madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE THE SUBURBS How shall one define a suburb? By what rule is Penge to be distinguished from Pentonville, Putney from Paddington? If we go far enough back, the Strand was a suburb once, so were Spitalfields and Southwark. Islington, Kilburn, Stratford, Camberwell could all not so long ago be spoken of as outside London, to which they are now welded on by unbroken streets, as soon will be Barking and Ealing, Edgware and Eltham. The Post-Office Directory's definition is the nimbus of districts lying between the County limits and a rough inner ring running by King's Cross to Tyburnia, then down by Chelsea, over the river, and round the Oval, Bermondsey, Stepney, and Shoreditch, to the "Angel" at Islington. But with all the deference due to an authority of such weight, it seems vain to draw distinctions, unless of degree, between Bloomsbury and its neighbour Somers Town, between Newington and Kennington; and several of its most noted suburbs stretch out far beyond London's legal frontier. Faring by tram or 'bus on the Brixton or the Clapham Road, we may note many dingily stuccoed houses adjoined by a superfluous coach-house, from which the master would once drive to business. One meets old men who remember how from Hornsey or Wandsworth they jogged to the city on a cob, as their grandsons may speed on a cycle, but no longer skirting market gardens and patches of meadow. Dombey and Son's crafty manager rode away from the office and down to rural lanes at Fulham, where, like Sir Barnet Skettles, more than one of Thackeray's and Trollope's fine folk had river-side villas, whose grounds may be preserved as arenas for sport. A mile nearer Charing Cross, Walham Green made an idyllic scene for an eighteenth-century poet. "The Disowned" took lodgings in a cottage of gentility situated "towards Padington." Walworth, where Mr. Wemmick's "Aged P." garrisoned a miniature castle, amid "black lanes, ditches, and little gardens," clearly counted itself a suburb then; but what are we to call it now? There seems no English word that exactly corresponds to the French faubourg, for our notion of a suburb suggests some hint of quasi-rusticity. On this rule, Hanwell, Mill Hill, Walthamstow, Chislehurst are still openly suburban; Dulwich, Acton, Brondesbury, Clapton, are losing their title to be anything but outskirts. Perhaps the most unquestionable sign of a suburb is not a hayfield or an elm grove preserved in it like a fly in amber, but the fact that its inhabitants, when off their guard, talk of going up to "London," as I have heard said in Brixton forty years back. At that date one clear title of a suburb was a spacious cemetery, taking the place of metropolitan graveyards closed, not too soon, by the sanitary science of the nineteenth century. But now such burial-grounds are embedded within the growth of Brompton, Hammersmith, Kensal Green, Stoke Newington, Bow, and other populous quarters, which can only be called suburban with a query, when we have to go leagues out of London to find peace for our dead. One of the oldest among once suburban cemeteries is the disused one of St. George's, Hanover Square, itself a modern parish, whose graveyard was in the Bayswater Road, not far from the Marble Arch. There it still makes a spacious exhibition of tombstones, removed to be ranged round the walls, among them Sterne's--alas! poor Yorick. Another novelist, Mrs. Radcliffe, lies under the Chapel, less well known than it deserves to be, since it was restored by the late Mrs. Russell Gurney as a place of rest and prayer, and is now finely decorated with scriptural paintings as well as quaint memorials. A suburb has been defined as a "dormitory" or residential district, from which the cares of business are held aloof. But that definition applies only to its primitive state. Beginning life as a shapeless mass of social protoplasm, a mere gathering of cells, it soon provides itself with nutritive apparatus--a mouth, stomach, alimentary canals--and may grow to be a highly organized segment of the general body with which it is sooner or later integrated. Its first baker's, butcher's, and grocer's shops prove fissiparous; its one pillar letter-box makes the germ of a complete nervous system; its early tentacles become limbs; it even may evolve special functions and an independent heart. Any Brixton or Bayswater needs only time to develop its local Regent Streets, Park Lanes, and Seven Dials; and where ground rents are cheap factories and workshops may overshadow villas. But if the suburb come to have industries of its own, offices as well as shops, places of amusement and public institutions, separate local government and a parish patriotism, however feeble, it has ceased to be a true suburb. It then hardens into a Clerkenwell or Lambeth, another trunk of the banyan grove that sends out seeds and suckers to spring up freshly on its spreading edges. Several of London's most thriving shoots, indeed, are grafted on to old country towns, like Barnet, Harrow, Croydon, and Romford, interlacing their branches with those of the Metropolis. The suburb proper has its root in town, while it stretches its branches towards the country. It may be known by its being, like Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, "in possession of the Amazons," except at the morning and evening hours, when men scurry like ants in and out of the station or tram-car. Through the day its streets are chiefly alive with women and perambulators, the male sex being represented by casual errand-boys, tax-collectors, hawkers, and tramps, with here and there a curate, a poet, a retired veteran airing himself in the sun. If you meet a man wearing the high hat of Pall Mall, you guess him to be a doctor. At an afternoon tea-party, unless where votes for women are on the tapis, the dullest he may plume himself as cock of the walk. Even a schoolboy, in his holiday hours, is at a premium among petticoats that belittle one another by their numerosity. It was of such a society a certain damsel complained that the hims were all either too ancient or too modern. Through the day its life ebbs into trickling streams and stagnant pools of nursing, cooking, shopping, and gossiping. Towards evening the tide flows back in a foam of news, greetings, meals, games, strolls, meetings, love-making by moonlight, gardening at sunset, neighbourly visits, or what not--quidquid agunt homines, when both sexes are free to amuse themselves and each other. I do not go so far as an admiring foreigner, who saw our athletic youth pouring out of shop and factory to play cricket on Christmas--tide evenings. Another note of a right suburb should be its respectability, in the fullest sense of the term. I see that a recent moralist identifies the suburbs with the middle classes. That personification is hardly comprehensive, for there are suburbs, such as Hampstead and Richmond, housing residents who would hardly care to rank themselves as mere suburbans. On the other hand, our municipal authorities have been fostering working-class suburbs far out their wide-stretched tram-lines, at Tottenham and at Tooting, for instance; then certain back-door industries, the offices of London's state, bring forth a brood of small homes, like those about the gas-works of Beckton or the Metropolitan Railway's; electrical reservoirs at Neasden. But in general it may be admitted that the typical suburban is one to whom Heaven has granted Agar's prayer, giving neither poverty nor riches, one whose chief care is to make both ends meet as creditably as possible, one who through the day is bound to wear a subfusc cost and a stiff hat, but at night willingly gets into slippers or tennis flannels, according to his time of life. He is apt to be, in ease or in posse, the character reviled by French Socialists "the bourgeois. On this side the Channel he seems rather a butt for the smart young men of Pall Mall and Fleet Street, who accuse him of not dressing for dinner, even of being seen in his shirt-sleeves in hot weather, of paying his bills weekly, of spending much time in the bosom of his family, and of going to bed, as a rule, before the chimes have rung midnight.		The British Museum Parliament The Tower of London Madame Tussaud's St. Paul's Cathedral Along The Strand Charing Cross Westminster The West-End Parks and Palaces The East-End The Surrey Side The Suburbs RESTAURANTS Restaurants in London The Corner Houses The Lyons Tea Shops The Marble Arch Barbecues The Non-Chain Budget Restaurants HOTELS RUSSELL SQUARE Bernard Street Bedford Place Bloomsbury and Gower Streets Guilford and Coram Streets Tavistock Place Cartwright Gardens HISTORY Roman Britain After the Romans Saxon and Norman Tudor Charles II George II London circa 1700-1815 GREAT BRITAIN The life of Metropolitan England Britain is a world by itself The Climates of Britain The English Plain Great Britain Strategic Geography Great Britain - Ireland Great Britain - Scotland