madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE WESTMINSTER Not every Londoner could tell you off-hand the boundaries of Westminster, in which we have been ever since leaving the old City gates. In the thirty divisions of our Metropolis, the City of Westminster holds up its head among neighbour boroughs, remembering how it was once the independent seat of royalty, which gradually became welded into the mass of dwellings overspread by London's name. Nor do other cities bear such a rank as this one that grew up round what might be called the Cathedral of all England; and as an island of municipal life it has a peculiar official styled its High Bailiff. Its area stretches from the City to Kensington, and from Oxford Street to the Thames. With a population larger than that of most English cities, it makes three Parliamentary constituencies, the Strand district, that of Mayfair and Hanover Square, and the Abbey quarter, which last is the Westminster most familiar by name to a generation that has ceased to think of St. Paul's as its eastern minster. The mists of early history rise off from a waste of riverside marshes and islets, one of them emerging under the name of Thorney Island, when a bar or bank thrown up by the silt of the Tyburn brook had been skinned over with matted vegetation. Here the Thames yielded a ford for that ancient road, paved by the Romans as highway from the north-western corner to the south-eastern coast of their British province. The rude Saxons were so struck with wonder at the construction of this road and its stations that they seem to have attributed such works to their mythical heroes, the Watlings, as elsewhere they gave a dark spirit of evil credit for the Grim's Dykes and Devil's Dykes of imposing British fortifications. When London Bridge came to be built, Watling Street was diverted towards it through the City, in which a fragment of this sideway still preserves the name. The original thoroughfare, holding on from the straight Edgware Road, took the line perhaps of Park Lane, then bent eastward to strike its crossing-place by Thorney Island, where the name of Horseferry Road makes a memorial of how Lambeth was reached in the centuries throughout which London had but one bridge. Observing from Westminster Bridge how "ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples" no longer "lie open unto the fields," we must stretch our imagination to picture the scene as it was in the days of Boadicea, whose effigy stands here, looking as if her chariot should be turned round so as to give the plunging steeds a free course down the Embankment. On Thorney Island, tradition puts a church of St. Peter, built by an East Saxon king at the beginning of the seventh century, when the Apostle himself left heaven unguarded to consecrate this favoured shrine. Then rose a Benedictine monastery, whose Dane-ravaged walls gave place to the Abbey and Church finished just in time to be tomb of Edward the Confessor, who at Westminster had a "King's House," supposed to have been first built by Canute. The Norman kings dallied for a time with the fame of Alfred's capital; the Conqueror had been crowned at Winchester as well as at Westminster, to make assurance of conquest doubly sure. But the magnetic power of London drew them to the Thames, and they fixed their seat beside the Abbey, which was rebuilt by Henry III., to be completed under the first Tudor king, all but the incongruous western towers added in Wren's time. Windsor, Sheen, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Whitehall, Kensington, St. James's, in turn became favourite residences with successive groups of sovereigns; but the Palace of Westminster was long royalty's official seat, as it now enshrines the modern majesty of the people. Such, in brief, is the history of the group of historic fanes in which Church and State have been throned together for a thousand years. The oldest of the secular buildings is Westminster Hall, first erected by William Rufus, enlarged and dignified to be a meeting-place of Parliaments, and a theatre for state ceremonies down to the Coronation banquets of George IV. Many famous trials have been held here, among them those of Charles I., of the Seven Bishops, and of Warren Hastings. Till the new Courts of Law were built at Temple Bar, this Hall made our chief temple of justice, whose shrines have now been cleared away, and the spacious Norman structure, with its rich oak roof and show of royal statues, is restored as a monument of the past, and as a befitting anteroom to the Houses of Parliament. At one time it was allowed to be littered with tables of moneychangers and scriveners; then for long its outside walls were blocked up by the shops of booksellers, wig-makers, and other hangers-on of the law. This is not the only clearance made in the last generation or two, for G. A. Sala could remember how the most sacred monuments of English history were neighboured by a cloaca of "malodorous streets" and "felonious slums." The rest of the Palace of Westminster was burned down in 1835, to be replaced at a cost of three millions by Barry's imposing if much-criticized pile, containing eleven courts, a hundred staircases, hundreds of halls and chambers, not counting the private residences of officials of the House, and a prison for offenders against its privileges. The Clock Tower, over which flies a flag to proclaim when our legislators are at work, has a modern dungeon of no very severe punishment, that, coming to an end with the Session, would be nowadays an excellent advertisement for ambitious demagogues, who might ask nothing better than to have their duress famed by the tongue of Big Ben. Poor Guy Fawkes and his fellow-conspirators were more roughly handled when they proposed to move an adjournment of the House in a manner far from parliamentary. So conservative are we, that every year, on the night before the meeting of Parliament, its cellars must be formally searched to make sure that no store of explosives has escaped the eye of the police-force who keep watch and ward over this focus of national wisdom.		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