London!

At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and buildings
and reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember that I ever struggled
very steadily to understand it, or explored it with any but a personal
and adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in me a kind
of theory of London; I do think I see lines of an ordered structure out
of which it has grown, detected a process that is something more than
a confusion of casual accidents though indeed it may be no more than a
process of disease.

I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover the
clue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine it is the clue to the
structure of London. There have been no revolutions no deliberate
restatements or abandonments of opinion in England since the days of
the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover was
built; there have been changes, dissolving forest replacing forest, if
you will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English system
set firmly. And as I have gone to and fro in London in certain regions
constantly the thought has recurred this is Bladesover House, this
answers to Bladesover House. The fine gentry may have gone; they have
indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them,
financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape is
still Bladesover.

I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions round
about the West End parks; for example, estate parks, each more or less
in relation to a palace or group of great houses. The roads and back
ways of Mayfair and all about St. James's again, albeit perhaps of a
later growth in point of time, were of the very spirit and architectural