The busy London, the shopping London lay principally between Fleet Street and the end of Cheapside. Ludgate Hill was an especially favourite place for dress-buying ladies. As for what we call the “West End” it did not exist, Westminster being a separate town, and between it and London City large expanses of waste land.
Mr. Wilkins gives a good account of the Court and its environs. He says:
“The political and fashionable life of London collected round St. James’s and the Mall. St. James’s Park was the fashionable promenade; it was lined with avenues of trees, and ornamented with a long canal and a duck pond. St. James’s Palace was much as it is now, and old Marlborough House (the residence at that time of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough) occupied the site of the present one; but on the site of Buckingham Palace stood Buckingham House, the seat of the powerful Duke of Buckingham, a stately mansion which the Duke had built in a ‘little wilderness full of blackbirds and nightingales.’ In St. James’s Street were the most frequented and fashionable coffee and chocolate houses, and also a few select ‘mug houses.’ Quaint signs, elaborately painted, carved and gilded, overhung the streets and largely took the place of numbers; houses were known as ‘The Blue Boar,’ ‘The Pig and Whistle,’ ‘The Merry Maidens,’ ‘The Red Bodice,’ and so forth.”
Piccadilly was practically a country road with a few mansions here and there. It ended in Hyde Park, then a wild heath.
Marylebone on the west, and Stepney on the east, were distinct villages some distance away; while as for the south, London appears to have ended at London Bridge, although the “Old Tabard” Inn in the Borough must certainly have existed at that time.
Bloomsbury, Soho and Seven Dials were fashionable suburbs, occupying, perhaps, much the same position as Kensington did fifty years ago. Grosvenor Square had been begun some twelve years, and was probably fairly covered by houses.
The most popular and agreeable mode of communication between London and the Court was by the Thames, and a stately barge with liveried rowers was as much a part of a nobleman’s equipment as his carriage or his “chair.” Very pretty must have been the appearance of the Thames at that time, although there was no Thames Embankment to view it from.
The streets at night were manifestly unsafe, being infested by a description of drunken young blackguards known as “Mohocks,” who apparently “squared” the equally drunken watchmen, and insulted women with impunity.
The public conveyance seems to have been of much the same description as that which one recollects in one’s youth in the shape of the ancient growler, musty and full of damp straw to keep the feet warm, but represented then by a rumbling old disused coach, very mouldy, with straw as above, and in which it must have been a great treat to traverse the irregular cobbles of the metropolitan streets. But with all its drawbacks London of 1728 rose immeasurably superior to London of the twentieth century in one respect, and one respect only. It had no fogs.
The streets apparently rang with more or less agreeable cries of itinerant traders, among which the still familiar cry of the milkman—or perhaps milk-girl—and the tinkle of the muffin bell must even then have been well established. There were, however, other street cries which are unknown to us in the present day, those of the professional rat-catcher and the street gambler, which latter apparently stood in the gutter and rattled a dice-box as an invitation to passers by to come and have a throw, an invitation which, in all probability, ended in disaster to the unwary who accepted it.