London—To-day and Yesterday
London. By E. V. Lucas. Illustrated in colour and monotone. (Methuen. 20s.)
IF sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, then present-day Londoners must be removed from at all events the deepest bitterness of sorrow, for there are only too many delightful things—old alms-houses, quaint seventeenth- century (or earlier) dwellings, dreamy court-yards, charming old inns—which they cannot now remember. But a revived remembrance is worth while, and it is for that reason that Lost London, as illustrated by Mr. Crowther's colourful brush and unerring pencil between the years of 1879 and 1887, is of importance both to the antiquarian and indeed to all who love beauty in architecture. Mr. Beresford Chan- cellor, who is-responsible for the text (may we ask him why he writes " the data is fuller " ?) conducts us on a pleasantly gossiping pilgrimage from Chelsea to the Strand, across the river through The Borough, and back again to Chelsea over Battersea Bridge. In Battersea close to the Church is still to be seen one of London's old taverns, in the shape of
the Raven, practically unchanged since Crowther sketched it forty years ago, with its beautiful Jacobean gables looking kindly down on a group of old-world dwellings that may have stood there these two hundred years. A little may one wonder that Crowther's artistic eye did not light upon the exquisite cluster of old outside-staired houses still standing in Crooked Billet Yard hard by Shoreditch Church, or on the Geffrye alms-houses (now a furniture museum) in Kingsland Road. But perhaps it did, for we find here only a selection of the vast number of drawings which Crowther executed.
The Geffrye Museum anyhow receives full treatment in E. V. Lucas's London, which is a rearranged reprint with many alterations of that author's previous books, A Wanderer in London and London Revisited. " A reference book," he calls it, but it is a reference book packed full of wit and the right kind of information.
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