public ”

“ We need not stop to consider how far that overrated statesman, in consulting maps too large, was the victim of his own cynical advice; but we may apply it, frankly and without any cynical meaning, here. Thus, referring to a large map of London and its environs, 33you will soon perceive this restricted choice of roads between London and Essex. The Lea and the broad marshes of West Ham, Stratford, Hackney, Leyton, Walthamstow, and Tottenham have always offered great obstacles to road-makers, and have stemmed the tide of London’s expansion in this direction until quite recent years. ”

“ It has been said that London was made by its bridge. Whether there was a settlement (there probably was) upon the gravelly hill which approached the river from the north, before any bridge was thrown across the tidal Thames, we do not know; but it is certain that the throwing of this bridge gave London its opportunity for development, and what is true of London is true of Paris, of Rouen, of Maestricht, of Cologne, and of twenty other great urban centres in our civilization. ”

“ Everything can be got in London, if (and the "if" is a comprehensive one) you know where to go for it. Old timber, for instance, can be bought not only at the Westminster wharves, but also in the Euston Road (where Messrs. Maple's vast timber-yards are in themselves an insight into the "highways and byways" of London) ; old silver may be had in the now spoiled Hanway Street, and Holborn; old furniture and antiques in Wardour Street and its neighbourhood; new furniture in Tottenham Court Road; livestock in and about Seven Dials; artists' materials in Soho, and so on.... ”

“ In 1353 the high road running from Temple Bar, then the western limit of London, to Westminster was 'so full of holes and bogs' that the traffic was dangerous for men and carriages; and a little later all the roads near London were so bad, that carriers 'are oftentimes In peril of losing what they bring.' What must remote country roads have been like when these important highways were in this state? If members of Parliament, rich men riding good horses, could not get to London, how did the clumsy wagons and carts of the day fare? ”