eems to me the best explanation, not simply of London,
but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence landed
gentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. The
proper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent
Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they
had been but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand--and in
Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or country
town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different,
and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward in the
abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and down in
Westminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices sheltered
in large Bladesoverish rooms and looked out on St. James's Park. The
Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was
horrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred
years ago, stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole system
together into a head.

And the more I have paralleled these things with my Bladesover-Eastry
model, the more evident it has become to me that the balance is not the
same, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blind
forces of invasion, of growth. The railway termini on the north side of
London have been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-station
from Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but
from the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great stupid
rusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that great head that came
smashing down in 1905--clean across the river, between Somerset House
and Whitehall. The south side had no protecting estate. Factory chimneys
smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not
having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all
London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London
port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly
expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the
clean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central
London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the
northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets
of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families,
second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase
do not "exist."