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.
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