ROADS INTO LONDON
London in a way that is bewildering and makes classification impossible. They are like the stratifications of pottery and rubble that lie under all large cities, Rome and London alike. But it is as if the layers had been disturbed. It is not necessary to cite such artificially respected fragments as the mediaeval St. John's Gate at Clerkenwell, which in any city less prodigal of relics would be a place of pilgrimage for sightseers, or the old house in Holborn. These are not factors in the life of modern London.
But on certain of the great roads into Town you will see the queerest jumble of old terraces, shadowed by old trees, grimed by the soot of generations long dead, jostled by the newest of shops dwelt in by generations as new. You may come into town by the Mitcham bus. You find brown, black or red trams waiting for you in a very narrow Square of old, but not ancient, untidy, and probably "doomed" shops. Rows of the small, redbrick, slate-roofed houses, with bow windows to suggest a certain superiority, run at right angles to the highway. They whirl round and out of sight, as the tram advances, each moving vista ending in the screen of distant trees. Suddenly, on the high-road itself, there is a long block of buildings, white, and with green shutters above, liver-coloured brick below, slate roofed, rather startling and rather impressive. A high paling and a few tall elms still on the road-line, announce that this, too, was, till the other day, an old estate. A large, lettered, black board spells out that here are the County Council's workmen's dwell-
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