The first sight of London

London is the city which was never planned. It has accumulated. For this reason, and also because its development was chiefly guided by commercial considerations, London is no longer, at first sight, overtly and obviously beautiful. Casual and shapeless, it offers few fine scenes and has no kind of symmetry. Its component boroughs and villages seem self-contained and unrelated to each other, for once beyond the ancient boundaries of the City proper, and once outside the Government quarter of Westminster and Whitehall, London is nothing but a mass of rural villages - Kensington, Tottenham, Paddington, Camberwell, Edmonton, Hampstead and so on - appeared in the tide of two centuries of fast urban expansion. Even Westminster itself was long a separate entity, an Abbey Church and royal palace standing high across the fields, accessible to Londoners by river.

The Thames in London is now only beautiful at certain times of day, in certain lights, from certain viewpoints - from Waterloo Bridge at dawn or a summer's evening for example, and at night from Cardinal's Wharf on the South Bank.

It is certain that a stranger - English or foreign - must be initially amazed by his first sight of London; it is not unlikely that he may also be disappointed. It will seem noisy, overcrowded, over-large, and filled with undisciplined-looking buildings. Many of them - Albert Hall Mansions, the Hotel Russel - are in more than strange taste. But though we cannot claim for it the immediate fascination of Paris, nor Dublin's tired charm, nor the sharp stimulus of New York's first impact, this city contains not only a number of architectural works of the first importance, but myriad places of quiet rather melancholy beauty, as well as many hundreds with historical and literary associations for students and lovers of the past.

The architectural beauties of London are most often unexpected. They are sometimes hard to find. Not many people know that if you push open the high forbidding wooden gates of the Deanery at St. Paul's, you will find yourself standing in a moss-grown courtyard made dark by plane trees, and facing the dim front of the brick town-house by Sir Christopher Wren.

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