YOUNG LONDON.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 350, 25 November 1879, Page 2

YOUNG LONDON.

Westboubne Grove and Thereabouts,

(From the Daily Telegraph, July 2.)

* There was, whefr I avas a child, only the faintest nucleus of a Belgravia, and the [greater part of Pimlico was a marsh. There was in a fashionably residential ' sense, no Tyburnia whatsoever. Notting Hill and West Kensington were still in the womb of Time. Brompton was a secluded I village, intersected by beautiful green i lanes. Where now is South Kensington I were dairy farms and market gardens, Glapham, Kilbnrn, Cricklewood, Hammersmith, Turnham Green, were secluded hamlets whither weary Londoners of the middle classes, who could not afford a trip to Gravesend, much less to Margate, retired, towards the close of summer, to rusticate for a few weeks. The new Houses of Parliament were unbuilt. The new St. Thomas' Hospital was not yet thought ! of. Mr Spurgeon and his Tabernacle to boot were non-existent. street was a wretched cul de sac in the midst of a vile slum. Gilbert Scott had yet to erect the new Foreign Office, and Charles Barry the new Home Office and Treasury buildings ; and the official residence of the Prime Minister was in such a ricketty condition that the Premier never gave a dinner in Downing street without misgivings as to the contingency of the hospitable board, guests and all, tumbling into the cellars; while to give a ball was absolutely impossible, in view of the danger of the floor of the ballroom giving way, and the dancers being precipitated into the dining-room. There was no Trafalgar Square, and*no National Ga'lery. , The site of the latter was occupied by a ramshackle pile called the Kings-mews, and the latter was a congeries of half-demolished stables. The church of St. Martin's-in-the-fielde and the approaches to Charing Cross were blocked up by a labyrinth of squalid cookshbps, low taverns, and livery stables ; there was no Lowther. Arcade, no Adelaide, Gallery, and obviously, no Gatti's ice and coffee establishment to replace that precursor of the Polytechnic Instjtuflen, which had yet

to be built and to be b.urrit .down. Old Exeter Change which ctimbered the roadway in the Strand below Wellington street, and the upper storey of which was occuby a wild beast show, had only iustbeen" demolished; but new Exeter Change,' -a lamentable little arcade full" of 'shop? which never attracted any customers —a circumstance, scarcely to be wondered at, since, asra rule, the shopkeepers had > nothing to Bell-jyas yet unbuilt, and naturally uhpulled T downagairi to make way, first for an unsuccessful music-hall, and, next, for the prosperous Gaiety Theatre , and Messrs Spiers and Pond's Gaiety Restaurant. Carltan House Palace had recently been removed, but the mansions known as Carlton House Gardens were unbuilt and the foundations of the clumsy Duke of York's column were not yet laid. Pall Mall was full of handsome shops, taverns, coffee-houses, and gentlemen's mansions; bat it could boast no Reform and no Travellers' Clubs, no Carlton and no Oxford and Cambridge—and certainly no Beaconsfield Club—no Junior Carlton, no Army and Navy, and no Marlborough. In Bt James , street the, Thatched House Tavern was really a tavern with a high pitched roof of thatch at the bottom of a yard; the'site of the present Devonshire" Club" was occupied by CrpckfordV, a notorious gambling house, -where a whole generation of noblemen, and gentlemen with "plenty money ho brains "were irretrievably ruined ; and in the same street were at least a dozen common gambling dens, sigpificantly known aa " hells." The Conservative! the Royal Thames Yacht and the Guards' Club—which subsequenly migrated from St James' street to its present habitat in Pall Mall—were not built. In Leicester Square, Saville House,, occupying the site of the old mansion of the Saville family, where fthe Earl ; of Carmarthen entertained Peter the Great, was still standing, a variety ffl Ases, Miss Liriwood's exhibition of pictures in needlework among thenumber. Where now stands Archbishop Tenisoti's Grammar School, stood the Sablpnjere Hotel, an inn much frequented, .by foreigners, and which was the self-same hoftseerst the habitation of William Hogarth ;' and the; square, was as yet unadorned by the remarkable minaretted edifice originally designed to serve as a " Panopticon of Science add Art,! , afid which ib; mow the Albambra Theatre.. There was no St. Martin's BatbjS and Washhouses—in point of fact,' there were no. public bath and washhouses in London at all, any more than there were Refuges for the Destitute, Shoeblack Brigades, or, Commissionaires. Between Leicester square and Coventry , street on the west, and the square and St. Martin's Lane on the east, were two foul little networka of .alleys full ,of hovels', the proprietors oi which stood at their, doors, passionately entreating all passers-by to purchase bonnets and others articles of millinery. There was no Cranbourrie ntreet and no Garrick street; Bedfordbury was,.? perilous place for people with any moneyin theirpoeket&'to pass through either by night or by day ; Dudley street boie its original name of Monmouth street; and from it and Seven Dials right into Bloomsbury stretched an abominable region choked with low shops and lower* lodging; houses, swarming with thieves, beggars and receivers of stolen goods—a region facetiously termed the "Holy Land," but parochially known and infamuos as St. Giles.'