ROADS INTO LONDON
The cry is that of Taylor the water poet and a waterman himself. It was that of the stage coachmen when railways came in, it will be that of the cabmen to-morrow, of railway engineers on the day after. That is the detail.
But until the days of Taylor London had been growing year by year more congested. Originally there had been the Tower, a fortress-village with a walled town of mud huts round it, its roads mere footpaths, its space circumscribed enough. As the town grew more important feudal nobles built palaces on the banks of the stream, crowds vast for their day came on foot or horse from the surrounding country or in ships from outer Europe. The houses of London climbed skywards along the narrow lanes—"Elizabethan" houses, half-timbered, climbing up to six, eight and ten storeys, the upper ones bulging out and almost touching overhead to gain in the air the space that had to be ceded to foot traffic on the ground. Near the river were these houses of the "comfortable" classes. These palaces of the kings and the great houses of the nobles crowded the face of the river that their owners might keep their private barges and have their own water gates. The others at the public stairs called "Oars!" as to-day we call "Cab". Then came "the pampered jades of Belgia".
Roads were laid down or made up to suit them, then London spread out and the watermen disappeared or starved. (Taylor died a "victualler" at Oxford.) The poorer classes began to swarm into such of the tall, "comfortable" houses as the Fire left, the nobles moved
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