Bridge Street, Blackfriars, is covered by a cluster of semi-detached, pent-roof, wooden-framed buildings such as we now see in remote villages in Hampshire. The Temple was one huge, compact sombre mass of dark red brickwork, lying back from the river, with a large lawn-like pleasure-ground intervening. Essex House, Arundel House, Somerset House, the Savoy, Salisbury House, Durham House, York House, Suffolk House, are veritable palaces, the gardens of which extend, with slight interruption, along the north shore to Charing Cross. On the opposite side of the river, which was then spanned by a single bridge, and that bridge crowded with tall, stately structures, lay Winchester House, with its spacious fruit-gardens and lawns—fit paradise for a prelate; and a little to the left, Shakspeare’s Theatre, the “Globe”—a classic and ever-memorable spot; behind which rose another circular building where “beare-bayting” took place. A few humble tenements scattered along the bank of the stream further on form the last vestige of buildings southward, and then all becomes country again.
Though within the walls the streets were narrow and the houses overhanging, though shade and moisture eternally enveloped the lower stories, and fevers and pestilences brooded in these mephitic enclosures, still, to the gates of the City it was but a bow-shot, and outside these barriers the winds of Heaven blew fresh and invigorating upon the pale face of the over-worked—was he over-worked in those days?—citizen. If fatigued after his daily labour, or desirous of a little healthy recreation, he could easily acquire a capful of pure air, and thus renew the vital energies of his mind and body with an evening stroll, or a dash of rural sport.
I have also before me the Post Office Map of London for 1863. Well may we say, “look upon this picture and upon that!” The small cloud of houses which in 1647 stretched from Temple Bar to the Tower, and from the Thames to London Wall, has expanded itself, until an area embracing more square miles than then it did acres, is a continuous mass of brick and mortar. Who can measure its extent, or predict the limits of its expansion? Will Mother Shipton’s prophecy be verified, and will Primrose Hill eventually become the centre of London? Primrose Hill! Why, in 1647 Primrose Hill lay far away in the outskirts of London, beyond Tottenham House, and no one besides that toothless, crazy old witch could have dreamed such a dream! Yet see how house has been joined to house, and suburb to suburb, until Highgate and Hampstead on the north, and Peckham and Clapham on the south, threaten soon to become part of this gigantic Babylon of buildings. London now encloses in its vast circumference Fulham and Hammersmith on the west, and Bow, Stepney, and Kingsland on the east. In vain should we look for fields in Islington or Pentonville—even the White Conduit Gardens, in which the mighty “Elevens” of the days of the Regency played their cricket matches, have disappeared. Shepherdesses’ Walks and Maiden Lanes have lost their pristine features, and form regular lines of streets interlaced with water and gas pipes, and electric wires. Your Paradise Rows and Pleasant Places are for the most part moral as well as material deformities. If anything green grows in them it is artificial, and the very air comes to their denizens choked with a dense floating concrete of dust and smoke. The fields lying between the Tonbridge Chapel and old Saint Pancras Church, across which, even so recently as the end of the last century, passengers used to go after dark in bands of seven or eight, armed with staves and bearing lanterns, for fear of highwaymen—what has become of them? Skinner Street and Somers Town have sprung up, producing an ill-conditioned, poverty-stricken crop of tenements. Paddington and Notting Hill have likewise fallen victims to this mania of house-rearing. Why! when I was a boy it was a delight to tramp north-westward of a summer’s evening and drink a glass of ale in the gardens of the “Yorkshire Stingo!” Now it is necessary to take rail, if one would escape from the soot and dirt of London, plant foot upon the soft sward, view a waving corn-field, or inhale a mouthful of fresh air. It is in vain we look for anything redolent or bright within an easy walking-distance of the heart of London. We are hemmed in on every side by brick and mortar suburbs. No gardens, no parks, no meadows, no verdure,—all is defaced and denaturalised by street upon street.
The fact is, London—or shall we rather say its millions?—is suffering from a plethora of houses which threatens its inhabitants with a veritable congestion of the lungs. All work and no play is a sad thing indeed, mentally, morally, and physically; but how are the poor—and the poor are the masses of our metropolis—to find recreation in their fœtid alleys, their brow-beaten, shame-faced-looking courts? Take Drury Lane and its neighbourhood, for instance, and ask how is it possible for those born in such slums of poverty and filth ever to see a green field, or to behold the bright face of unadulterated sky, or gasp with ecstasy on imbibing a gulp of the precious country air? One poor girl, when I spoke to her about trees and flowers, naively asked what was a tree? She had seen flowers in Covent Garden in the shop-windows—nay, some of her own neighbours cultivated a pot of geraniums, or may be a fuchsia; but when I described to her something that grew taller than the houses themselves, expanded their branches covered with leaves, and sheltered us from the winds and the rains, and the heats of heaven, it was beyond her ken. Although twelve years of age, she had never been above half-a-mile away from the court in which she was born. I may safely say that she is but a type of hundreds—nay, of thousands, who first see the light in these miserable alleys, whose infancy is spent, ragged and neglected, in our crowded thoroughfares, and who are liable to be trodden on by men, or trampled under foot by horses, or run over by the wheels of carts and carriages.
What we have related of this girl from Clare Market, who lived comparatively so near St. James’s Park, will apply with tenfold force to the inhabitants of Poplar or Whitechapel, and it will also enable us to estimate the intense pleasure which those summer-trips organised by the friends