The position to. which London attained in the nineteenth century is extraordinarily complex, and can here be presented only, in outline. The city finally achieved the rank of the financial centre of the world. In 1816 England, first of all commercial nations, adopted the gold standard. In 1844 the Bank Act of Sir Robert Peel ended the issue by the Bank of England of notes for which there was not sufficient cover in specie ; and since that date, except when in 1847, 1857 and 1866 the Act was suspended by government, there has been a guarantee that all claims on England and drafts on London will be paid in gold, the one of all circulating mediums which is least subject to fluctuations in value. The result has been that English bills are everywhere negotiable. The banking systern was perfected, the uses of credit multiplied, by the establishment in London after 1833 of joint stock banks, which had existed in the provinces since 1826. The benefits of the clearing house, first founded in 1775, were extended in 18 54 to the joint stock banks, and a great saving of time, labour and currency was thereby accomplished. Numerous English banks and branches were established not only in the provinces but also in the colonies, and in various parts of Africa, Asia, China and the Americas.

It was mainly by her gold standard and her sound banking policy that England secured for her capital city the position of the principal money market and the great clearing house of the world. But her commercial advance and the safety which her island situation was held to give her, were contributory in producing such a result. At this moment it is impossible to judge whether or not she will maintain her place.

The problems of the organisation of modern industry are not local but general, and therefore have no place in the history of a particular town. But it is worthy of notice that a principal feature of industrial conditions in the present day has developed gradually in London from the middle ages onwards. It was one of the first results of an increasingly complex society in the city that the mere craftsman tended to become subject to the merchant, first as the distributor of the fruits of his labour, later as the provider of his material. More and more he came to depend only on his skill and his strength, to bring nothing else into the market ; and inevitably he was degraded to a position in which he drove his bargains not with the consumer but with the merchant, who thus could annex a major share of the profits of the joint enterprise. The middleman and the capitalist had come into existence. In modern times such’ a position has been much accentuated. It is comparatively rare nowadays to find a workman who supplies his own capital or sells by retail his own handiwork. And so largely have capitalists and middlemen engrossed profits that the industrial population have become co-extensive with the poor, almost with the very poor.

Mr.   Charles   Booth   in   Life   and   Labour   in   London, noints out that London is deficient in a supply of cheap fuel and iron, running water, fresh air, space and light. On this account she cannot be a centre of the iron and steel trades, of chemical production, or of the textile industry with which she was so long connected. It is said that mat-making, originally a London industry, is now centring rather in the provinces. The value of space tends to banish ship-building, and the early and large operations connected with stone dressing, carpentry and ioinering. Provincial tan-yards are superseding those of Bermondsey.

The central position of London, the centre of the great railway systems and the centre of retail trade, brings to her industries connected with the final processes by which goods are prepared for market. Paper made elsewhere is converted in London into bags and envelopes ; cloth from provincial manufactories is shrunk in London ; she has become a " fitting " shop in which the different parts of articles are put together.

The same causes have made of her a repair shop, especially in connection with the metal and the shipbuilding trades. Owing to her central position also, work for which prompt execution or particular supervision is required is largely done in the capital. The high average of intelligence maintained by an urban and partly cosmopolitan population, and the large field from which an employer can choose his workmen, bring to London certain kinds of highly skilled work. The finest and most artistic   jewellery,   the   best   stained-glass   windows,   the est organs, surgical instruments and carriages, are still made in London. london,   moreover,  provides  an  enormous  supply  of labour, " unskilled, semi-skilled and over specialised.” This is a great reason why, although no great industry centres in the capital, many are important in it. Some would seem to have been established accidentally, and to have maintained a strong position by the help of the labour supply and of trading advantages. It is the labour feupply which explains the predominance of London in the industries of cheap furniture, ready-made clothing wholesale boots and shoes, rope, sacks, rubber, fur, cardboard boxes, and envelopes.

Another class of industries, such as baking, brewing and newspaper printing, are localised by the large demands of the population.

Finally, for a few ‘industries, London to a great extent supplies the material, as for the manufacture of soap, size and glue, the tanning and dressing of leather, and the making of glass from old and broken glass.

The capital no longer stands in isolation as the commercial port of the kingdom ;   in  1880 the value of her total foreign trade was almost equalled by that of Liverpool.   She occupies, however, an unique position in respect of the extent to which her imports exceed her exports, a circumstance due to her distance from any great manufacturing district, to the fact that she is rather a mart than an industrial town or the port of industrial towns. The accommodation of the Thames has become insufficient  for her trade, and many  of her  imports and exports are now conveyed overland by way of Southampton, Newhaven, Folkestone and Dover, which may be regarded as ports of London.    The trade with France, and with Jndia,  China and the Baltic is largely  concentrated in London.
 
An enormous population and an increasing prominence the   social   capital   have  emphasized  that   tendency, ticed with jealousy and with fear even in the reign of Flizabeth, by which British retail trade has been centred in London.   The capital is the shopping place of the three kingdoms.    As such her position has been strengthened by  steamships,   railways  and   motor   cars,   by   the   Post Office, the telegraph and the telephone.     Of late years there has been a second tendency, to centralise retail trade of all descriptions within a few great shops ;   and it has been fostered by the increased means of communication. It seems, especially as regards the food  supply  of  the wealthier classes, that shops in the suburbs and the neighbourhood of London, and shops devoted to the sale of a single class of goods, are on the decline.

Another particular function of the great town is that of a distributor of foodstuffs and of certain other articles.
The old markets of East and West Cheap were, after the fire, superseded by a small market for meat, poultry, vegetables, and sales by retail in general, which occupied the sites  of the burnt churches of St.  Mary Magdalene Milk Street, and All Saints Honey Lane, and was known as the Honey Lane Market.    The thoroughfare of Cheap-side was thus freed from serious obstruction to traffic. The   ancient   LeadenhalL,   Smithfield   and   Billingsgate Markets,  and another held in  the street   near   Newgate, were continued.    In 1700 a meat market was established near  the  Fleet,  and  between   1735   and   1737   a  fru$ market on the ground reclaimed by filling up the Fleet. In the nineteenth century, under various Acts of parliament,   the   whole   market   system   of   London   was   reorganised.

The Honey Lane, Smithfield and Newgate Markets were closed and that of the Fleet removed to the Farringdon site, so that important markets ceased to be held in streets. The markets which, largely; by the efforts of the corporation, were established or organised in the nineteenth century may be divided into three classes ; those which serve the whole country as centres for the distribution of food, those which distribute the food supply of London, and retail markets.

In the  first category are four controlled  by the corporation, the London Central Meat, Poultry and Provision Market at Smithfield, the Metropolitan Cattle Market at Islington, the Foreign Cattle Market at Deptford, and the Billingsgate fish market ; and also Covent Garden Market and the Potato Depot of the Great Northern Railway at King’s  Cross.    These collect produce from all parts of Great Britain ;   to some extent, especially in the cases of Covent Garden and of Deptford, from continental countries and from the colonies.    They send their wares even to remote parts of the kingdom.    They supply also the London tradesmen ; and it is noteworthy that by enabling butchers to buy meat wholesale they have abolished the nuisance of slaughter-houses in London.

The second class are mainly for fruit and vegetables ; East London is served by the Spitalfields and the Columbia Markets, South London by the Borough Market. Their direct customers are the costermongers and the greengrocers. The gay open shops of the greengrocers and the costermongers’ barrows, laden with the spoils of orchards and gardens in England, in France and in America, fruits of tropical orange groves and banana plantations, nuts which have ripened under the hot sun of South America, afford in the poor parts of the town extraordinary relief from, the monotony of strictly economical architecture and much dirt. They are proof 0{ the extent to which the poor Londoners are vegetarians. Costermongers, especially those who trade in West London and the city, are supplied also from Covent Garden.    They, frequently hawk fish and are customers of Billingsgate.

The chief retail markets are that of Leadenhall, which’ is a collection of shops for the sale of provisions, and the Farringdon for fruit and vegetables, which supplies its   own  neighbourhood.     There  are  to be  found  also, scattered variously about the town on different days of the week, aggregations of costermongers and hawkers, of whom some, such as those who constitute the Portman Market in Church Street, Lissom Grove, and the Newport  Market  in Newport  Street,  are probably relics  pf ancient markets of importance, while others exist by force of more recent custom.    In that goods are sold in them at a cheaper  rate than in shops,  they are valuable to the poor of their districts.    Hawkers of all kinds have throughout the history of London been a feature of street life ;   and recurrent efforts of the authorities, influenced by the jealousy of established tradesmen or the necessities of traffic, to suppress them, have met with little success.    They are almost inevitably part of the society of a great city, because in it there is a certain real demand for their services.    In the present day the hawkers who enjoy most dignity are the newspaper boys and the flower sellers.    The sellers of flowers in modern London, ill-favoured women, usually elderly, figures distinguished by a strange exaggeration of line, who sit behind banks of fresh and lovely flowers, make at some principal street corners an effect of grotesque beauty.

Two other notable markets of London are that held in Bermondsey for hides and skins, and Tattersall’s, which was established by Richard Tattersall who died in 1795 and is the chief English mart for horses.
The century has witnessed an extraordinary development of means of communication.   Sedan chairs and the boats  of the Thames  passed out  of common  use with other eighteenth century fashions, and vehicles were for many decades practically always horse drawn.    An Act of 1802 permitted hackney coaches to be licensed up to, the  number   of   1,000,   and   in   1833   all  limit   to  the number of carriages which might ply for hire was withdrawn.    Omnibuses were introduced from Paris about the year  1828 ;   and in 1834 the Common Council received a complaint as to the manner in which the streets were crowded by cabriolets and omnibuses.    In December of that year Joseph Aloysius Hansom took out a patent for the cab he had invented.    The underground railway from’ Farringdon  Street to  Paddington was opened in   1863, and its subsequent extensions have made the system of the    Metropolitan   and   District   Railways.     Tramways, owing to the narrowness of many thoroughfares and their crowded state, have never been used in central London. It was decided in 1873 that they should not be suffered within the city.    The first electric underground railway, the  City and South London, was begun in   1850 ;   the Waterloo and City Railway followed in  1898 ;   and in 1900 the Central London RailWay from Shepherd’s Bush’ to the Bank, which until recently was known as the Twopenny Tube.    In the last half-dozen years there has been rapid development of means of transit.    

The single line "l   trie raiiways called tubes have been multiplied, and have been connected with the earlier tubes and with the Metropolitan and District Railways, which also have been electrified, as well as with the termini of the great overland lines.     It has become possible by the agency of this strange network constructed beneath the foundations of London, to travel underground from almost any point in the town to another.    There are a large number of people who every morning pass directly from their homes to subterranean regions, which they leave only to spend the day immured within a  great building  of the city ; and at night they descend again, and are carried beneath the earth until they are once more within’ a stone’s throw of the houses in which they sleep.    Except on Sundays and during a short holiday they hardly see the sky or the sunlight. So rapid has been the increase of resort to London from all parts of the world, and of the habit of pursuing occupation abroad rather than at home, that traffic has hardly been appreciably lessened by the underground railways.     On the streets  it has within the last  five years, been distinguished by the supersession of horse-drawn by motor  vehicles.     Motor  omnibuses,  motor  cabs,   motor vans seem to be about to replace their forerunners.  Their superiority in point of speed, by which so many more journeys can be made in a given time, must have dissipated the traffic which, were horses in undiminished use, would be concentrated ;   yet still there are no signs that the streets of London grow empty.    The ceaseless and dense stream of men, women and children, and of the vehicles which carry them and their goods, is unceasing and dense as ever.

In this connection it is noticeable how vain have been all efforts to restore the river to its old position as a city thoroughfare. The persistent sacrifices of a county council, almost hopelessly enamoured of the scheme, could not induce Londoners to regard the cheapest and most express of steamboats as intended for anything but their pleasure jaunts. The reason is geographical ; the Thames does not, like the Seine, cut through the heart of its city ; it meanders round the busiest part of the town.

It would appear that the habit which Londoners have acquired of sleeping and maintaining households far from the central district in which they transact their business was at first a cause rather than the effect of the facilities for travelling.    In the time of Jane Austen the rich merchant still lived, usually, above his place of business in Cheapside,  Cornhill, Lombard Street,  Thames Street or Holborn ;   but before 1831 the wealthiest Londoners had abandoned the city.    Probably their fashionable neighbours of the West End had infected them with a distaste for cramped quarters.    The second exodus, that of the poorer  resident population,  took place after   1851.     It was  mainly a consequence of the higher value of city property which followed not only on the needs of a growing commerce, but also on a diminution of the area available for building caused by the making of new streets, and   the  widening  of   others.     Southwark  Bridge   was opened in 1819, and the new London Bridge, which occupied a slightly  different  site  from its  predecessor and therefore necessitated some diversion of the streets leading to it, in 1831.    Cannon Street was widened and extended to St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1854.    In 1856 the ground was cleared for the construction pf the Farringdon Road which continued Farringdon Street. The Holborn Valley Improvement Act, which resulted in the construction of Holborn Viaduct, was passed in 1864. Queen Victoria Street was opened in 1871 and Throgmortori Avenue in 1876.    In 1877 Temple Bar was removed.

In   1866, a few years after the  opening of the first underground railway, the persons who actually lived in the city constituted about one-eighth of those who were in it every day.     It was computed in   i860 that  four hundred thousand of them, walked daily; in and put pf the city, while eighty-eight thousand travelled by omnibus.    Of the smaller class who drove in cabs and private carriages  no estimate was  made.    The introduction of new means of communication has not only reduced the number of those who sleep in the city, or elsewhere in central London, but has also extended widely the limits of the  greater London in which Londoners have their dwellings ;   and the term, of such expansion has not yet been reached.

Thus the ancient city; of London, once alive with all the interests of a powerful and intelligent population, has become a place in which men make money by day, and which at night is left desolate, a dead thing of offices and warehouses.    It has been partly reconstructed in accordance with its new character.    For some decades extensive rebuilding has taken place, and large and ostentatious buildings, often Renascence or pseudo-Renascence, but sometimes bewilderingly mixed in style, have been raised in many city streets.     Evidently it is the rather vulgar ideal of their architects to produce an impression of wealth.    Constructurally they are uninteresting because they usually depend on iron frameworks.    Buildings of this type are found in all the prosperous commercial parts of the town, in the West Central district and in some West End streets as well as in the city.

The Londoners’ custom of living at a distance from the place of their work is not confined to the middle classes. In the industrial districts, East and South London, the value of space has induced many workers to live where a long walk, or even a train journey, separates them from the factory, yard or workshop, or other place in which they are employed.

In the residential parts of London, rich and poor, the most remarkable recent feature is the extent to which buildings containing flats have taken the place of houses constructed to accommodate one family.
Until almost the end of the nineteenth century there was no provision of a central authority for the general government  of Greater London.     The corporation of the  city continued  to  exercise  their ancient  functions,  although with the shrinkage of the resident population it became increasingly   difficult   to   fill   the   lesser   administrative offices.    The corporation of Westminster had governing powers   which   extended   to   the   limits   of   Westminster. Furnival’s  Inn and Staple  Inn, the four Inns  of Court, the   Charterhouse and  the  close  of Westminster Abbey were  ruled  by  corporations   of  their  owners ;    and  the Tower was a liberty of the crown.   Administrative powers outside the limits of the City were exercised by the vestries of parishes.    The whole of London was exempted from  the  Municipal  Corporations  Acts  of   1835,   1882 and    1883.     Certain   new   authorities   with   particular powers, which had for their sphere all the metropolitan area, were however provided.    In 1829 an Act of parlia-nt  created the  Metropolitan Police Force, an estab-,o htnent of police officers and courts.    But while this was ntitled after  1839 to assume power over any other district  within  fifteen  miles  of  Charing  Cross,  the  actual city was excepted from its scope.    In 1832 the city itself remodelled its police force on a plan which, in so far as day arrangements were concerned, approximated to the Metropolitan Police system while it made the Common Council the supreme authority, but which left the duties of a nightly police to the old agency of watchmen and beadles.     In Southwark, which belonged to their jurisdiction,  the  civic  authorities   maintained  order  by,  day only by means of one marshalman, one messenger and one housekeeper, while at night, since the borough had no wardmote, it had not even a watch.    Shortly before 1837, however, Southwark was included in the sphere of the Metropolitan Police.
Police duties on the river had already, early in the century, been allotted to a special force over which the corporation had no rights ; and in 1839 the Thames together with its creeks, inlets, waters, docks, wharves, quays and landing-places, within and without the city, was made part of the Metropolitan Police district.

The second great authority, which acquired power over the area of London in general, was that of the Metropolitan Board of Works. The primary object of its institution was the improvement of sanitary arrangements. These in 1847 were controlled by seven different commissions, including the City Commissioners of Sewers, each of which was entrusted with a particular district; The Metropolitan Board of Works was constituted under an Act for the better management of the metropolis passed in 1855. It acquired power over the whole metropolis area, / not excepting the city, and consisted of three members elected by the Common Council, and of forty, three chosen, singly, in twos or in threes, by each 0f twenty-three vestries and of fourteen unions of small vestries in the rest of London.
This body was the object of frequent jealousy on the part of the corporation, but accomplished much useful work. Hitherto all the main sewers of London had discharged into the Thames, and matter had remained stagnant at low tide, and at high tide had been forced into low-lying streets and houses. Many houses had no sewer iaccommodation, and every extension of the town had multiplied the filthy and dangerous cesspools. The whole drainage system was remodelled on scientific principles by the Board of Works.

They had power also over streets and roads ; and in such capacity were responsible for the finely constructed Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, for the widening and improvement of some streets, and the making of some new thoroughfares. They had a control over building. By various Acts they were charged with the formation of parks and the management of open spaces js and through their initiative Finsbury, South wark and Victoria Parks were opened to the public, and Blackheath, Hampstead Heath, Shepherd’s Bush Common, Hackney Commons, Tooting Bee Common, Leicester Square, Clapham Common, Bostall Heath, King’s Road Wastes, Parson’s Green, Brook Green, and the commons of Tooting Graveney, Eel Brook and Streatham were improved or acquired. The Fire Brigade was placed under their direction in  1866.    In  1872 by the Infant Life Protec-Act they became the local puthority for the execu-of provisions which regulated baby farming.    They ahle to compel the removal from the metropolitan were AUL    . of dangerous or obnoxious businesses.    iSy various they acquired power to supervise the construction of tramways, to regulate the speed of road locomotives, to execute the Act for the prevention of contagious diseases anion? animals, to exercise certain control over the water
and gas supplies.

Thus the Metropolitan Board of Works largely superseded the vestries and to some extent the corporation/ They were, in fact, as the only existing general authority, invested with powers to administer all the new departments of local government invented by the legislature, for which a special authority was not created.

Among such special authorities were the Conservators of the. Thames, constituted by an act of 185 1, on whom the ancient rights of conservancy exercised by the corporation devolved. They included the mayor, two aldermen and four Common Council men, but consisted also of five members appointed independently of the city ; and later acts which remodelled their body gave a preponderance to that section of them who were unconnected with the corporation.

In 1867 the Metropolitan Poor Act transferred the duties of poor relief from parochial authorities to Boards 01 Guardians, to each of which a parish or union pf Parishes was allotted.    As a result of the same Act the etropohtan Asylums Board was constituted to maintain and manage hospitals  for the sick,  the  infirm and the insane. e Ele"ientary Education Act of 1870 gave the control of public education in London to the London Scho Board.

Thus in 1888 London was governed in a somewh chaotic manner. The two corporations of the city atui of Westminster and the lesser long established local authorities existed side by side with new authorities, each of which in isolation, exercised certain new duties, and likewise superseded to some extent the functions of the ancient bodies.

In 1889, under the Local Government Act of the previous year, the whole London area, consisting of the city and of adjacent parts of Middlesex, Kent and Surrey became the new county of London. The boundaries were to some extent altered by another Act passed in 1899. The chief officers of the county are a lord lieutenant, a custos rotulorum, and a sheriff appointed by the Crown.

The central authority is the London County Council, which consists of a chairman, nineteen aldermen, and one hundred and eighteen councillors, of whom four are elected by the city, and two by each of fifty-seven other divisions of the county. This body acquired all previousf capacities of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the administrative functions of the quarter sessions in such parts of Kent, Middlesex and Surrey as are now in the new county, and certain powers of the Court of Aldermen and the justices of the city. In 1890 it became the local authority for the maintenance of lunatic asylums, and under the Education Act of 1903 the local education authority. By various acts the powers with regard to the maintenance of public health, inherited from the Board of Works, have been increased. The Metropolitan Police authority and the city’s man nt   of  its   own   P01ice>   as   we^   as   the  Poor   law; 3^       ernents, have not been affected by the creation of
the county,. T     1899 an Act of parliament abolished vestries and… trict boards  of work outside the limits  of the  cityy d   divided   the   whole   county,   except   the   city,   into; twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs, governed by metro-nolitan borough councils.    From the sphere of these all affairs connected with the church or ecclesiastical property are exempted.    They are the local authorities for the maintenance,  cleansing and lighting of streets  and for sanitary matters, and they may make bye-laws for the peace, order and good government of their boroughs.

The electors of the London County Council are qualified as are those of other county councils, while the electors of the Metropolitan Borough Councils must have the qualifications of those of urban or rural district councils elsewhere in the kingdom.

The corporation of London has survived the establishment of London County. The Common Council exercises within the city those powers which belong in other parts of the county to the borough councils, and has also certain capacities held elsewhere in London by the County Council. The powers of the City Commissioners of Sewers were vested in the Common Council in 1898.

In 1908 by the Port of London Act the process of unifying administration was finally advanced. The up-river limit of the port was fixed at Teddington Lock, and control below that point was granted to a new authority which consists of ten persons elected severally by the city corporation, the London County Council, the Board of  Trade,   the   Admiralty,   and  Trinity  House,   and   of
around the palace of Edward the Confessor and the Abbey, the famed Westminster Hall, the road from Lud-gate to Westminster Palace and the historic inns of the Strand, Whitehall and St. James’s, the houses of the Tudor and Stewart kings, the ancient royal parks, the West End of the early Stewarts around and north pf the Strand, and the modern West End with the squares and the " palaces " of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is hardly a street in all the district which has not been peopled by the great novelists pt the Georgian era. From the Restoration until the present day it has included all the theatres of London. The clubs have always been situated in it. The chief royal palace of London is still within its boundaries. It contains the law courts and the government offices ; and it is the principal shopping quarter of modern London.

The buildings of Westminster were extended in the nineteenth century over Belgravia and Pimlico. Thomas Cubitt leased some land known as the Five Fields from the Grosvenor family in 1825, and erected on it Eaton Square, Belgrave Square, Lowndes Square, Chesham Pl,ace and other rows of houses. Victoria Street was planned by the architect Abraham and opened in 18 51. It was one of the first London streets to contain mansions of flats, and was not completely built until 1887. Victoria’ Station, which now engrosses a large part of Pimlico, was opened in i860.

The topography of the West End was in the nineteenth’ century notably affected by the making of Regent Street. This street, distinguished by its fine line, was planned by Nash, the favourite architect of the Prince Regent, and was almost complete in 1820.    It was intended as a way
0f communication between Carlton House and Regent’s Park   and included the northern continuations of Lang-ham Place and Portland Place.    Foley House was bought as  part  of  the  plan.     Nash  adopted  a  device  of  the brothers Adam by which, in order to secure some uniformity,  a   single   facade   served  several  houses.     Regent Street   inaugurated   an  age   of   slight   building,   for   its houses  were of brick and  composition,  a  circumstance which inspired a popular epigram :-
" Augustus at Rome was for building renown’d, For of marble he left what of brick he had found ; But is not our Nash, too, a very great master ? He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster." >
The Quadrant was also designed by Nash. Its whole footway was covered by an effective arcade, supported by iron pillars, which was removed in 1848. The architect built All Soul’s Church at the northern .end of Langham Place, as a termination to the view from Oxford Street.

A   contributor   to   the   "Quarterly"   of   June,    1826, refers to  " the new square at  Charing  Cross," and the project of erecting on its north side " a splendid building,   designed  for  the   use   of  the   National   Gallery  pi Paintings and Sculpture  … to supplant the mews and to extend from Pall Mall East to St. Martin’s Church "   ; but Trafalgar Square in its present form, with Nelson’s Column as its central point, was not completed until about the  middle   of  the   century.     The  equestrian   statue   of George IV. is by Sir Francis Chantrey.    The lions are more recent additions and are after Landseer’s studies. Three modern thoroughfares traverse an historic dis-
trict and have obliterated some landmarks ; Shaftesbury Avenue, which cuts through Seven Dials rendered famous by Dickens, was opened in 1886, and Charing Cross Road in the following year. The wide Kingsway, which joins the Strand and Holborn, and is as yet only partially built, has existed only for a few years.

The classes of the population of Westminster are very various. There are the fashionable residential districts of Mayfair and Belgravia ; and in Soho, near the Strand, and near Victoria Street and the Abbey, there are crowded streets inhabited by casual workers and the poor who do not work, some of them persons of doubtful character, and other streets in which live the respectable poor who are in regular employment. Soho is still the foreign quarter of London. Middle class dwellings are found principally in the Victoria and the Pimlico district.

The small borough of Holborn is situated around New Oxford Street and Holborn, from Tottenham Court Road to the city’s boundary.   New Oxford Street, on the site of the  "Rookery" of St.  Giles was opened in   1847, and diverted the main line of traffic from High Street and Broad Street.    The buildings  of the borough are to a great extent commercial, but it includes the residential district of Bloomsbury, which, in modern times, is largely learned and respectable, and largely a place  of middle class hotels and boarding-houses,  but also slightly disreputable.    Much of the old lawyers’ quarter of London, Gray’s Inn, Furnival’s Inn, Staple Inn and Lincoln’s Inn, is in Holborn Borough, as well as the ancient parish of St.   Giles-in-the-Fields,   now  a  shabby  place   of   partly doubtful reputation.

The borough of St. Pancras, formed out of the parish so called, adjoins that of Holborn on the north and west. It reaches from Oxford Street to Highgate and is clustered   about   the   line   of   Tottenham   Court   Road,   the Hampstead Road, High Street, Kentish Town Road and High gate Road.    It is a development of the eighteenth century suburbs of Somers Town and Camden Town and the village of Kentish Town, and their connections.    The district is mean arid airless, and chiefly inhabited in its residential parts by members  of the lower middle class and by the working poor, and elsewhere by the tradespeople who supply their wants.    Certain streets are disreputable.    Tottenham Court Road is a shopping street of a more general character, a centre of the retail trade in furniture.

West of St. Pancras is the parish of St. Marylebone, now Marylebone borough, which historically is of great interest.    It extends on the north side of Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch, but reaches little eastwards of Cleveland Street.     On its north side it includes almost all Regent’s Park and much of Primrose Hill, and St. John’s Wood to the south of Boundary Road.     Its   western   boundary   is   Maida  Vale   and   the Edgware   Road.      It  thus  comprises  a  considerable  part of the " polite end " of the eighteenth century, as well as the northern part of Regent Street with Langham Place and Portland Place.    Regent’s Park is a royal park, and was designed by Nash together with all the terraces about !t but one, Cornwall Terrace, the work of Decimus Burton. Bryanston   and   Montagu   Squares,   and   Dorset   Square, which  occupies  the  site of  the  original   Lord’s   cricket ground,  date from the same period.    Blandford Square was   building   in    1833.    This   district   constitutes   the second extension in the early nineteenth century 0f fashionable London. The park was not accessible to the public until 1838. The Zoological Gardens were opened by the Zoological Society in 1828, and the Botanic Gardens by the Botanic Society in 1840.

The Duke of Bedford, who feared the nuisance of dust behind  Bedford  House,  insisted  on the  gardens  of the houses in Marylebone Road.     The street was part of a new    road    from    Paddington   to    Islington    made   in I756-7-    It  was a  crowded  thoroughfare in   1833 and its buildings   were   then   described   as   "pleasing   and   picturesque."     At  this  date  the  west  side  of   the  Edgware Road, of which part is now Maida Vale, was built as far as Kilburn Priory, and included some " detached houses of a most splendid style of architecture."    The suburb of St. John’s Wood was building and had " villa residences, situated   in  large   gardens,   erected  in  every  variety  of (architectural    elegance."     It    was    already   an   artists’ quarter, inhabited by Thomas and Edwin Landseer, R. J. Lane, G. Sintzenich, and Ugo Foscolo, the Italian poet.
In this period the poorest parts of Marylebone borough were that behind the Edgware Road, northwards from Marylebone Road to St. John’s Wood Road, and eastwards to Lissom Grove and Grove Road, which from the first was given up to the jerry builder ; " the densely populated mass of buildings north and south of Wigmore Street, from Duke Street and Marylebone Lane " ; and Portman Town, the district between Grove End Road and Lord’s.

In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the population of Marylebone borough was almost doubled. In the eighty years which have since elapsed there have h en many changes. The district about Regent’s Park nd that north of the western part of Oxford Street are till fashionable, but Harley Street and the streets around it have been very largely appropriated to doctors. St. John’s Wood, grown much more populous, is still a pleasant place of many gardens much inhabited by artists. The " splendid" detached houses of the Edgware Road have disappeared, but Maida Vale remains a road of private dwellings. The houses in Marylebone Road, no longer either pleasing or picturesque, have completely the air of decayed gentility. Of the neighbourhoods stigmatized in 1833 as wretchedly poor that of Grove End Road has been improved.

Paddington, the borough which adjoins Marylebone on the west, and which comprises the districts of Bayswater, Westbourne Park, Maida Vale and Kensal Green, is, in its urban character, largely a creation of the mid-Victorian age. In 1830 the Edgware Road might be called the [western boundary of London. At about that date the building of Bayswater was begun, and after the opening of Paddington station in 1840 there was considerable building in its vicinity. Yet in 1849 there were green fields to the north of Westbourne Grove and Bishop’s Road, and the houses on the east side of Maida Vale were not continuous. There are still small open spaces about Maida Vale, and the artisan quarter of Kensal Green is very modern.

he borough has been changed in recent years by the version of numerous houses in the Bayswater squares
boarding houses, and by the erection of many man-o l0ns of flats in Maida Vale.    Westbourne Grove is an Portant shopping street.    There are shabby streets in Paddington inhabited by the working classes, especially near Praed Street and the Harrow Road, but there is little extreme poverty.
The borough of Kensington styles itself, as the birthplace of Queen Victoria, not " metropolitan " but "royal." In 1837 it still consisted mainly of its several villages clustered around the principal highways, Kensington about the High Street, Brompton about the old Brompton Lane or Road, Little Chelsea on the north side of the Fulham road, Earl’s Court on either side of Earl’s Court Road or Lane, and Notting Hill around the Uxbridge Road. From Kensington to Knightsbridge there were however continuous buildings, except on an open space now occupied by the Albert Hall, which in the forties was the site of the Exhibition. In 1844 there were in Notting Hill High Street only two shops which were more than one storey high.

Modern Kensington contains the important shopping streets of Knightsbridge, the Brompton Road and Kensington High’ Street. It has some public buildings and monuments, all artistically deplorable ; the Albert Hall and Memorial, the Imperial Institute and the South Kensington Museum. St. Mary Abbots, the old church of the parish, has been rebuilt. There is considerable poverty in the Notting Hill district, especially in the vicinity of Ladbroke Grove and the Portobello Road ; but for the most part the borough is inhabited by well-to-do people, and, like other residential parts of London, it has been invaded by the flat. There are still some great houses on the road to Knightsbridge, and there are still streets and squares which have a sober dignity, reminiscent   of the  days  of  the  courtly  suburb.     Ken- sington has faintly the atmosphere of traditions which in Bayswater is so entirely lacking.

The small borough of Chelsea, once the parish of St. Luke, has a form roughly triangular indicated by Sloane Street,  Walton  Street  and  the  Fulham  Road,  and  the river.    The King’s Road was made by Charles II. as a way to Hampton Court, and was the private property of the crown until  1830.    The two districts, the older near the church and that of Hans Town, grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century.    Many great houses were however demolished about the year  1830, and in some cases squalid   streets   replaced   them.     Throughout   the   nineteenth century Chelsea, especially Cheyne Walk and its neighbourhood, was a favourite dwelling place of artists. It was inhabited by Turner, Rossetti, Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, George Eliot, and many more.    To some extent its pic-turesqueness   was   impaired   by   the   embanking   of   the Thames ;   yet Chelsea by the river has never ceased to be, in the opinion of many, the most beautiful place in all   London.     It   has   still   fine   houses   and   is   still   an artists’  quarter.    About King’s Road and the Embankment there are poor streets and many habitations of the working classes ;   and poor households are provided by the shops  of the King’s Road and by one  of the picturesque irregular markets  of  London which there has its site.

Sloane Street has shops which supply the less localized demands of a more luxurious class. As a residential ‘quarter its neighbourhood has increased in fashion. Dickens described Cadogan Place, which strictly is in Westminster, as " the one slight bond that joins two great extremes ;   it is the connecting link between the aristo- cratic pavements of Belgrave Square and the barbarism of Chelsea. It is in Sloane Street but not of it."1 gut in the present day there is no opprobrium attached to a connection with Sloane Street.

The three remaining boroughs in the western part of London county, Fulham, Hammersmith and Hampstead may even now be described as suburbs.
In 1813 Fulham parish consisted of the village around the ancient palace  of the bishops of London,  and the out-lying hamlets of Parson’s Green, Walham Green and North End.    Hammersmith was a riverside village which for more  than a hundred years had  been  " a  summer retreat for nobility and wealthy citizens."    In Hammersmith parish there were the hamlets of Shepherd’s Bush, Gaggle  Goose  Green,  Stamford Brook  Green,  Pallings-wick or Paddingwick Green and Brook Green.    The copyholders of both Hammersmith and Fulham had rights on the common of Wormholt Scrubbs.    In either place the principal   industry   was   market   gardening   for   Covent Garden and other London centres of distribution.

There was little change between the years 1813 and 1849 ; and the modern urban characters of these two boroughs is greatly due to the increased means of communication. They are largely inhabited by respectable working people and members of the lower middle class. Some riverside .property is occupied by casual labourers and rough characters.

Hampstead in the sixteenth century is said to have had for   its   principal   residents   the   washerwomen   of   " the nobility,  gentry and chief citizens."     Later it attracted the retired tradesman who wished to establish himself in 1 " Nicholas Nicldeby," the country. Early in the eighteenth century Hampstead Wells were opened, and about 1706 a comedy by Baker called " Hampstead Heath," which had for subject the pleasures of the Wells and of the adjacent assembly rooms, was produced at Drury Lane.

In   1818 buildings  "stood thick" about High Street and   Heath   Street,   and   between  High  Street   and  the Heath,  and there were elsewhere scattered houses,  and the hamlets of Frognal, West End, Kilburn,1 North End, Pond Street and Haverstock Hill.    But even in 1849 the houses up to the limit of the borough were, outside the village   about   High   Street,   detached,   and  commanded views of green fields and of hills.    The latest additions have been the buildings in West Hampstead and in the Belsize Park district, which date from, the late nineteenth century.

These finally brought Hampstead within the vast tract of London ; and the annexation was completed by the construction, two or three years ago, of the Hampstead Tube Railway. But until very recent times Hampstead was a pleasant outlying village, and it has not yet lost
its individuality.

From the time of FitzStephen the land to the north of the city was a pleasure ground of Londoners. In it they followed athletic pursuits and practised archery ; and in it, at a later date, the trained bands were exercised and mustered. Some sort of right of common was claimed by the citizens over the Moorfields and Finsbury Fields and an indefinite tract stretching to the north of these, for in 1516a protest was made against certain enclosures.
‘ Before this time," says Hall the chronicler, "the towns 1 Part of Kilburn is in Willesden and outside London County.

about  London,   as   Islington,   Hoxston,   Shoredifch,  and other, had so enclosed the common fields with hedges and ditches,  that nother the young men of the  City might shoot,   not  the  auncient  persons  might  walk  for  their pleasure in the fields, except either their bows and arrows were   broken   or  taken  away,   or  the  honest  and  substantial  persons  arrested  or  indicted,  saying that  ‘ No Londoner should go out of the City but in the highways.’ This  saying sore grieved the  Londoners,  and  sodianly this year a great number of the city assembled themselves in a morning, and a turner in a fool’s coat came crying through the city,   ‘ Shovels and Spades,’ and so many people followed that it was wonder, and within a short  space all  the hedges about  the  towns  were  cast down, and the ditches filled, and everything made plain, the workmen were so diligent."    " So after," Hall concludes, " the fields were never hedged " ;   yet Stow, half a century later, states that they were " in worse case than ever, by means of inclosure for gardens, wherein are builjt many   fair  summer-houses."    Throughout   most   of  the seventeenth century, however, a very considerable remnant of  unenclosed  land  was  left  to  the  enjoyment   of  the citizens.    " Walked over the fields to Kingsland and back again," wrote Pepys in May,  1667;   "a walk, I think, I  have not taken these twenty years ;   but puts me in mind of my boy time, when I boarded at Kingsland, and used to shoot with my bow and arrows in this field." Artillery  Ground  is  part  of a much  larger  tract over which, as late as  1792, the Artillery Company successfully claimed a right of practice.
Of the northern boroughs that of Finsbury consists of the district of Clerkenwell, of a former part of the parish r gt Giles Cripplegate, which in the eighteenth century h came St. Luke’s parish, of an extra-civic division of St Sepulchre’s parish, and of the liberties of Charterhouse and Glasshouse Yard.

Its earliest growth as an urban place must be ascribed to the situation in it of religious houses ; Charterhouse, the Benedictine nunnery of St. Mary on the present site of St. James’s church, and the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, of which the place is marked by St. John’s Square. The well which named Clerkenwell was near the priory, and Stow relates that on the green beside it, Clerkenwell Green, " the parish clerks of London . . . of old time were accustomed . . . yearly to assemble, and to play some large history of Holy Scripture."

In the seventeenth century several distinguished persons came to live in this suburb, and it was, moreover, one of those most attractive to the industrial population who wished to escape from the tyranny of the companies. But the citizens still resorted to the northern part of the modern borough in search of rural pleasures. Sadler’s Wells, sometimes called Islington Wells, near the present junction of Rosebery Avenue and St. John’s Street, were opened in 1683, and their waters were drunk throughout the eighteenth century. Certain bowling greens and houses of entertainment, of which one was the first Sadler’s Wells Theatre, were near them.

Building in the northern part of Finsbury known as Pentonville began about the year 1773, and the intervening district of the borough was covered with streets ^nd buildings in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Modern Finsbury is a crowded and busy place of unlovely streets inhabited by the poor, sometimes  of themiserable or even criminal class, sometimes respectabl iworking people. A few eighteenth-century brick houSe strangely distinguished beside the uninteresting building which flank them, can still be seen, and many streets and squares plainly consist of former dwellings of the middle classes, deserted at the time of the great migration to the suburbs. For a long period the trade of working watchmakers, clockmakers and jewellers, and such subsidiary industries as those of lapidaries and hair-workers, centred in Clerkenwell. The centre of the high-class jewellery trades is now Hatton Garden, which is immediately outside the western limit of Finsbury borough, but there are still in Clerkenwell a considerable number of jobbing jewellers. Dealers in precious stones are in Hatton Garden, lapidaries in Clerkenwell or in Soho. The watchmaking and clockmaking trades still centre in Clerkenwell ; but many of the men employed, both in them and in the jewellery trade, live further afield in North London.

The borough of Shoreditch, formed from the parish of St. Leonard Shoreditch, adjoins Finsbury on the west and the city on the south. It consisted originally of the liberty of Norton Folgate, outside the city’s liberties, Which belonged to St. Paul’s Cathedral, the ancient village of Shoreditch on the old road which led northwards from Bishopsgate, the outlying village of Hoxton on the north side of the way now Old Street, and the hamlet of Haggerston at a more northerly point of the road from Bishopsgate. Halliwell Priory, which has named Holywell Street and Holywell Lane, was in the parish. Norton Folgate had been built over in 1720; there were then houses also on either side of the High et   extending to the eastern limit of the parish, and, ome places, as far west as Curtain Road ; and Hoxton, o11   confined to  the  north  side  of  Old  Street,  had a arket place and various streets.    The Curtain Road, so lied after the Elizabethan playhouse which had been ituated in it,  did not yet reach to  Old  Street.    The building of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has converted Shoreditch borough into a poor and crowded neighbourhood much like that of Finsbury.   Its sole claim to beauty  is  in  the  fine perspective  of  the  Kingsland Road, the beginning of Ermine Street, along which from Roman times men have travelled from London to the north.   The district is mainly one of artisans.   The furniture trade is largely localized in the Curtain Road and its neighbourhood.

Bethnal Green was originally a part of Stepney parish. The settlement in it of Huguenot weavers was a stimulus to rapid growth ;   and in 1720 the hamlet of Spitalfields had come to be well populated and closely built.     In 1743   the   inhabitants   of   all   Bethnal   Green   were   so numerous that it was constituted a distinct parish with a church dedicated to St. Matthew.    Before  1839 it was necessary to build a second church, and such was the subsequent increase of population that before 1891 twelve additional churches were erected.

Modern Bethnal Green is poor and crowded, a place of wide streets and mean houses. Some needed freshness is afforded by the Victoria Park. The district is, like Shoreditch, largely inhabited by artisans. The weavers have from the latter end of the nineteenth century been on the decrease. Some streets have all the worst characteristics of a slum.

The parish of St. Luke, Islington, comprised in 17-5,. the considerable village of Islington on the road from London to St. Albans, the hamlets of Upper and Lower Holloway, Newington Green and Kingsland Green, and the manors of Highbury, Canonbury, and Barnsbury. ft had assumed a suburban character in 1842 when continuous buildings connected it with the city, but it still included much open land. In the latter half of the nineteenth’ century it was built over entirely. It is now inhabited chiefly by the working poor and by families of the lower middle class ; here and there are squalid localities in which dwell the wretchedly poor. Highbury Fields form’ the one open space left to this borough, which some sixty years ago was a pleasant place.

Hackney village contained in 1795 several streets, and in the parish there were the hamlets of Clapton, Homer-ton, Dalston, Shacklewell, and a part of Kingsland.    A manor was named the Wick.    In Hackney, as in other places equally near to London, there were, from the sixteenth century onwards, various fine houses ; many of them were demolished in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century.     The   conversion  of  this  parish  into  part  of London   took  place   mainly   in   the  latter   half   of  the nineteenth   century,   and   some   important   open   spaces have been left to it ;   London Fields,  Hackney Downs and Stoke Newington Common.    Moreover, Victoria Park lies   around  its  south  eastern  boundary,  and   Hackney Marsh,  a public  park  of  some  extent,   is  at  its  south eastern, and Hampton Llill near its northern limit.   Hackney has not, therefore, become one of the monotonous and mean districts  of London.    There are pleasant houses, inhabited  by  well-to-do  people,  around  Victoria  Park, Hackney Downs and Stamford Hill. Extreme poverty is found also, especially in Lower Clapton and near the river Tea. The borough is largely inhabited by respectable working people and by persons of the clerkly and shop-keeping classes.

The borough of Stoke Newington, formed of the parish of St. Mary, Stoke Newington, together with a part of South Hornsey, has, in modern times, a character very like that of Hackney. The village which was its nucleus was situated about Church Street, and was in 1849 a village only. Eastwards  of the city, between the liberties and the river Lea, with the Thames as a southern boundary, there are only two boroughs, Stepney and Poplar.   The district is traversed by an ancient thoroughfare, the way from London to Essex, from Aldgate along Whitechapel High Street,   Whitechapel  Road,   Mile   End  Road,  and   Bow. Road,  and  by  a  great  nineteenth-century  road,   Commercial Road, which from Whitechapel High Street leads past the docks eastwards to the road to Barking,  and which by Commercial Street is connected with North London. East London was never fashionable.    From Aldgate a straggling suburb, of cottages and dirty alleys, reached in the beginning of the seventeenth century half a mile beyond Whitechapel.    On the river bank " a continual street,   or  filthy  straight  passage,  with  alleys   of  small tenements or cottages builded," stretched almost to Rat-cliff.     Many   small   tenements   had   lately   been   raised towards the manor of Shadwell.    Ratcliff had increased to the eastward so that it was joined to Limehouse, and Premises  of shipwrights and small dwellings  of sailors ^tended almost to Poplar and Blackwall.    It is said that between 1590 and 1630 the population of the distrirf east of the city, especially of its waterside part, Wa trebled. Although the eastward extension of London was humble, there were here and there within the present limits of Stepney and Poplar boroughs, as in Bethnal Green, country houses of wealthy men who wished to live near the town. In 1720 " many fine seats and noble structures " were still " scattered about those parts," although they had been abandoned to meaner uses.

Sir Christopher Wren in the late seventeenth century reported on the Mile End Road as a healthy place convenient for the habitation of mariners, and of manufacturers connected with shipping. Building along this road was therefore undertaken in a less haphazard fashion than heretofore. There were along the way from Aid-gate, in 1720, the populous parish of Whitechapel, and the hamlets of Mile End New Town, which was joined, to Spitalfields, and of Mile End Old Town " built with many good houses, inhabited with divers sea captains and commanders of ships." Yet the northern part of Stepney had still " the face of a country, affording everything to render it pleasant."

Stepney by the river had already something of its modern importance with regard to shipping ; it was distinguished by " Populousness, traffic, commerce, havens, shipping, manufacture, plenty and wealth." Wapping, Shadwell, Ratcliff and Limehouse formed to the eastern limit of the present borough, along the river bank, a continuous line of buildings which to the north extended to Cable Street or beyond it. White House Street, which had buildings on both sides, led, as it does now, from Ratcliff to Stepney Church and thence to Mile End. ^7IT an  insignificant hamlet  in  Stepney parish
P°P    1   there was   however, a wet dock of unusual The Isle of Dogs was size ^ B,afW ,f:f nIL was " a fine rich level for fattening cattle."

In the latter part of the eighteenth century the docks at Blackwall were extended until they covered an area of nineteen   acres.    The   buildings   of   Limehouse   and   of Poplar had met by the middle of the nineteenth century ; yet, beyond Whitechapel, East London, except near the river, where streets, lanes and houses were closely packed, did not yet constitute a crowded district.    There were open spaces especially within the limits of modern Poplar. Beside the river Lea the villages of Stratford-le-Bow or Bow and Bromley-by-Bow, of which both are now part of that borough, had not yet lost individuality.    Both the West India Docks and the London Docks were at this time in existence.    The Isle of Dogs was still a deserted tract.

Mr. Charles Booth, in his " Life *"\Lah™\™™o don," considers modern Stepney borough as divided into the several districts of Whitechapel, St. George s-m-the-East, which is a parish formed of central Stepney m the eighteenth century, Mile End Old Town, and the largely riverside area which alone still belongs to Stepney parish.

Whitechapel is the Jewish quarter, and a great proportion of the inhabitants follow the employments of the Jews ; they are tailors, bootmakers, tobacco workers, street sellers and general dealers. A small percentage are employers of labour, usually sweated.
Stepney is a labourers’ district, and St. Georges partakes of the two characters.    Mile End has     a little of everything ; " the labour of Stepney, the trade and in. dustry of Whitechapel, and the artisan element of Bethnal Green and Shoreditch ; and it " very closely represents the average " of East London.

Of all the poor districts which surround the city 0t" the north, the east and the south, St. George’s is, in the opinion of Mr. Booth, " the most desolate." It has not like some of the others, the charm of a life which is vivid even if it is miserable. It has that squalor, that hopeless, unabashed and unutterably dull poverty which’ is the limit of degradation. The street life of Whitechapel, on the other hand, is full of colour and incident, of drama, of possibilities. No race could be more different from another than are the Whitechapel Jews from that class of the hopeless and the degenerate who drift into the worst slums of the East End. The Jews have many hopes and schemes ; they have quick brains and strong feelings, and many of them live in considerable comfort. To know all this it is only necessary to watch them when in Petticoat Lane * on Sunday mornings they noisily and showily sell to Christians clothes, food, furniture, gaudy ornaments, patent medicines, all manner of necessaries and luxuries. There are some other street markets in Whitechapel. The fanciers bring pet birds, rabbits and guinea pigs to sell in Brick Lane; and, as in other poor quarters of London, the coster-mongers on Saturday night drive a thriving trade in cheap food, beneath the glare of flaring torches.

Stepney parish has two miles of water frontage, which have all the beauty of the misty river and its strange crafts and sounds, with the half-seen buildings of distant banks. 1 Now officially called Middlesex Street. is moreover intersected by the Regent’s Canal, and herefore it derives interest front the waterside and river , rin<T population who form a section of its inhabitants, nd who have usually a wider outlook than the very poor of inland places. Like Whitechapel it has a foreign element. Mile End is comparatively fresh and clean, and has frequent small open spaces.
Poplar now includes a large area of dockyards, of which the whole Isle of Dogs is practically part. About the fifteenth-century church of Bow some little steep-roofed houses, and the line of the streets, still suggest the roadside village, Stratford-atte-Bow, which grew up about the bridge over the river Lea ; and even now Bow and Bromley have not the crowded and closely-packed streets of central London. North Bow and some other parts of Poplar have, however, been impropriated by the jerry builders. " Desolate looking streets spring into existence and fall into decay with startling rapidity, and are only made habitable by successive waves of occupation." The foreign element in the population of Poplar is small. The inhabitants are mainly labourers and artisans.
The topography of South London has been largely affected by the building of the several bridges over the Thames. Its oldest part was situated at the southern end of the first bridge of all, the ancient borough of Southwark, of which the history begins before the Norman Conquest.
Southwark in mediaeval times had importance as the place in which were situated the inns of some great ecclesiastics. Its river bank, Bankside and Tooley Street, was as convenient a place as the Strand for the houses of men who wished to live where, by way of the river, they had   easy   access   to   parliament   and   the   court.     The borough was otherwise distinguished by the disorder and the loose morals of its inhabitants.    This was due to its proximity to the city combined with its exemption from the civic jurisdiction ;   it was an easy place of refuge for London criminals.    From the reign of Edward III. successive charters of kings placed it within the scope of the authorities of the city ;   yet its independent history had produced certain peculiarities and customs which the royal grants did not completely override, and although’, after a grant by Edward VI., Southwark became Bridge Ward Without, no complete uniformity between its arrangements and those of other wards in the city was ever produced. A  second  cause  of disorder  was  the  existence  in  the borough, down to the final abolition of such institutions, of an unusual number of places of exempt jurisdiction, in which  immunity from arrest under the public law was enjoyed.    Paris  Garden,  as a former possession  of the Knights   Templars,   the   adjacent   Clink   liberty, which belonged to the bishop of Winchester, the Mint which adjoined the King’s Bench and Marshalsea prisons, were all such privileged places, and one or other of them was, in different periods, a popular haven for criminals and debtors.    Moreover, they were convenient sites for places of amusement to which the city authorities might take exception.    The bear gardens and playhouses in the Paris Garden and the Clink Liberty have already been noticed. In the Clink there were situated also from an early period the public stewes which were abolished only under Henry VIII.  When, after the dissolution of religious houses, most of the inns of ecclesiastics in Southwark were converted to other uses,  the character of the borough suffered a further degeneration.
 
Throughout the middle ages it was fairly populous. Its most ancient thoroughfare is the road from the city to Kent, now the Borough, the High Street, Tabard Street and the Old Kent Road. Newington Causeway, which continues the High Street towards Newington, is a mediaeval way, as are Long Lane and Abbey Street which led to Bermondsey Abbey, and, by the river, Bankside and Tooley Street or St. Olave’s Street. The old borough had a river frontage which extended eastwards as far as Dockhead, but towards the south it included an area rather less than that of the metropolitan borough.
Of  the  other  boroughs   of  South  London  none   had until   modern   times   an   urban   character.    Bermondsey derived some importance from the situation in it of the great abbey of St. Saviour.    Its history, as recorded in the  monastic  chronicles,   is  largely  concerned  with  recurrent floods of the river over its low-lying territory ; and in modern times it is still a damp and foggy place, very suggestive of the swamps which once were on its site.    Lambeth is historical because it has contained for many centuries the archiepiscopal palace.    There were in Lambeth parish the manor of Kennington, a possession of the Black Prince and of his descendants, kings of England, the manors of Vauxhall and Stockwell, the district of Brixton, and the hill called Heme Hill.    Rotherhithe, now part of Bermondsey, was known for its shipping even in   the   sixteenth   century.     Battersea,   and,   beyond   it, Clapham, Wandsworth, Putney and Roehampton, Streat-ham and Tooting, which now. form Wandsworth borough, were   only   villages   until   modern   times.     Camberwell borough, which includes the early parishes of Newing-ton,  with its hamlet of Walworth,  and  of  Camberwell, with its hamlets of Peckham and Dulwich, was equally rural.     Of  the  boroughs   which  were  taken   from  the county of Kent, Deptford, like Rotherhithe, was anciently important in connection with shipping, for Henry VIII made there a dock in which the royal ships were built and repaired.    The parish included the hamlet of New Cross.    Greenwich is celebrated for the palace and park made by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, on an ancient royal manor, and a favourite residence of Edward IV. and of later kings and  queens before the  Civil Wars. A  rebuilding of  the palace was begun  by  Charles II., yet it did not return to its ancient use, but, by a grant of William and Mary, became Greenwich hospital.    The Ranger’s House was part of the old palace.     Charlton village stood within the limits  of Greenwich borough. Docks were made at Woolwich in the reign of Elizabeth, and  this  village  gradually  superseded  Deptford  as  the place in which the royal navy was built.    The metropolitan borough of Woolwich comprises the old parishes of Woolwich, Plumstead, and Eltham, which included the hamlet of Shooter’s Hill, and which contained a palace inhabited by kings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Within the present boundaries of Lewisham borough were Lee parish, and the parish of Lewisham, with its hamlets of Perry Street, South End, and Sydenham.    Sydenham Wells Park commemorates the discovery in the village, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, of some mineral springs, and its consequent increase in size and prosperity.
As elsewhere around London the districts on the south side of the river, which were absorbed in the town £* a late date, were places for the country houses of retired citizens and others whose tastes were not completely rural. Such persons were living in the eighteenth century iri most  of the villages  which went tQ form the southern metropolitan boroughs.

Westminster Bridge was opened in  1750, Blackfriars Bridge in  1768, and Battersea Bridge in   1772.    As a consequence new thoroughfares were made, notably, in Southwark   and   Lambeth,   several   of   those   important streets which centre in St. George’s Circus, and houses, population  and  business  increased  rapidly.     A  further advance followed on the opening of Vauxhall Bridge in 1816,  of Waterloo Bridge in   1817 and of Southwark Bridge in 1819, and on the making of the new London Bridge.    These bridges have effected the annexation of South London, and a curious reproduction on the south bank of the Thames of the conditions which prevail on the north ;   a portion of Southwark near the river has become part  of the city, a place of offices and warehouses deserted every night ;  around it the rest of South-owark, Bermondsey, Lambeth, and a part  of Batttersea, form a ring of districts which correspond in character to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Stepney ;  beyond them to the south and west, as to the north and west of the inner boroughs  on the north side, are prosperous residential quarters, and to the east there are the boroughs which, like Poplar, are chiefly important for their dockyards.

The bridges over the Thames built since the middle of the nineteenth century have been less instrumental in extending London, and have had consequence rather as a means of diverting traffic.
In modern South London the great thoroughfares which are connected with the bridges centre at a meeting of ways known by the name of a public house, the Elephant and Castle. These streets, which form the main lines of communication, are wide and comparatively prosperous but behind them a network of smaller streets, alleys and courts traverses some of the most wretched neighbourhoods in all London.

The old borough still enjoys the infamous distinction of a pre-eminently evil reputation. It is a district which has not the squalid monotony of some parts of the East End ; but to the disreputable traditions of its past it has added in modern times a certain new meanness which proceeds from extreme poverty and decay. The ancient streets of Southwark have a depressing quality which is their own. They have an individual atmosphere born both of the shiftless, unlovely, and tragically cheerful poor who now inhabit them, and of those graceless scoundrels and brawlers who lived in old Southwark, in Dirty Lane and Melancholie Walk.

East of the old borough, along the river bank to the south of Jamaica Road, there is another very miserable quarter ; and there are yet others in Lambeth, in Batter-sea, and near Clapham Junction.
Beyond these neighbourhoods, in southern Bermondsey, Camberwell, Lambeth, much of Battersea, and part of Wandsworth, and much of Deptford, the houses are mainly dwellings of the poor in regular employment. To a great extent the district is suburban ; many of its inhabitants daily cross the bridges to go to their work in London north of the Thames ; others are employed in the factories of Bermondsey, Southwark, Lambeth, Batter-sea, and Greenwich. The leather trade centres about the Leather  Market in Bermondsey, and there is the usual ount of waterside labour along the river bank.  A large rt  of Rotherhithe has been engrossed by the Surrey rorrrmercial  Tjocks ;   and  jn  Woolwich employment  is rovided by the dockyards and the arsenal. The   outlying   district   of   South   London   is   entirely uburban.    The large majority of its inhabitants, whether the wealthy merchant of Dulwich or  Wandsworth or the artisan of Brixton, travel every morning to their work in the central part of the town.