BEAUTIFUL LONDON.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 8 September 1924, Page 8

BEAUTIFUL LONDON.

ROMANCE OF ST. MARTIN’S DANE.

Standing now in the crowded', har-i-6av thoroughfare of'St.'Mar tin’s lane, in the land, of theatres, electric signs and taxis, you may well ’ have difficulty in picturing your surroundings as they were, say, in the ■ reign jof Queen Elizabeth, Avrites Herbert 'Williams in the Daily Chronicle. Tt wad a lane then, fringed Avith hedges, aind ho doubt very miry, and your eye Avodld have 'Avalndefed "oA r er green meadoivs dotted l with grazing cattle, AvertAvafd to the- fields about Soho, Avhere stood the Avindmill avho.se memory has Lebn preserved for us in : Great Windmilling street, or southward beyond the old St. Martins Church-literally in the fields—to Avhere the river gleamed bjetAA’een- the- palaces that 1 lined the Strand from LOndon to Westminster.

The tAvo cities must indeed hake been fair to look upon-from this rural spot. The lane itself connected' the tiny village of Charing. Avith the tinifer one of St. Giles, and it is interesting iioav to trace the old way north of - the present St. Martin’s lane, by way of St. AndreAV street and Seven Dials, and thence straight to the church of St.. Giles-in-the-Fields.

_ When London rapidly grew in the 17th and 18th centuries a turnpike Avas built across the old lane, and 'it soon became part of the neAv and fashionable suburbia of that time. Artists and poets came to live here, and it became a predecessor of Chelsea; among its most distinguished residents Avere Sir Joshua Reynolds Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth, Roubilac, the sculptor, and Chippendale, the cabinetmaker and upholsterer. Just step through a little, loav. archAAay under an old house at the upper end of St. Martin’s lane on. the east side, and you will make one of those discoveries Avhieh so Avell repay the search for the picturesque in London. On one side are the projecting backs of old buildings, with leaning Avails and tottering chimneys; on the other a number of how windoAvs bulge from a row of old dAA’ellings. Goodwin’s Court is probably named after a long-forgotten resident, 'as AA-ere May’s Buildings, farther down the lane on the same side. Mr May’s much-admired house, after serAung for a time as -a sausage shop, was finally swept away by the building of the Coliseum. Thus has the Avhole character of the street become changed once more, the stately houses that Hogarth knew swept aAvay, and the old country lane absorbed among the arteries of the Great City. Yet some A r estiges, such as OoodAvin’s Court, still remain, though uoav fallen to loav estate, to remind us of the lane’s romantic past.