Marvell's House, 1825 View in Highgate Cemetery St. Pancras Wells and Church, in 1700 Dr. Stukeley's Plan of the Camp at St. Pancras . Gateway of the Foundling Hospital Interior of the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital The Roman Road, Tufnell Park, in 1838 The Gate House, Highgate, in 1820. Highgate Archway Gate and Tavern, in 1825 Lauderdale House, in 1820 Staircase of Cromwell House, 1876 The Old Well Walk, Hampstead, about 1750 463 Belsize House in 1800 354 Views in Stoke Newington ""Tis hard to say-such space the city wins- Prefatory Remarks-The Building of the District-De Moret, and far from the outermost of all—which, not above as a sobriquet to Belgrave and Eaton Squares and half a century ago, certainly was not London, but as certainly now forms part of it. We hope, at all events, to find much that will be interesting to our readers even in modern "Belgravia ;" but Knightsbridge and Paddington, Chelsea and Kensington, are each and all old enough to have histories of their own; and the two last-named villages have played a conspicuous part in the annals of the Court under our Hanoverian sovereigns, and in those of the aristocracy for even a longer period. We purpose, therefore, to traverse in turn the fashionable area which has its centre fixed about Eaton and Belgrave Squares; then the undefined region of Knightsbridge, and that portion of Hyde Park which lies to the south of the Serpentine, and formed the site of the first Great Exhibition of 1851. Then across Pimlico to Chelsea, rich in its memories of Sir Hans Sloane and Nell Gwynne; to look in upon the household of good Sir Thomas More; and to speak of Chelsea's famous bun-house, and its ancient china-ware. Next we shall visit Brompton, the "Montpelier" of the metropolis; and then be off to the "old Court suburb" of Kensington, familiar to all Englishmen and Englishwomen as the home of William III., and of most of our Hanoverian sovereigns, and dear to them as the birthplace of Queen Victoria. We shall linger for a time under the shade of the trees which compose its pleasant gardens, and call up the royal memories of nearly two centuries. Then, bearing westwards, we shall look in upon the long galleries of Holland House, and see the chamber in which Addison died, and the rooms in which Charles James Fox and the leading Whigs of the last three reigns talked politics and fashionable news; thence to Percy Cross, and Walham Green and Parsons' Green, and to Fulham, for a thousand years the country seat of the Bishops of London both before and since the Reformation. Then we will saunter about the quaint old suburban village of Hammersmith, with its red-brick cottages and cedar-planted lawns, and so work our way round by way of Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill -two names of truly rural sound-to Paddington and St. John's Wood-once the property of the Knights of St. John-and so to Kilburn, Hampstead, and Highgate, and Camden and Kentish Towns, till we once more arrive at St. Pancras. With these few words by way of preface to the present volume, we again take our staff in hand, and turning our back on the "congestion" of traffic at Hyde Park Corner, which has lately been an object of legislation in Parliament, we turn our faces westward, and prepare to go on our way. The name of "Belgravia" was originally applied the streets radiating immediately from them, but is now received as a collective popular appellation of that " City of Palaces" which lies to the southwest of Hyde Park Corner, stretching away towards Pimlico and Chelsea. The district was first laid out and built by Messrs. Cubitt, under a special Act of Parliament, passed in 1826, empowering Lord Grosvenor to drain the site, raise the level, and erect bars, &c. "During the late reign-that of George IV.," observes a writer in 1831-"Lord Grosvenor has built a new and elegant town on the site of fields of no healthy aspect, thus connecting London and Chelsea, and improving the western entrance to the metropolis, at a great expense." Where now rise Belgrave and Eaton Squares, the most fashionable in the metropolis, there was, down to about the year above mentioned, an open and rural space, known as the "Five Fields.” It was infested, as recently as the beginning of the present century, by footpads and robbers. These fields formed the scene of one of the first, but unsuccessful, attempts at ballooning in London. De Moret, a Frenchman, and a bit of an adventurer, proposed, in 1784, to ascend from some tea-gardens in this place, having attached to his balloon a car, not unlike some of the unwieldy summer-houses which may be seen in suburban gardens, and even provided with wheels, so that, if needful, it could be used as a travelling carriage. "Whether," says Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "M. Moret ever really intended to attempt an ascent in such an unwieldy machine, has never been clearly ascertained. . . . However, having collected a considerable sum of money, he was preparing for his ascent, on the 10th of August in that year, when his machine caught fire and was burnt; the unruly mob avenging their disappointment by destroying the adjoining property. The adventurer himself made a timely escape; and a caricature of the day represents him flying off to Ostend with a bag of British guineas, leaving the Stockwell Ghost, the Bottle Conjurer, Elizabeth Canning, Mary Toft, and other cheats, enveloped in the smoke of his burning balloon." There was a time, and not so very distant in the lapse of ages, when much of Belgravia, and other parts of the valley bordering upon London, was a "lagoon of the Thames ;"* indeed, the clayey swamp in this particular region retained so much water that no one would build there. At length, Mr. Thomas Cubitt found the strata to consist of gravel and clay, of inconsiderable depth. The clay * In this lagoon there were many islands, as Chelsey, Bermondsey, &c. |