Wimpole Street

“ We remain, however, in our usual state of conscious ignorance, although there is a good deal of talking and walking about a house in Wimpole Street—which, between ourselves, I am not very anxious to live in, on account of the gloominesses of that street, and of that part of the street, whose walls look so much like Newgate's turned inside out. ”

“ To those who love love for love's sake, who se passionnent pour la passion, as Prosper Merimée says, there could scarce be a more sacred spot in London than that fiftieth house in unattractive Wimpole Street, where these two poets first met each other ”

“ Wimpole Street quotations. The thing was that Eve had learned to want to be always in the right and was not swift enough in gathering things ...... not worldly enough. The train was rocking and swaying in its rush towards its first stop. After that the journey would seem only a few minutes, time passing more and more rapidly filled with the pressure of London coming nearer and nearer. But the junction was still a good way off.
“No. It’s nothing of that kind. All Russian students are like that. They have everything in common. ”

“ The morning was raw with dense fog; at her Wimpole Street ledgers she would by this time have been cramped with cold; but she felt warm and tingling with life as if she had been dancing, or for a long while in happy social contact; yet so differently; deeply and serenely alive and without the blank anxious looking for the continuance of social excitement. This something would continue, it was in herself, independently. It was as if there were someone with her in the room, peopling her solitude and bringing close around her all her past solitudes, as if it were their secret. ”

“ THE ROMANCE OF THE INSTITUTE Not quite two centuries of human life have gone quietly in Wimberton, and for the most part it has been on Main and Chester Streets. Main Street is a quarter of a mile long and three hundred feet wide, with double roads, and between them a clean lawn shaded by old elms. ”

“ Sidney Kirkwood had a lodging in Tysoe Street, ClerkenwelL It is a short street, which, like so many in London, begins reputably and degenerates in its latter half. The cleaner end leads into Wilmington Square, which consists of decently depressing houses occupied in the main, as the lower windows and front-doors indicate, by watchmakers, working jewellers, and craftsmen of allied pursuits. The open space, grateful in this neighbourhood, is laid out as a garden, with trees, beds, and walks. ”

“ The flagged square behind the Exchange seems like a mart—the busy hum, the perpetual, headlong va-et-vient, the general bustle and brightness, are all suggestive, and the bye streets, such as the old Thames Street, that skirts the river, the oddly-named Garlick Hill, and others, have all a strange, foreign effect, being narrow lanes, yet having fine old churches and towers rising to a great height. ”

“ This is a special peculiarity of the West End, which has puzzled many a visitor besides Claire Gifford. What is the magic which transforms narrow slips of buildings into spacious halls and imposing flights of stairways? Viewed from the street, the town houses of well-known personages seem quite inadequate for their purpose; viewed from within, they are all that is stately and appropriate. Those of us who live in less favoured neighbourhoods would fain solve the riddle. ”

“ It was founded on the truest love, and admiration of great qualities which have stood the test of many years. The marriage took place in Wimpole Church in February 1873.
It was about June in the same year that my father left Wimpole for the last time in an invalid carriage. The fatigue of the journey brought on a severe attack of heart failure, and as he reached his house in Portman Square, we feared it was his last. But not so. A few weeks later he reached his beloved Sydney Lodge, where his room was arranged on the ground floor and a young doctor always in attendance. ”

“ Thames Street, like its adjoining Billingsgate, is, I may remark, nearly always muddy, whatever the time of year. On rainy days, it is like a Slough of Despond. If by chance you wish to land at All Hallows or London Bridge Piers, you must first climb endless wooden and slippery steps, then wend your way carefully, past threatening cranes, and along narrow alleys between high houses, alleys blocked by heavy waggons, from which tremendous packages ascend, by rope, to top stories; alleys where there is barely room for a solitary pedestrian to wedge himself past the obstruction. ”

“ This Nancy trudged for hours through straight and terrible streets called avenues, with a dismal husband and a tired baby at her side. Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, then quickly across Fifth Avenue, which had nothing to do with us, and again across to Sixth Avenue ... and everywhere dirty shops, screaming children, jostling girls, rude men, trains rushing overhead, street-cars screeching and clanging. Then, at last, Seventh Avenue, where there were streets full of quiet, squalid boarding-houses, fewer screaming children, fewer dirty shops, and no trains. ”

“ From the Obelisk at the junction, or approximate junction, of the Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Borough, and London-roads, in pretty well every direction to the banks of the Thames, are a mass of private-looking streets—as far as the absence of shops constitutes the privacy of a street—old and half-ruinous, or modern and trim, in all of which perhaps may be found street-sellers, and in some of which are pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes. ”

“ Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall. Above the muffled roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering. ”

“ To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material development. ”

“ Hamilton Street is a little street not much more than a hundred feet long, offset from the foot of William Street. It leads down very steeply from Water Street to a wharf, and its very name brings up before my mind a picture of a pair of heavy horses breasting the hill vigorously, dragging a low truck loaded with barrels of oil, and stirring up with their feet the powdery black dust of the street. ”

“ Another leading thoroughfare crossed the City from London Bridge to Bishopsgate, and another, Thames Street, by far the most important, because here the merchant adventurers—those who had ships and imported goods—met for the transaction of business. The rough cobbled pavement of Thames Street was the Exchange of Whittington and the merchants of his time, who all had their houses on the rising ground, among the narrow lanes north of the street. You have seen what splendid houses a London merchant loved to build. ”

“ All this quarter of London is a vast hive of industry. The stranger should walk along the busy thoroughfare of Upper and Lower Thames Street all the way from the Tower to St. Paul's; tall, blackened, ever-devouring warehouses line the street, which is a very inferno of bustle and labour. Though the street is muddy and noisy, and its perambulation may not impossibly render the pedestrian more than a little cross, he will, at any rate, gain from it some insight into London life. ”

“ Through the swirling crowds at Broadway he threaded his way, finally entering the gloomy thoroughfare that cuts a somber, murky streak through the illuminated area of Times Square.
Even Whitmore, engrossed as he was in his own affairs, could not help a feeling of depression as with a single step he emerged from the throbbing life and light of Broadway into the shabby darkness of Seventh Avenue. For nowhere in the big city is the contrast of its extremes brought home so sharply as at this intersection of three busy thoroughfares. ”

“ There is not a more melancholy exemplification of decayed grandeur than a London street which has once been "respectable," and keeps up, in its desolation, the same unvarying forms as some neighbouring thoroughfare, at whose doors the carriage still lingers. ”

“ There is landing and scuffling and pushing; the quivering old barges, moored in the mud, are swaying and groaning beneath trampling feet. Then, for an instant, Thames Street, Upper and Lower, is invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses soon swallow them up: as though London’s commercial maw were an hungered too, for breakfast, at nine o’clock in the morning. ”

“ I hate this incorrigible little thoroughfare; this New Street. It is full of bad smells, mangy little shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is a yawning gin-palace at its south-western extremity. The odours of its eating-houses—especially of a seedy little French pension bourgeoise about half way up—are displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended in New Street are the worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are mobbed—yes, mobbed—by children in torn pinafores who never have any pocket handkerchiefs. ”

“ Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. ”

“ In Pont Street my demeanour is not so calm and measured. I feel less sure of myself, and adopt a slight swagger. In High Street, Kensington, I find myself dapper and respectable, with a slight leaning to the fine arts. In High Street, Notting Hill, I become frankly common. Fleet Street fills me with a conviction that if I don't make haste I shall be jeopardising the national welfare. ”

“ Pope at “my lodgings at Mr. Digby’s, next door to ye Golden Bell, on ye second Terras in St. James’s Street;” Wolfe, who wrote from here in 1758 to Pitt, desiring employment in America; and Gibbon, who died 26 years later, at No. 76, now part of the Conservative Club.
It was in this street that Dr. Johnson once did some shopping with Boswell; calling at Wirgman’s toy-shop (at No. 69, where Arthur’s is now) “to choose a pair of silver buckles, as those he had were too small.” ”

“ He admired her back, and wondered whether her face, if seen, would prove a disappointment. Thus musing, he drew near to the top of the Haymarket, where it ceases to be a street and becomes a whirlpool of rushing traffic. And here the girl, having paused and looked over her shoulder, stepped off the sidewalk. As she did so a taxi-cab rounded the corner quickly from the direction of Coventry Street.
The agreeable surprise of finding the girl's face fully as attractive as her back had stimulated Jimmy, so that he was keyed up for the exhibition of swift presence-of-mind. ”

“ The stridency of day was over in the shabby street; its high houses, standing like cliffs, showed tier upon tier of windows, dimly lighted or dark, while from under the feet of the buildings, from cellar-saloons to traktirs below the street-level, there spouted up the ruddiness of lamplight and the jangle of voices. There was a smell in the sharp air of ships and streets blended, the aromatic freshness of tar, the sourness of crowds and uncleanliness.
Waters, halting upon the cobbles, sniffed with recognition and unstiffened his mind as he gazed along the dreary street. ”

“ The bus had reached the lower end of Fifth Avenue, passed through Washington Square, and stopped at the end of its run. Jimmie Dale clambered down from the top, threw a pleasant "good-night" to the conductor, and headed briskly down the street before him. A little later he crossed into West Broadway, and his pace slowed to a leisurely stroll.
Here, at the upper end of the street, was a conglomerate business section of rather inferior class, catering doubtless to the poor, foreign element that congregated west of Broadway proper, and to the south of Washington Square. ”

“ Every Street in London is being converted into a battlefield of styles, all shrieking at one another, all murdering one another. The tumult may be exciting, especially to the architects, but it is not beautiful. It is not good to live in. ”

“ A pleasant and almost poetical contrast can be furnished by viewing one of the busiest of City streets under different conditions; much as in a Diorama we are shown the same view by day or by night. If at the busiest hour of the day we descend from London Bridge into Thames Street, which passes under one of its arches, we shall see a curious specimen of antiquated trade, and very much what might have been noted a hundred years ago. ”

“ Chester Street is narrow and crowded with shops, and runs from the middle of Main down-hill to the railway and the river. It is the business street for Wimberton and the countryside of fifteen miles about. Main Street is surrounded by old houses of honorable frontage, two churches, and the Solley Institute, which used to be called “Solley's Folly” by frivolous aliens. ”

“ 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 ”