Letters from England/London Streets
London Streets
AS regards London itself, it smells of petrol, burnt grass, and tallow, thus differing from Paris, where unto these are added the odour of powder, coffee and cheese. In Prague each street has a different smell; in this respect there is no place to beat Prague. The voices of London are a more complicated matter; the inner districts, such as the Strandor Piccadilly, sound, I assure you, like a spinning-mill with thousands of spindles; it clatters, rattles, whirs, mutters, whizzes and rumbles with thousands of packed motor lorries, buses, cars, and steam tractors; and you sit on the top of a bus which cannot move forward and clatters to no purpose, you are shaken up by its rattling and leap about on your seat like some queer stuffed puppet. Then there are side-streets, gardens, squares, roads and groves and crescents up to the wretched street in Notting Hill, where I am writing this: all of them streets of Two Pillars, streets of Similar Railings, streets of Seven Steps In Front of Each House, and so on; now here, a sort of desperate series of variations on the sound “i” proclaims the milkman, a woeful “ieiei” merely denotes firewood, “uó” is the coalman’s war-cry, and the ghastly yell of a delirious sailor announces that a youth is hawking five cabbage heads in a perambulator. And by night the cats make love as savagely as on the roofs of Palermo, in spite of all reports about English Puritanism. Only the people here are quieter than elsewhere; they talk to each other half-heartedly, and their aim is to get home with the least possible delay. And that is the strangest thing about the English streets: here you do not see respectable ladies telling each other on the kerb what happened at the Smiths or the Greens, nor courting couples strolling arm-in-arm like sleep-walkers, nor worthy citizens seated on their doorstep with their hands on their knees (by the way, here I have not yet seen a carpenter or a locksmith or a workshop or a journeyman or an apprentice; here are nothing but shops, nothing but shops, nothing but Westminster Bank and Midland Bank. Ltd.), nor men drinking in the street, nor benches in the market-square, nor idlers, nor tramps, nor servant-girls, nor pensioners—in short, nothing, nothing, nothing; the London streets are just a gulley through which life flows to get home. In the streets people do not live, stare, talk, stand or sit; they merely rush through the streets. Here the street is not the most interesting of places, where a thousandfold spectacle meets your gaze, and where a thousand adventures address themselves to you; a place where people whistle or scuffle, bawl, flirt, rest, poetize or philosophize, and enjoy life and indulge in jokes or politics and band themselves together in twos, in threes, in families, in throngs, or in revolutions. In our country, in Italy, in France, the street is a sort of large tavern or public garden, a village green, a meeting place, a playground and theatre, an extension of home and doorstep; here it is something which belongs to nobody, and which does not bring anyone closer to his fellows; here you do not meet with people, and things, but merely avoid them.
In our country a man thrusts his head out of the window, and he is right in the street. 
But the English home is separated from the street not merely by a curtain in the window, but also by a garden and a railing, ivy, a patch of grass, a door-knocker and age-old tradition. The English home must have its own garden, for the street does not provide it with a queer and delightful pleasaunce; in the garden it must have its own swing or playground, because the street does not provide it with a playground or the diversions of a skating-rink. The poetry of the English home exists at the expense of the English street which is devoid of poetry. And here no revolutionary throngs will ever march through the streets, because these streets are too long. And also too dull.
Thank goodness that there are buses here, vessels of the desert, camels bearing you on their backs through the infinity of bricks and mortar which is London. One of the things which puzzle me is that they do not miss the way, although, for the greater part, they do not steer by sun or stars, owing to the cloudy condition of the atmosphere here. I still do not know by what secret signs the driver distinguishes Ladbroke Grove from Great Western Road or Kensington Park Road. I do not know why he should prefer to take a trip to East Acton, instead of riding to Pimlico or Hammersmith. For all these places are so curiously alike that I cannot imagine why he should have specialized in East Acton. Perhaps he has a house there, one of those with two pillars and seven steps by the door. These houses look rather like family vaults; I tried to make a drawing of them, but do what I would, I was unable to obtain a sufficiently hopeless appearance; besides, I have no grey paint to smear over them.
Before I forget: of course, I went to look at Baker Street, but I came back terribly disappointed. There is not the slightest trace of Sherlock Holmes there: it is a business thoroughfare of unexampled respectability, which serves no higher purpose than to lead to Regent’s Park, which, after a long endeavour, it almost manages to achieve. If we also briefly touch upon its underground railway station, we have exhausted every thing, including our patience.