madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE THE SURREY SIDE WHILE Westminster distinguishes itself as a City, Southwark bears for title the Borough, as oldest of all the swarms sent out from the London hive. Nay, according to one theory, Southwark might claim higher dignity as the original London, if the bulk of the Roman buildings were first set up there, with a fortress on the north side as tête de pont. The chief argument for this is Ptolemy's putting Londinium in Kent. But Ptolemy and Pausanias were the fathers of guide-books, and I have some reason for knowing how liable that class of writers are to err. Anyhow, these pages keep clear of controversial matter, so, with a respectful reference to Mr. Loftie's own scholarly writings, I will take leave to stick to the commonly received view of Southwark's origin. This is that when a town sprang up on the northern gravel bank of the Thames, the south side was an almost uninhabitable marsh, broken by ponds, ditches, and channels, mostly overflowed by the tide as far as the low, heathy heights now known by such names as Denmark Hill, Brixton Rise, and Lavender Hill, below which Lambeth Marsh and Brook Street tell as plain a tale of their past, while Bermondsey and Battersea suggest islets on the amphibious shore. The first inhabitants of this shore would be fisher-folk or prowling outlaws, who might prey upon the traffic passing from the ford at Thoeney Island. Some sort of road there must have been across the marsh, even before the Romans raised and paved a way on from the bridge they built over the Thames. Hint of their construction survives in the name Newington Causeway; and it is believed that Roman roads might come to light below the foundations of Surrey suburbs, which have yielded bits of antiquity enough to bear out that theory of a Roman city on the south side. If London stood on the north bank, the other end of the bridge had to be guarded by some work of defenee, about which, sooner or later, would grow up such a transpontine suburb as appears in so many cities. Seldom can this "Bridge End" aspire to equality, as in the case of Buda-Pesth. Rome has its Trastevere; Calcutta its Howrah; Warsaw its Prags; Cologne its Deutz; New York looks condescendingly over to New Jersey City, but cannot, indeed, belittle its Brooklyn. So London got its Surrey side, which it long inclined to treat with good-natured hauteur as a poor relation, that has indeed thriven to count two-thirds of a county's population in its metropolitan precinct, besides urbanized men of Kent. Southwark still owns a certain dependent position in its nominal wardship under the City; like Westminster, it has a High Bailiff, who in this case is a City official. The first extra-city borough began meanly enough, outside the South-work by which the bridge head was fortified on the Surrey side. Its best houses would be along the road that is now its High Street, to which we shall come presently. But on each side, along and behind the river, and notably westward by the early embankment still known as Bankside, there grow up nests of doubtful characters taking refuge beyond the reach of strict City discipline; so that this suburb came to bear some such reputation as the subura mentioned in passages of Horace and Juvenal which schoolboys are allowed to skip. A writer for our modest public must follow such example; and it will be enough to say that medieval prodigals were more familiar with the Borough than would be the steady citizens who through industrious apprenticeship rose to wealth and honour. In the Reformation time we find this a scene of popular amusement, when amusement was not always innocent. Theatres, banished from the City's bounds, were set up here among pleasure gardens to which there was much resort by ferries, as well as by London Bridge, so that on fine summer evenings Bankside must have been like a permanent fair. It is now a narrow, muddy, and malodorous wharf, littered by rubbish, overswung by cranes hoisting bales from stranded barges to the line of warehouses behind, through which run hidden passages like the dismal Love Lane walled in beside the City of London Electrical Works, and the not less belied Moss Alley. Yet, as Besant points out, it is not without a squalid picturesqueness, and has a noble view across the river to the dome of St. Paul's, if its usual frequenters oared to look at anything more inspiring than the plash of a rat or the tricks of a mudlark. The prospect must have been pleasanter when the Thames was gay with swans, and rowing-boats, and state barges like that in which the Lord Mayor made his annual procession till not so long ago, or that royal one preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is hardly sixty years out of the water. The name of the "Bear Garden," borne by a Bankside alley, recalls how the most popular amusement, when drink would not be lacking and tobacco had become obnoxious to King James's counterblast, was the baiting of bulls and bears, considered sport even for ladies, Queen Elizabeth for one, though they might cry and shriek at such "ill-favoured rough things," while your Master Slenders would have it believed meat and drink to them to see the bear loose. There are many allusions in Elizabethan literature to this brutal sport, and to Paris Garden, which made its most notorious arena, a resort as popular as the Crystal Palace or the Stadium in our generation. Further back in the good old times, we hear of boars, too, being baited before they became bacon. Then on Bankside flourished cockpits, which in other parts of London came to be turned into theatres. Such unedifying exhibitions were put down, along with the theatres, by the Puritan conscience, according to Macaulay, not so much by reason of pain given to the baited beast as of sinful pleasure to the spectators. Under Cromwell, seven bears belonging to Paris Garden were sentenced to military execution. After the Globe was pulled down at the beginning of the Civil War, its site seems to have been used for Richard Baxter's meeting-house and burial-ground; and John Bunyan also, it is said, preached on Bankside, who in our day might take one of the Southwark theatress for openly advertised sermons. The bears, however, seem to have been restored with Charles II., for Mr. Pepys, after not having been there for years, in 1666 went to "the pit where bears are baited." The attraction on other visits of his was prize-fighting, not with fists but swords, an exciting duel that once ended in a general scrimmage; but that first time he saw a bull baited, when the way in which it tossed the dogs, one of them "into the very boxes," made "good sport," though on reflection he voted it "a very rude and nasty pleasure." Fencing was long another favourite sport here; and Congreve uses a "Bear garden flourish" as a familiar term of swordsmanship. Again, Pepys appears at an alehouse on Bankside as a box from which to view the more thrilling spectacle of the Great Fire, till he went home to find it a case of proximus ardet, and had to spend the night in packing up his goods and burying away his money. The year before he had visited "Foxhall," to find no company there, for terror of the Plague. This resort Evelyn mentions as now in 1661; but not till next century did it become famous as Vauxhall Gardens, with its enticements of music, pictures, and statues, illuminated walks and dark thickets, and fireworks that fizzled out within living memory. The "New Spring Gardens" at Foxhall--as Addison still spelt it--took their first name from the garden at the corner of St. James's Park, and flourished as a novel suburban resort, supplanting the coarse joys of the Bear-pit by prettier sights and sounds that were prostituted to pleasures by no means innocent. "When I considered the fragrancy of the walks and bowers," was Mr. Spectator's experience, "with the choirs of birds that sung upon the trees, and the loose tribe of people that walked under their shades, I could not but look on the place as a kind of Mahometan paradise." The novels of the eighteenth century have many scenes to show us what Vauxhall was, that from this side long blazed in renown, though eclipsed for a generation by the fashion of Ranelagh on the Chelsea bank; but the older lights shone on, as we know, down to the youth of Mr. Pendennis.		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