Or, to bring the same question nearer to our own
time, what would the inhabitant of London of, say, a hundred and fifty years ago be able to make out of the geography of London to-day ? Would be be able to find his way from Islington to Vauxhall, or would the perpetual environment of walls and houses in which he would find himself blot out his horizon,—and it is chiefly by the shape of the horizon that men travel in roadless countries, as, for instance, in the wilds of a Scottish deer-forest ? Probably the disappearance of the horizon would balk him completely ; he would be blinded by the omnipresent walls. And, indeed, though it is not an extraordinary thing—for the growth of population follows natural laws—it would certainly seem an extraordinary thing to such a traveller that the London of 1750 could ever grow into the London of to-day. To grasp the meaning and the tendencies of that growth, he would have to study a series of maps of London such as now find places on our bookshelves year after year, each map becoming out of date on every suc- ceeding first of January,—if, indeed, he could obtain a map corresponding with each succeeding year, for it is only during the last fifty years or so that the increasing growth of London has rendered local maps more and more necessary. And how would he find a map of London of 1750—an early Georgian period----differing from a map of London of to-day ? Chiefly, of course, he would be struck by the enormous spread of the grip of brick and pavement, by the growth and the strength of the octopus of building; especially, too, he would notice that whereas in the middle years of the eighteenth century the growth of London tended towards east and west, in a natural course along the banks of the river, during the last two or three decades there has been an enormous growth north and south. And that growth has been of curiously differing kinds. London has spread north, east, south, and west, but towards each point of the compass she has carried a different spirit, almost a different class of men. Towards the east she has attracted mainly, indeed almost entirely, the millions of workers, the meaning of whose grey lives hardly is present, even to-day, to the average spectator of the life of a great city,—so nebulous has become the atmosphere of its growing outskirts. Towards the west she will probably expand in much the same way, out through Acton, Ealing, and Drayton towards Slough, but never carrying with her the same kind of suburbs as are to be found growing north and south of the river. North and south the tendency is towards what are known, in the auctioneer's language, as residential neighbour- hoods ; east and west grows a succession of what may best be classed, perhaps, as "dwellings,"—rows of small, unim- portant-looking houses, which contain, nevertheless, a vast proportion of the life and energy of the greatest of business cities.
What was London in the days of George II.? Sir Walter Besant some ten years ago tried to draw the picture of its spreading arms. "Eastward," he wrote, "the City had thrown out a long arm by the riverside. St. Katherine's Precinct was crowded ; streets, two and three deep, stretched along the river bank as far as Limehouse, but no farther. These were inhabited by the people who made their living on
already a crowded suburb, filled with working men. This was one of the quarters where the London mob was born and bred, and free from the interference of clergy or rich folk. Clerkenwell, with the parts about Smithfield, was another
district dear to thieves, pickpockets and rowdies On the north side, Moorfields still remained an open space; beyond lay Hoxton Fields, White Conduit Fields, Lamb's Conduit Fields, and Marylebone Fields. The suburb of Bloomsbury was beginning." (" Beginning" only,—and in the hundred and fifty years since that date it has passed from a fashionable neighbourhood into a district of boarding- houses.) "A crowded suburb had sprung up north of the Strand. Westminster was a great city by itself. Southwark, now a borough with half a million people, as great as Liver- pool" (the population of Liverpool in 1901 was six hundred and eighty-six thousand), "occupied then a little strip of marshy land not half a mile broad at its widest. East and West, to Lambeth on the one side and to Redriff on the other, was a narrow strip of riverside, dotted with houses and hamlets." If that is a true picture of London in 1750, what is the appearance of a map of London to-day ?—of course dis- regarding county boundaries, and simply looking at London as the outsider sees it, careless of this or that statutory limi- tation. It is customary to think of London as beginning at Charing Cross, and extending out through the four-mile cab radius towards her suburbs. But of course the centre of London does not lie at Charing Cross, since Charing Cross is the fountain only of one of the great arteries which lead her blood south ; the heart of London is in the centre of, and con- nected with, all the great arteries. It lies somewhere between all the termini of the roads which take her working millions out of her to the compass's four quarters : to the north as far as Enfield and Barnet; to the east to Ilford, Romford, Erith, almost to Dartford ; to the west to Harrow, Hayes, and Hounslow ; and to the spreading south as far as Weybridge, Epsom, Croydon, Bromley, and Chislehurst. The arteries are lengthening every year ; to-day you cannot run for twenty miles from Hyde Park Corner out into the " country " without looking at bricks and mortar on each side of the road or the railway ; a hundred years hence why should it not be supposed that into the "wen" will be incorporated Brighton, Reading, and Aylesbury ?
If the growth of the greatest of towns increases, and must be supposed likely to increase, one factor of that growth remains constant. That is the situation of the world of "fashion." The statement is a truism, since the " fashion- able " circles in every great city have always drawn towards the most central position; or rather, they have taken up a central position, from which the life and the energy of the city have emanated. The mountain has come to Mahomet. From whatever cause, it has happened in the case of London that the" world of fashion" has taken up a position east of the Albert Hall, south of Oxford Street, north of, say, Eaton Square, and west of the Carlton Club. To live outside that circle is, in a certain sense, to live outside London ; at all events, to live outside fashionable London. And after all, there is a good deal to be said for the distinction which is drawn by" fashion- able" people—the epithet is unsatisfactory, but no other exactly takes its place—as to what is meant and what is not meant by "living in London!' London has now become so huge, and communication has become so general, that it is just as true of Kensington that it does not belong to the centre as it is true of Highgate or Weybridge. If Kensington alone had been joined to the West End, householders in Kensington might have regarded themselves as holding much the same position as householders in Belgravia or Mayfair. But it is now just as easy to get to Surbiton or to Hamp- stead as to Earl's Court, and the consequence is that the fashionable world has shown a tendency not to expand, but to shrink into itself; to regard no house as belonging really to "London" unless you can, so to speak, walk into it round the corner. So far as the keeping up of communication with the world of fashion is concerned, nobody benefits very much more by living in Bayswater than by living in Barnet.
Of course, the keynote of the whole business is conveni- ence. It may or may not be a desirable ideal to live and move in what is vaguely known as London "society," but London
"society" has established a quite logical rule for itself in laying down fixed boundaries outside which it does not wish to move; no one outside need come in unless he pleases. A mind looking broadly at the best that is to be had from the great activities of life might decide, perhaps, that it would matter very little whether a member of "society" should live in St. John's Wood or Battersea; but inside a certain circle in all large cities the great question is not what matters in the great activities of life, but what takes time in the small matters of life. The essential point for such a circle, always hurrying, always anxiously welcoming any process which makes the rush of life, or rather the rush of living—which is a different thing—a little more simple, a little more con- venient, is to get as much out of every hour as modern contrivances of communication can manage. Consequently, for them the geography of fashion becomes every day more important ; the boundaries of the fashionable world shrink. It is the same in Paris and in St. Petersburg as in London; it was the same in Rome in the days of Sallust and Lucullus. What is interesting to the student of history is that the world of fashion, in thus arrogating to itself certain powers of decision as to what shall or shall not be, always, in reality, abandons other powers far more important. It makes rules for its own circle ; nobody outside the circle follows the rules, since they are unimportant to the mass. The real power in the State lies, and grows, in the hands of the millions of dwellers between the quarters of fashion and the Suburra.
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