“Oh, Godmother, what a nice place! But it isn’t a bit like our Cheapside. It’s much wider, for one thing—and of course the houses are all different. Oh! it’s lovely.”
They stood in a broad open space paved with cobblestones. On either hand there were quaint houses like those in Thames Street, and among them a few much finer and larger, with carved balconies, and coloured and gilded coats of arms on their walls. “Those are the houses of the wealthy merchants,” said Godmother, pointing to the grander buildings. “Do you remember when we were in the car this morning passing a street out of Cheapside called Wood Street?”
“With a big tree at the corner? Yes!”
“Well, we are standing just about there.”
Betty gasped with astonishment.
“Oh! how difficult it would be to imagine all this if I wasn’t actually seeing it,” she murmured.
Down the middle of the market-place, at intervals, were stone fountains, and close to where she stood (opposite the modern Wood Street), rose a beautiful stone cross.
“That’s one of the crosses put up by Edward the First, in memory of his wife, Eleanor. You remember the story? And that church on the right, is Bow Church.”
“But it doesn’t look a bit like the Bow Church I know!”
“Except for the foundations it’s not the Bow Church we know, but another, built on its ruins. You have to remember that all this market, and in fact nearly the whole of London, is going to be swept away by a fire nearly three hundred years later on.”