Haymarket (obviously once a hay market) is near Trafalgar Square, and Coventry Street near Leicester Square.
innovations: novelties, new things.
[57. UNDER GEORGE II. PART III.]
Broad Street: between the Royal Exchange and Liverpool Street.
Whitecross Street is near the Barbican, Aldersgate Street; Whitechapel, in which is Middlesex Street (commonly known as Petticoat Lane), is reached through Aldgate.
Hogarth (born 1697, died 1764): a celebrated English painter, chiefly famous for moral, satirical and humorous pictures drawn from everyday life.
asphalt: a kind of mineral pitchy substance which melts in heat and can be laid down so as to form a hard, smooth roadway.
Vauxhall: in Surrey, in the parish of Lambeth, on the south of the Thames. There was once an old manor house here called Faukes or Fox Hall.
Bermondsey Spa: so called from a mineral spring discovered there in 1770. (Spa, a place where there is a mineral spring, gets its name from a celebrated watering-place in Belgium of that name.)