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Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone, so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
-- T S Eliot 1922
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In 1905 the Pall Mall Magazine published a "little book [which] will appeal to all who wish to possess what is really a portfolio, in a handy form, of beautiful drawings and photographs of the marvellous New LONDON which is rising up around them day by day." The first part of the guide was effectively a guide book for the Londoner and the visitor alike, but a guide book with a difference, as it includes architect's drawings of the many new buildings and streets which were still at the planning stage. Our guide now takes us for a trip through the streets surrounding the Monmument. We visit noisy stinking Billinsgate where our guide is disappointed not to hear some of the fammous swearing the market is famous for. We also visit Pudding Lane, and the baker’s shop wher ethe Great Fire of London started and colmplete out tour with a vista of London from the Syteeple of St Magnus the Martyr.
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"London in 1731" is a wonderful guide book to the city which was penned sometime in the early 18th century and subsequently brought up to date. The author is supposed to be a Portuguese merchant named Don Manoel Gonzales but the internal evidence demonstrates that this is almost certainly a nom de plume. It is more likely that our author was an accomplished native of London. The guide was edited by Professor Henry Morley and published by Cassell as part of their wonderful little National Library series in 1888. We now come to end of ther book with a look at the bank of England, the role of brokers, the manufacturers established in London and the number of foreigners resident in the City. It seems that the French were the most numerous at that time, most of them refugees from the Fronde revolution in the 17th century and from the political changes instituted by Louis XIV.
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