VIII
KENSINGTON HIGH STREET, SUMMER SUNSET.
OLD KENSINGTON
It may be as well to put on record in this place the Kensington of my own recollection. My reminiscences of Kensington by no means go so far back as the time when Leigh Hunt wrote his “Old Court Suburb,” a book which described what was then a village “near London;” but when I first knew that now bustling place it was, if not exactly to be described as rural, certainly by no stretch of imagination to be called urban. In those days the great shops, which are no longer called shops, but “emporia,” or “stores,” or “magazines,” did not flaunt with plate-glass windows opposite St. Mary Abbot’s Church, nor, indeed, did the present building of St. Mary exist. In its place was a hideous structure, erected probably at some early period of the eighteenth century. It had windows that purported to be Gothic, and a bell-turret that belonged to no known order of architecture. It, and the now demolished old church of St. Paul, Hammersmith, bore a singular likeness to one another. The present generation can only discover what these unlovely buildings were like by referring to old prints, because there are none other now existing in London to which they can be likened; and a very good thing too. I can recollect old St. Mary’s very well indeed, and the days when the old Vestry Hall was still a place for the transaction of vestry business are quite vivid to me. In fact, at that time the Vestry Hall was somewhat new, and where the imposing Town Hall now stands beside it there was a tall building of very grimy brick, with quaint little figures of a boy and a girl perched high up on brackets above, and on either side of, the door. These little figures were represented as clad in a peculiar Dutch-like uniform; the boy, I think, blue, and the girl a quite painful orange, whenever they repainted her, which was seldom. This was, in fact, some sort of charity school, and it was as dismal a place as all charitable institutions were apt to be in our grandfathers’ time, when it was criminal to be poor, and eleemosynary establishments, in consequence, were designed as much like prisons as might well be.
“OLDEST INHABITANT.”