Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/71

RV 54 (ROADS INTO LONDON) In these parts you hardly see a discontented face, and never a morbid one. Right in to the very bottom of the Waterloo Road, and nearly up to Westminster Bridge, old villas, new houses and new shops lie side by side, or stare at one another. They are all mixed together, it is not possible to get any zones to "synchronise", it is not possible to say "early Georgian London had reached here, middle Victorian here, the railways produced this district, the short stages this". They are dropped down in terraces anywhere, nearer Whitehall, or further away. But the general effects is a pleasant one. It is as if the poorer classes had come into the cast-off clothes of the comfortable, and found them roomy, easy and luxurious.

I suppose the speculative builder accounts for this. He found in one generation or the other, bits of waste ground, or rows of smaller buildings; he ran up at one time the fine old houses, at another the terra cotta shops. Probably in each case he was miscalled by the old residents; so does the "ferry built" terrace of the late Georges become the pathetic old region of to-day; so no doubt the new shops will, to our children's children, be tenderly reminiscent, quaint, and full of old memories; so does Time assuage all temporal griefs.

The speculative builder's lamentable failures may be traced too. There is an odd terrace in one part of a long main road into London, it contains four immense, thin-walled, pretentious stucco houses, with middle Victorian pinnacles, gables and extravagances. It breaks off in uncompleted doors, uncompleted foundations, and a 54