Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/67

RV 50 (ROADS INTO LONDON) their houses on to the larger roads, the comfortable classes built themselves small houses. The riverside palaces became wharfingers' buildings, their gardens and water gates became quays. Exactly the same thing has happened with every subsequent improvement in communications.

Ten years ago tall flats for the comfortable and tall dwellings for workmen seemed to have solved the question. The latter are already discredited, the former have always been disliked, and London is once more sending out bee swarms of small houses. We may consider that the thousands and thousands of small brick, slate-roofed cottages on the flats and low hills of south Essex are the contribution of "workmen's fares". These, though still growing, are old-fashioned already, so quickly do we move. The electric tractions are, as it were, spreading layers of the tall flats in villas over new regions of the south and west. London is full of traces of these past stages.

You may find an old water gate at the bottom of Buckingham Street; Somerset House and Whitehall and Westminster palaces remain administrative long after kings and protectors have left the lower river; all over the west central district there are august Georgian houses with panelled rooms and "ceilings by Adams", inhabited by family upon family of the most entirely poor, or by firm upon firm, in stages one above another, of solicitors, of architects, of money lenders, of journalists.

Varying types of houses are buried in all parts of 50