London, 6th April, 1900.
Few people, even Londoners—or, perhaps, Londoners less than other people—realise how entirely the character of London is changing. The growth of the met-repolls, the pulling down and putung up, the constant improvements of the last few years, are of a kind usually associated with the go-ahead cities of America or South Africa, rather than the most conservative capital in the world, that is just awakening to the advantage of electric light and traction. The Englishman, if he were told, a as the other day by an American fresh from a journey through the Western States, that nowhere was there suc. a fury of building and rebuilding as in London, would probably be as surprised as he is when the foreigner ventures to suggest that the suppression of evidence at the Jameson trial was, after all, not much more creditable than the suppression of evidence at the Dreyfus trial!
But if the Londoner does shut his eyes to the facts before him, there can be no question that, gradually, old landmarks are disappearing and a brand-new town springing up.
T say nothing of the Embankment and the changes in the City; they are older than my personal acquaintance with London. I say nothing of the spreading out of the suburbs; it is impossible to keep pace with them. I simply look back to the London I came to sixteen years azo, and compare it with the London of to-day: Then, between Ozford Street and the Strand—as I remember to my cost, for I lived in Bloomsbury—there was but a network of narrow alleys and twisting streets; and Seven Dials, though somewhat reformed since Dickens's description could still be seen in all its labyrinthine glory, or squalor. Now, the two districts are connected by two wide thoroughfares, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, and, judging from the grime on the houses that line them, the newcomer to London could never imagine both streets had been opened, virtually, but vesterds have seen the beginning and completion of a third, Rosebery Avenue, leading through the wilderness to Islington, of a third, a fourth, still further afield." But to give a list of them all would be to fall into cataloguing, and my object is to point out chiefly what is going on in the very heart, the very centre of London.
When I came, almost the only houses of modern flats—the old-fashioned chambers of the Inns of Court and their neighbourhood are a very different matter—were in Victoria Street, that dark, dingy, narrow valley where few men could preserve their cheerfulness. Now, there are apartment-houses, or mansions, on the Embankment looking out upon the river, everywhere in Mayfair and B, in the little streets leading from the Strand, in the quiet, nified squares of Bloomsbury, which, though never of any great architectural distinction, had a_ certain stateliness, a certain air that these tall, gingerbread, jerry-built barracks are fast destroying. Ju Kensington, in Chelsea, even in St. John's Wood it is the same story; the big, ugly modern contrivances shoot up of a sudden in the streets that Thackeray and Carlyle knew and loved, and all the old character goes from them for ever. There is no use in protesting. 'The modern flat is by far too useful and often admirable an invention. Only once was a protest made and heard—when, a few years ago, a private company was asking Parliament for the right to fill its shareholders' pockets by turning the river front, beyond the Houses of Parliament and that beautiful little old corner of Westminster just back of the Abbey and the Dean's Yard, into a checker-board of mansions. But, as a rule, the gain in comfort so outbalances the loss in picturesqueness that opposition would seem as foolish as Ruskin's crusade against the railroad.
But when it comes to really the greatest innovation of all, one cannot look on quite unmoved. One accepts with equanimity the widening of the lower end of Parliament Street, now in progress, for, as it was, the street was too new to have the sanctity of association, and the Houses of tinment are worthy of the noble ap-Boma; however, ans is on holy ground.
roach hitherto denied them. On the
Tt may not be as old as Fleet Street or Holborn, it may be without the old City limits, but it is old enough—the ancient, Strand," Mr. Henley calls it—to be one of the best-known streets by name in Europe or America, Whoever has heard of London has heard of the Strand; whoever loves London loves the Strand. In some ways it has changed enormously, The ices that Pepys passed on his way to Whitehall have gone; there are hardly any buildings left that Dr. Johnson would recognise—only the two churches that stand in the middle of the road and obstruct the But, in its main characteristics, ins as it has been during many long, generations. Tt leads to the City—that is, to the busiest, wealthiest, most powerful business quarter there is the world over, and it is still as mean in its proportions as the High Street of a sleepy country town. It is one of the very few direct lines of communication between East London and West, and the route of endless omnibuses. During the day, it is thronged by an army of business men and clerks hurrying to and from work; in the evening, by an army of theatre-goers, and yet it is still so narrow that the best-trained police to be found anywhere cannot. prevent a ceaseless succession of blocks. It is shabby beyond words; its shops are shabby, its houses are shabby, its theatres are shabby, the people who crowd it seem shabby in sympathy. It is, in fact, as absurd a street as you could imagine. But then, it is the Strand, and no lover of London would have it otherwise. It is as characteristic in its way as are the Boule-yards of Paris or Unter den Linden of Beni And now, the Strand—the ancient Strand—is doomed, though the name no doubt will survive. It has been easy to seo that for long the County Council has had the evil municipal eye upon it. The slightest chance or excuse to widen it has been greedily seized. Already before the Hotel Cecil and at the corner of Wellington Street, where there is such a mass of cabs and carts and "buses going to and coming from Waterloo Bridge, the old line of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.