rt of Compton House now stands) and a
confectioner's at the corner of Church-alley. Bold-street was nearly all
private houses, and there were very few shops in it, even some forty
years ago. Seventy years since there was scarcely a house of any sort in
it. I have been told that where the Athenaeum now stands in
Church-street, there was once a large pond on which the skaters used to
cut a figure, and that a farm-house stood at the corner of
Hanover-street. Some houses in Hanover-street will be noticed as being
built out at angles with the street. This was to secure a good view of
the river from the windows. At the corner of Bold-street some ninety
years ago was a milkman's cottage and dairy. Whitechapel, when I was a
lad, was a dreadful thoroughfare. I have seen it deep in water, and
boats rowed about, conveying people from house to house, in times of
flood. There used to be a channel with water running down the centre of
the street, which was considerably lower than it is at present. It was
no uncommon thing for the cellars of all the houses to be filled with
water, and even now, I believe, some portion of the neighbourhood is not
unfrequently rendered damp and uncomfortable. In the cellars under the
Forum, in Marble-street, there is a very deep well which is at all times
full; this well drains the premises. This Forum, about fifty years ago,
was a well-known and much frequented arena for disputations of all sorts.
Many a clever speaker has addressed audiences now passed away. Speaker
and spoken to are for the most part gone. A great change took place some
forty years ago in the locality where St. John's Market now stands.
There was a ropewalk here which extended from where the angle of the
building faces the Amphitheatre, as far as Renshaw-street. There was a
field at one time to the north of the ropery skirted by hedges which went
down the site of the present Hood-street, and round to where there is now
a large draper's shop in the Old Haymarket; the hedge then went up
John's-lane, and so round by the site of the lamp opposite the Queen's
Hotel, along Limekiln-lane to Ranelagh-street. These were all fields,
being a portion of what was anciently called "the Great Heath." It was
at one time intended to erect a handsome Crescent where the cab-stand is
now. The almshouses stood on this ground. Limekiln-lane, now
Lime-street, was so called from the limekiln that stood on the site of
the present Skelhorn-st