A WANDERER IN LONDON

THE TOWER AND THE TOWER BRIDGE

BY E. V. LUCAS

WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY NELSON DAWSON

THIRTY-SIX OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP

TWENTY-FOURTH EDITION

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1926

All rights reserved

NO. 1 LONDON AND PICCADILLY

A Beginning No. 1 London Charing Cross in Retirement A Walk down Piccadilly Apsley House The Iron Duke's Statues An Old Print Rothschild Terrace Changes The March of Utilitarianism The Plague of New Buildings London Architecture The Glory of Disorder A City of Homes House-collecting The Elusive Directory Kingsley's Dictum The House Opposite Desirable Homes London's Riches The Smallest Houses in London A Monument to Pretty Thoughtfulness The Piccadilly Goat Old Q Rogers the Poet.

LONDON, whichever way we turn, is so vast and varied, so rich in what is interesting, that to one who would wander with a plastic mind irresponsibly day after day in its streets and among its treasures, there is not a little difficulty in deciding where to begin, and there is even greater difficulty in knowing where to end. Indeed, to a book on London to a thousand books on London there is no end.

But a beginning one can always make, whether it is appropriate or otherwise, and there is some fitness in beginning at Hyde Park Corner, by that square, taciturn, grey house just to the east of it which we call Apsley House, but which I have always been told is really No. 1 London if any No. 1 London there be. Let us then begin at No. 1 London just as a Frenchman bent upon discovering the English capital would begin at Charing Cross.

To take a walk down Fleet Street the cure for ennui attributed to the most dogmatic of Londoners but really, I believe, invented for him by another and later lover of our city, George Augustus Sala is no longer an amusing recreation, the bustle is too great; but to take a walk down Piccadilly on a fine day remains one of the pleasures of life: another reason for beginning with No. 1 London. Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner to Berkeley Street is still eminently a promenade. But only as far as that. Once Berkeley Street is crossed and the shops begin, the saunterer is jostled ; while the Green Park having vanished behind the Ritz Hotel, the sun and the freshness are lost too. But between those two points on a smiling day one may enjoy as fair a walk as in any city in the world.

No. 1 London enjoys its priority only I think in verbal tradition. To the postman such an address might mean nothing, although the London postman has a reputation for tracking any trail, however elusive. The official address of Apsley House is, I fancy, 149 Piccadilly. Be that as it may, it is No. 1 to us, and a gloomy abode to boot, still wearing a dark frown of resentment for those broken windows, although the famous iron shutters have gone. The London rough rarely mobilises now, and when he does he breaks no windows; but those were stormier days. Opposite is the Duke himself, in bronze, on his charger, looking steadfastly for ever at his old home, where the Waterloo survivors' dinner used to be held every year, with numbers lessening and lessening until the victor himself was called away.

An earlier equestrian statue of Wellington once dominated the triumphal arch now at the head of Constitution Hill (where Captain Adrian Jones, that rare thing, a soldier sculptor, set up his spirited quadriga), but this, I know not why, was taken down and erected afresh at Aldershot. A third Wellington trophy is the Achilles statue, at the back of Apsley House, in the Park, just across the roadway. This giant figure was cast from cannon taken at Salamanca and Vittoria, Toulouse and Waterloo, and was set up here by the women of England in honour of the great and invincible soldier. There is a coloured print which one may now and then see in the old shops (the last time I saw it was in the parlour of a Duke of Wellington inn at a little village in Wiltshire), of the hero of Waterloo riding beneath the Achilles on his little white horse, with his hand to the salute: one of the pleasantest pictures of the stern old man that I know, with the undulations of Hyde Park rolling away like a Surrey common in the distance. There is also, visible from the tops of omnibus, a bust of the Duke at the side of his house, in the garden.

Our Dukes are no longer made of iron, and Apsley House is desolate, almost sinister. Albeit within its walls are four of Jan Steen's pictures, to say nothing of one of the finest Correggios in England and Velazquez' portrait of himself.

And so we leave No. 1 London frowning behind us, and come instantly to smiling wealth, for the little terrace of mansions between Apsley House and Hamilton Place is a stronghold of that powerful family which moved Heinrich Heine to sarcasm and Hans Christian Andersen to sentiment, and is still one of the greatest forces in European finance.