BEAUTIFUL LONDON.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19271, 8 September 1924, Page 5

BEAUTIFUL LONDON.

ROMANCE OF ST. MARTIN’S LANE,

Standing now in the crowded, narrow thoroughfare of St. Martin’s lane, in the land of theatres, electric signs, and taxis, you may well have difficulty in picturing TOUT surroundings, as they were, say, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (writes Herbert Williams in the Daily Chronicle). It was a lane then, fringed With hedges, and no doubt very iuir,y, and your eye. would have wandered over green meadows, dotted with grazing cattle, we«tward to the; fields about Soho, where stood the windmill whoso memory has been preserved for us in Great Windmilling street, or southward beyond the old St. Martin’s. Church—literally in the fields—to where the river gleamed between the palaces that lined the btrand iroiu .London to Westminster. The two cities must indeed have ‘ been fair to look upon from this niral spot. The lane itself connected the tiny village of Charing with the tinier one of St. Giles, and it is interesting now 1 to trace the old wav north of the present St. Martin's lane, by way of St. Andrew street and Seven Dials, and thence straight to the church of St. G iles-in-the-F ields. . , When London .itapidly grew in the 17th and 18th. ‘centuries a turnpike was built across the ohßUane, and it soon became part of the new 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 were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth, Roubilas (the sculptor), and Chippendale -(the cabinetmaker and upholsterer.). Just step through a little low archway under an old house a.t the upper end of St. Martin’s line, on the , east side and you will mad© one of those discoveries which so well repay the. search for the picturesque in London. On one, side are the projecting backs of old buildings, with leaning walls and tottering chimneys; on the other a number of bow windows bulge from a row of old dwellings. Goodwin’s Court is probably named after a long-forgotten resident, as were May’s Buildings, farther down the lane on the same side. Mr May’s much-admired house, after serving for a time as a sausage shop, was finally swept away by the building of the Coliseum. Thus has the whole character of the street become changed once more, the stately houses that Hogarth knew ewept away, and the old country lane absorbed among the arteries of the Great City. Yet some vestiges, such ns Goodwin’s Court, still remain, though now fallen to low estate, to remind ns of the lane’s romantic past.