Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/135

28, 1860.] suggestion South Kensington has grown. Although the distance from Central London is even greater, it is a curious fact that the “genteel” people, with incomes varying from 500l. to 2000l. a-year and upwards are flocking to South Kensington as fast as the houses can be run up. You can’t exactly say that this is the effect of tradition, for the old court end of the town about which Leigh Hunt used to tell us such pleasant stories, is by no means identical with this modern creation of South Kensington. It can scarcely be regarded as a question of healthier and better air, for there is no healthier quarter of London than Tyburnia; but somehow or other it has missed the perfume of gentility after the school of dowagerhood and my Lord’s Poor Cousins. Perhaps the millionnaires made too heavy a rush upon the quarter at once, and frightened away the timid kine whose natural pastures were not at the diggings. They could scarcely hope to run their graceful little tea-parties with success against the magnificent banquets of the more opulent parvenus, and so adhered for a time to little white genteel streets in Belgravia. From these they have timidly stolen forth, occasion offering, and the family banker being propitious, to little squares and streets Kensington way, where they take nice little houses, which they are not indisposed to let once and again when the season is at its height on one genteel pretext or another; and so they play their part. The end of it, however, is, that although Tyburnia may glisten with gold, it has very little to show in the way of purple, faded or otherwise.

I cannot remember the time when Belgrave Square was not; but those of my contemporaries who have preceded me but a short way on the path of life tell me that they recollect it well when the site was called the “Five Fields.” My boyish memory will not carry me back beyond the year 1829 or thereabouts; and I find by reference to the same instructive work of Mr. Timbs which I have before quoted, that Belgrave Square was built by Mr. George Basevi, the architect, and finished in the year 1829. The place before this was a miserable swamp, and I have been told by older men that in their boyhood they have shot snipe in the Five Fields; others have informed me that they used to go botanising there for curious plants. Mr. Thomas Cubitt, the great builder and contractor, may be said to have invented Belgravia. He dug into the swamp, and found that it consisted of a shallow stratum of clay, and that below this there was good gravel. “The clay he removed and burned into bricks; and by building upon the substratum of gravel, he converted this spot from one of the most unhealthy to one of the most healthy, to the immense advantage of the ground landlord and the whole metropolis.” I think Mr. Basevi and Mr. Cubitt must have understood the mystery of lord-and-lady catching better than their brethren of Tyburnia. They seem to have built a great square first, and to have filled it with grandees; and from this they built away other smaller squares, and streets of all dimensions, which were gradually taken up by people of the same class, and afterwards by their imitators and admirers, who loved to dwell in the odour of perfect gentility. The plan pursued by Mr. Cubitt was certainly an inspiration of genius, for before his time all builders who looked at the place gave a glance at the surface-water, and turned aside in despair. There was another consideration which might perhaps have prevented tenants from flocking to this quarter, and that is the extreme lowness of the situation. I do not pretend to give exact figures, but I can scarcely be wrong when I say that the Belgravian district is a hundred feet lower than the higher and more northerly districts of London. Healthy the district most certainly is, as I can testify myself from having resided many years within its limits. It was a very common thing on returning home at night by Piccadilly in the season of fogs to see the fog lying heavily on that famous thoroughfare; but when you turned down upon Belgravia all was clear. Chelsea, which lies even lower, has always been reputed a healthy suburb. In the last century it was the residence of Doctors Arbuthnot, Sloane, Mead, and Cadogan; and I suppose the physicians knew where to find the best air.

Endless have been the changes in this Belgravian district. The Orange Garden in bygone days stood upon the site of the present St. Barnabas’ Church. Indeed in the old, old times, Pimlico was essentially the district of public gardens. It is notorious that the Queen’s Palace of Buckingham House stands on the site of the old Mulberry Gardens, so famous amongst our dramatic writers. Precisely one hundred years ago—that is, in the year 1760—there was nothing between Buckingham House and the river, looking either south or west, but a few sparse cottages and the Stag Brewery. What is there now? The name of Pimlico has often puzzled me, and if any one can throw any additional light upon the subject I shall be glad. All I can do for the information of others who may have taken this momentous point into consideration, is to copy for their benefit the following brief suggestions from “Notes and Queries.” “Pimlico is the name of a place near Clitheroe, in Lancashire. Lord Orrery (in his Letters) mentions Pemlicoe, Dublin; and Pimlico is the name of a bird of Barbadoes, ‘which presageth storms. ” The district and its vicinage in some measure keep up the old reputation as the quarter for public gardens, inasmuch as just above Battersea Bridge are Cremorne Gardens. Cremorne House was formerly the residence of a Lord Cremorne; a title which still exists. The family name is Dawson of Dartrey, Rockcorry, Ireland. The river frontage of Chelsea seems to me less changed than most things in London since I was a boy. It seems to me that I remember Cheyne Walk as long as I remember anything, with Don Saltero’s Tavern, made so famous by Steele, and subsequently by Benjamin Franklin. If Kensington is called the Court end, Chelsea might fairly be called the literary end of the town, for here in former days lived Steele, Addison, John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Smollett, and Swift. Sir Robert Walpole, too, had a house here. As a question of age I ought easily to remember the Chelsea Bun House, but I do not. It was only pulled down in 1839 or 1840, an affair of