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." All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times,
do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some
tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines
of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortable
Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask myself
will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape
into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and
ultimate diagnosis?...

Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration of
elements that have never understood and never will understand the great
tradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the heart of this
yeasty English expansion. One day I remember wandering eastward out
of pure curiosity--it must have been in my early student days--and
discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying
Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse of
bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish