A LONDON JOURNEY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 28 July 1928, Page 24

A LONDON JOURNEY

By

Hector Bolitho

Auckland Nofelist Writes f©r SUN Readers ©f the J®ys of Eipl©rati©i in London s By-Ways

Mr. Urol or Bolitho, who writes this article exclusively for THE SUN is an Aucklander with several books to his credit. His "Solemn Boy” teas published by Chat to and Windtis and and Thunder '* by Jonathan Cape. JLtd. At present he is collaborating with the Jie.an of Windsor in editing some historical letters, one volume of which has already been published.

9 any day and. see tourist Westminster to Whitehall, stopping at St. Paul’s or rushing desperately past the Albert Memorial. Yet the most interesting journeys in London are not made between these famous places, but rather among the coffee houses and lesser monuments, by-streets and courts and inns where the true character of old London still lives undisturbed. One of my favourite walks is from The Monument in the city, to Shepherd’s Market, behind the mansions j of Mayfair. If you are sumptuous in your tastes or lazy in your habits, you may make the journey in a car or a great rumbling bus: but then you •will miss so many of the little things which make walking worth while. We may travel underground and ; yrome up to the air again at The Monument in the city. Pause at the Monument for a moment and read an Amusing notice. You are warned not to hang mats and carpets against the base! And who could possibly wish to bring their mats and carpets all the way to the heart of the city of London, to bang them on the Monument. This is not the only fantastic notice you will find in this part of the. world. On All Hallows Church. the congregation is so cosmopolitan that the vicar has a notice on the Church door, saying:— “Not every one who enters this church is converted. Please watch your handbags, etc.” From the Monument you may walk towards Canon Street, passing William IV’s. statue, past St. Swithin’s Church, and appreciate the names of the little streets that run i his way and that way—Bread Street, Friday Street. Distaff Lane and Godliman Street. Everywhere the pigeons are flying and high among the garrets where the poor may be found, I am fold that they catch the pigeons and make pies of them. You pass up Ave Maria Lane, round Amen Corner and come to Paternoster Row, and here yon may pause in front of quite a plain looking building, the Chapter Coffee House, where Charlotte Bronte stayed on her first visit to London, en route to Brussels. This coffee house is connected* with St. Paul’s by a secret undeground passage and it was by this way that the priests used to go from the church to take their bj ead and wine between the Cathedral services. We may return to St. Paul’s aud then walk down Ludgate Hill, under the railway bridge, to Ludgate Circus. Fleet Street, with its old chop houses and newspaper offices, and then into the cosmopolitan Strand, the street of Dickens.

The people of the Strand seem to be fantastic, when you see them after you have walked in the west end of London or the east end: here they are clear-cut types, the people of Dickens’s novels* flower-sellers and vagrants, soldiers and sailors, Cockneys and provincials, all mixed up in strange confusion. It is hard to suppose that they ever cross Trafalgar Square to the west: it is hard to suppose that they even know the west end of London exists. From’the Strand we may walk into Trafalgar Square, see the monument of Nelson, rubbing his ■’bronze hat against the sky. see a dozen monuments and of them all choose the loveliest of all the statues in London

On the lower side of the Square is the monument of Charles 1., a delicate and lovely thing, which seems to exist only for those who are not impressed by magnitude and decoration. But the story of the statue is almost as dramatic as the story of the- unfortunate King himself. The French sculptor. Le Sueur, made it and it had a place of honour in the land until the execution of Charles I. (In a glass case in the library at Windsor Castle is the delicately embroidered shirt for which he asked on that sad. cold morning in Whitehall). After the execution, the statue was taken down and sold to a brazier in Holborn, a brazier* named Rivet who was to melt it down and use the bronze for his work. Whether it was artistic sensibility or loyalty, we cannot tell, but Rivet buried the statue in his garden and it stayed there until the Restoration. It was unearthed then and restored to the pedestal in Trafalgar Square. The exquisitely sculptured figure of Charles I. on the horse originally carried a sword and buckler, but these were torn off by roisterers in 1810. You may cross Trafalgar Square, walk up Whitcombe Street, along Coventry Street, and into Picadilly Circus. (How well I remember the dear old lady who asked me, “Could you tell me the way to Piccadilly Circus?” I told her. “Well, could you tell me if there’s j a performance in the afternoon?”) But Piccadilly Circus has lost its Eros, the faery bronze figure about

which, the flower women used to sit. They are making an underground railway here now, and the ideas of 1928 have chased the flower women on to the curb, and Eros to some half-known garden on the Embankment. Walk along Piccadilly and turn into Sackville Street, the longest street in London without a break or a crossroad. But Sackville Street's fame is not all to do with its length. Sackville Street is the only one in all the length and breadth of London without lamp-pofets. It is said that Lord Sackville was a man of great sympathy and understanding, so much so that he considered lamp-posts to be a menace to midnight marauders who might be making their way home. So he ousted the posts and hung all the lamps of Sackville Street from brackets on the buildings, so that there should oe nothing to interrupt the songs and progress of the midnight merrymakers. At the end of Sackville Street we may turn around and take our hats off to the Albany, and walk through Burlington Gardens, behind the Academy into Bond Street. Let us walk through Grafton Street, down Plain Hill, across Berkeley Square and find a strange little lane which lies behind the Mayfair Hotel. It seems to be quite an innocent lane in its way, merely bricks and mortar and an easy way from Berkeley Square to Curzon Street. But at the end, there is an old gateway, and in the centre of this a stout iron bar, reaching from the arch to the ground. This is a relic of the days of the highwaymen. A robber of the time made his escape down the steps and through the arch on horseback, after holding up some travellers near Ham Hill. So the law makers thwarted the law breakers of me time by putting an iron bar in the centre of the arch to prevent any other horsemen from doing likewise. Since I am tired and you may be tired, we’ll end our journey near here, in Shepherd’s Market, a strangely tumbled down and old world place, to find poked in behind the houses of Mayfair. Here are the old inns, “The Running Footman,” “The Bunch of Grapes,” and here are the barrows of fruit and the little shops, all as Disraeli found them when he used the market as his opening scene for *‘Tancred.” And if we stand here, in the market, and see coachmen and footmen going into the inns for their glasses of English beer, and watch the multi-coloured fruit barrows coming down the lane, we may stand still and listen to the great noises of London outside and, with Disraeli, realise that here in the market “A policeman would as soon think of reconnoitring these quiet streets as of walking into a house in Park Lane or Berkeley Square. . . . Here reside the wives of house-stewards and of butlers. . . . Here may be found his Grace’s coachman, and here his Lordship’s groom, and still, the inevitable charm which survives all the schemes of a new generation—the inevitable charm which is London.