Without cumbering our narrative with the fables of dim legendary lore, with regard to the origin of London—or Llyn-Din, “the town on the lake,”—we may mention, that the Romans, after conquering its ancient British inhabitants, about a.d. 61, finally rebuilt and walled it in about a.d. 301; from which time it became, in such excellent hands, a place of not a little importance. Roman remains, such as fine tesselated pavements, bronzes, weapons, pottery, and coins, are not seldom turned up by the spade of our sturdy excavators while digging below the foundations of houses; and a few scanty fragments of the old Roman Wall, which was rather more than three miles round, are still to be seen. London, in the Anglo-Norman times, though confined originally by the said wall, grew up a dense mass of brick and wooden houses, ill arranged, unclean, From being a city hemmed within a wall, London expanded in all directions, and thus gradually formed a connection with various clusters of dwellings in the neighbourhood. It has, in fact, absorbed towns and villages to a considerable distance around: the chief of these once detached seats of population being the city of Westminster. By means of bridges, it has also absorbed Southwark and Bermondsey, Lambeth and Vauxhall, on the south side of the Thames, besides many hamlets and villages beyond the river. By these extensions London proper, by which we mean the City, has gradually assumed, if we may so speak, the conditions of an existence like that of a kernel in a thickly surrounding and ever-growing mass. By the census of 1861, the population of the City was only 112,247; while including that with the entire metropolis, the number was 2,803,034—or twenty-five times as great as the former! It may here be remarked, that the population of the City is becoming smaller every year, on account of the substitution of public buildings, railway stations and viaducts, and large warehouses, If we follow the Registrar-General, London, as defined by him, extends north and south between Norwood and Hampstead, and east and west between Hammersmith and Woolwich. Its area is stated as 122 square miles. From the census returns of 1861, we find that its population then was 2,803,921 souls. It was, in 1871, 3,251,804. The real city population was 74,732. The growth of London to its present enormous size may readily be accounted for, when we reflect that for ages it has been the capital of England, and the seat of her court and legislature; that since the union with Scotland and Ireland, it has become a centre for those two countries; and that, being the resort of the nobility, landed gentry, and other families of opulence, it has drawn a vast increase of population to minister to the tastes and wants of those classes; while its fine natural position, lying as it does on the banks of a great navigable river, some sixty miles from the sea, and its generally salubrious site and soil—the greater part of London is built on gravel, or on a species of clay resting on sand—alike plead in its favour. At one time London, like ancient Babylon, might fairly have been called a brick-built city. It is so, of course, still, in some sense. But we are greatly improving: within the last few years a large number of stucco-fronted houses, of ornamental character, have been erected; and quite recently, many wholly of stone, apart altogether from the more important public buildings, which of course are of stone. Of distinct houses, there are now the prodigious number of 500,000, having, on an average, about 7.8 dwellers to a house. For our own part we are somewhat sceptical as to this average. But we quote it as given by a professedly good authority. The Post-Office officials ascertained that there was built in one year alone, as long ago as 1864, no fewer than 9,000 new houses. We have often heard foreigners laughingly remark of sundry London houses—apropos of the deep, open, sunk areas, bordered by iron railings, of many of them—that they illustrate, in some sense, our English reserve, and love of carrying out our island proverb—viz., that “every Englishman’s house is his castle,”—in its entirety, by each man barricading himself off from his neighbours advances by a fortified fosse! Without particular reference to municipal distinctions, London may (to convey a general idea to strangers) be divided into four principal portions—the City, which is the centre of corporate influence, and where the greatest part of the business is conducted; the East End, in which are the docks, and various commercial arrangements for shipping; the West End, in which are the palaces of the Queen and Royal family, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the residences of most of the nobility and gentry; and the Southwark and Lambeth division, lying on the south side of the Thames, containing many manufacturing establishments, but few public buildings of interest. Besides these, the northern suburbs, which include the once detached villages of Hampstead, Highgate, Stoke Newington, Islington, Kingsland, Hackney, Hornsey, Holloway, &c., and consist chiefly of private dwellings for the mercantile and middle classes, may be considered a peculiar and distinct division. It is, however, nowhere possible to say (except when separated by the river) exactly where any one division begins or ends; throughout the vast compass of the city and The poet Cowper, in his Task, more than a hundred years ago, appreciatively spoke of
We wonder what he would think now of the many houses of this kind which extend, in some directions, so far out of town, that there seems to be no getting beyond them into the country. From the Surrey division there extends southward and westward a great number of those ranges of neat private dwellings, as, for instance, towards Camberwell, Kennington, Clapham, Brixton, Dulwich, Norwood, Sydenham, &c.; and in these directions lie some of the most pleasant spots in the environs of the metropolis. The flowing of the Thames from west to east through the metropolis has given a general direction to the lines of street; the principal thoroughfares being, in some measure, parallel to the river, with the inferior, or at least shorter, streets branching from them. Intersecting the town lengthwise, or from east to west, are three great leading thoroughfares at a short distance from each other, but gradually diverging at their western extremity. One of these routes begins in the eastern environs, near Blackwall, and extends along Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, Cornhill, the Poultry, Cheapside, Newgate Street, Holborn, and Oxford Street. The other may be considered as starting at London Bridge, and passing up King William Street into Cheapside, at the western end of which it makes a bend round St. Paul’s Churchyard; thence proceeds down Ludgate Hill, along Fleet Street and the Strand to Charing Cross, where it sends a branch off to the left to Whitehall, and another diagonally to the right, up Cockspur Street; this leads forward into Pall Mall, and sends an offshoot up Waterloo Place into Piccadilly, which proceeds westward to Hyde Park Corner. These two are the main lines in the metropolis, and are among the first traversed by strangers. It will be observed that they unite in Cheapside, which therefore becomes an excessively crowded |