madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE CHARING CROSS CHARING CROSS stood a mile out of old London, when it began to stretch its "Liberties" beyond the walls. From Ludgate a road, in time bordered by mansions and gardens, ran along the Strand of the Thames to the village of Charing, that long made a station on the way to the Palace of Westminster, and was no doubt well provided with inns, where many a cask of ale would be tapped for the attendants of courtiers and suitors, or for strolling citizens. By Edward I. a monument was erected at each resting-place of his beloved Queen Eleanor's body on its funeral procession from Grantham to Westminster, the last of the series being at Charing, for which name Chère reine has been fancifully suggested as origin; but it occurs also in Kent. On the border of Middlesex, the roadside Eleanor Cross at Waltham stands restored by a more reverent generation than those Puritans who destroyed Charing Cross as a relic of superstition. The modern memorial of the latter has been placed in front of Charing Gross Station; but it is believed to have stood where Charles I.'s statue now looks down Whitehall towards the scaffold upon which he stepped from a window of his palace, and towards the Parliament-house that has overlaid his throne. This hamlet was bound to grow when taken under the wing of royalty. Wolsey's York Place, appropriated by Henry VIII., came to be rebuilt under the name of Whitehall, from which Queen Mary could catch sight of Wyatt's straggling band as it passed through Charing to attack Ludgate. The noble palace designed here by Inigo Jones was never completed; and Charles II.'s seraglio, no longer suburban, Dutch William deserted for the more modest Palace of Kensington. Of the magnificence of Whitehall, mainly destroyed by accidental fire, nothing is left but part of one wing, the Banqueting Hall, a building long used as a Chapel Royal, but now as the Museum of the Royal United Service Institution, fitly neighboured by the new War Office. Across the street, the Horse Guards, where two mailed and booted sentinels sit living statues on horseback, to the admiration of strangers, seems to have made a gateway of the palace leading out to St. James's Park. The Cockpit, used in Pepys' day as a theatre, is understood to have been on the present site of the Prime Minister's Downing Street residence. The Palladian style of the structure is represented in the new Government offices that line a great part of Whitehall, and may one day make a complete avenue of public palaces between Trafalgar Square and the Abbey. It is only within the 19st century that Charing Cross became centre of Greater London, the boundary mark between East and West. At the date of Nelson's crowning victory, a narrow, dirty lane of mean houses led by the Church of St. Martin's, that once could be rightly described as "in the fields." "Hedge Lane," too, ran north beyond the site of the National Gallery, not begun till 1832; and about this time the square came to be cleared from unsightly buildings known as the King's Mews. The Grand Hotel belongs to the early part of our own generation, when Northumberland Avenue was opened by the needless demolition of Northumberland House and the suburban emigration of that ducal lion that, according to a hoary Cockney jest, wagged its tail as often as it heard twelve o'clock struck. There are Londoners still alive who remember how this fine site was bordered by a truly British jumble of dubiously pretentious buildings and very ordinary shops. Till 1830 an actual Hay Market was held not far off, now transferred to the Cumberland Market beside Regent's Park. Some aged citizens may have crossed the Thames by the Hungerford suspension bridge, whose second-hand frame went to span the gorge of the Avon at Clifton. Not so many memories will go back to the days when Charing Cross Station was Hungerford Market, and little Charles Dickens worked resentfully at a rat-riddled blacking factory on Hungerford Steps, a scene of real life transferred in David Copperfield to Blackfriars Bridge. Ever since, the area about Charing Cross has been undergoing a transformation, not yet complete. Only the other day was an opening made from the Square into the Mall, giving a vista towards Buckingham Palace. Now the ribboned recruiting sergeants will be going off their post at the corner of St. Martin's Lane, since the barracks behind are destined to swell the cadres of the National Gallery. Were Dickens alive to-day, he might tell us how the Tourist and Exchange Offices about this international rendezvous were humbly prefigured by a starting-point of coaches at the "Golden Cross," as, indeed, we know from the adventures of Mr. Pickwick. But not yet has the counsel of perfection taken form by which Charing Cross was to be a great central railway station, knotting together all the lines that come into London. Even Paris, that loves system and centralization as we do not, was fain to scatter her terminuses far apart in the suburbs. Surely it is time to banish the pedantry of termini, as to grant full right of naturalization to the vernacular 'bus, that reached us through France, as did cab, cabriolet, long ago shorn of its outlandish trappings. Did we not take from Italy an idea for the catacomb lines that now act as motor nerves to this ganglion of London communications? The name of the Underground Railway, at least, came from over the Atlantic as one of those jocular metaphors our cousins are so quick to coin. In very early days of railroad enterprise sprang up a philanthropic secret society for helping runaway slaves, and Levi Coffin got the nickname of its "President," when some baffled slave hunter is said to have declared that there must be an underground railroad to Canada from that sly Quaker's house, as his pursuers could never hit on further trace of any fugitive who gained it. How did Londoners get on without their "Underground," which began to break out through the streets as London became familiar to me? This convenience is supplied by two companies, the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District, the one, as some of us know too well, paying but a small dividend, while the other, I understand, has returned to its shareholders only the consciousness of being public benefactors, execrated if ever they try to raise the fares on some vain excuse of carrying passengers at a loss. Roughly speaking, the Metropolitan takes the north side of the system, the District's domain being on the south, both of them with long feelers into northern, western, and eastern suburbs. Their rails are linked at Kensington and at Aldgate to form the Inner Circle, a joint main line, on which frequent trains run round and round in either direction. The fact of two companies being concerned should make one wary which way one turns, as each may be more concerned to carry the traveller on its own metals than on the shortest segment of the circle. I have known country cousins who, living at Brompton and desiring to reach Kensington, innocently took an almost complete round under London to reach a point not a mile off. One hard winter, it was told how a tramp spent his last penny on a short-stage ticket, then passed the rest of the day in that snug roundabout. But only very cold and impecunious travellers welcomed the Stygian atmosphere of the Underground in its days of steam traction, when the northern stretch, from Edgware Road to King's Cross, had a specially foul reputation, and one drew a breath of relief on coming into the open-air reaches, where, also, the trains are gloomily walled out from all brighter prospects than a show of mendacious advertisements. In one such gap near Gloucester Road Station, a moving scene was once enacted, when marriages still had to be performed before noon. A block in the line had held up a train containing a bridegroom in gallant array. As twelve o'clock drew near, anxiety made him bold. Amid the cheers of his fellow-passengers, and the secret sympathy of protesting officials, he and his friends stormed the glacis to rush, begrimed and bleeding, to the altar at which a distressed bride awaited them.		The British Museum Parliament The Tower of London Madame Tussaud's St. Paul's Cathedral Along The Strand Charing Cross Westminster The West-End Parks and Palaces The East-End The Surrey Side The Suburbs RESTAURANTS Restaurants in London The Corner Houses The Lyons Tea Shops The Marble Arch Barbecues The Non-Chain Budget Restaurants HOTELS RUSSELL SQUARE Bernard Street Bedford Place Bloomsbury and Gower Streets Guilford and Coram Streets Tavistock Place Cartwright Gardens HISTORY Roman Britain After the Romans Saxon and Norman Tudor Charles II George II London circa 1700-1815 GREAT BRITAIN The life of Metropolitan England Britain is a world by itself The Climates of Britain The English Plain Great Britain Strategic Geography Great Britain - Ireland Great Britain - Scotland