That, at least, is how it takes me!
Looked at with the eyes only, Shepherd Market reveals itself as a queer, haphazard warren of streets packed with little shops whose onions overflow on the pavement, whose cabbages sometimes collapse into the gutter, whose fish and meat are much in evidence. Here you have the atmosphere of the Pantiles and the formation of any square in any old county town you care to remember.
This is picturesque. Behind any grand modern street you seem to see a surveyor or an architect bending over a blue paper, drawing straight lines. These shops and squares have grown up naturally, as a clump of flowers grows—some here, some there; some big, some small. What splendid individuality.
Here, within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, shopkeepers display big galvanized dust-bins on the pavement. You might be in Salisbury marketplace. A china shop sells pretty little teapots of the kind which spinster ladies drive into Ipswich to procure on market day. All manner of antique shops sleep in the shadows. In one window I saw really good china, in others Georgian silver and rushlight holders.
It is Georgian or Victorian, according to taste. You can people the uneven pavements with ghosts of your own choosing. No matter how many gallants and dames you discover, there are a few later characters whom you expect to meet at every turn. The colonel's wife! Where is she? You look round anxiously. She should be walking stiffly round with her cane, a couple of Sealyhams rolling affectionately at the hem of her tailor-made skirt. The bishop's lady, too, a tall, lined woman in a religious black hat; the dean's daughter, romantic and anæmic and addicted to green velvet; Lady Potts, from "The Hall," in a dog-cart, large, florid, and suspiciously golden; the three hefty unmarriageable daughters of the major-general (retired), with their bicycles; the pretty wife of a junior subaltern—all the stock characters of an English cathedral city or garrison town.
Instead, so strange is this rural atmosphere, go London folk, smart women from flats in Curzon Street, and men passing through on their way to their clubs.
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How did this patch become insulated from the fierce current of London life? I will tell you. They used to hold a fair here every May as far back as Edward I. Then, in 1738, a Mr. Shepherd built a cattle market on the spot. The butchers' shops had theatres on the second storeys, so that the dwarfs and drolls and vagabonds might in fair-time amuse the crowds. In 1750 so many regrettable things happened here that the fair was suppressed as a public scandal. (It must have been very wicked!)
So this is the heritage of our Shepherd Market, this concentrated essence of old England set down within sound of the wheels of Mayfair. If you visit it, notice how the old butchers' shops linger on, relics of the Shepherd Market of 1738. I imagine that there is here more prime Welsh mutton to the square yard than in any other street in London.
Romantic mutton!