The London to which Caroline came was a very different London to the vast metropolis we know to-day. Its total population could not have exceeded seven hundred thousand, and between the City of London proper and Westminster were wide spaces, planted here and there with trees, but for the most part waste lands. The City was then, as now, the heart of London, and the centre of business lay between St. Paul’s and the Exchange, while Westminster had a life apart, arising out of the Houses of Parliament. The political and fashionable life of London collected around St. James’s and the Mall. St. James’s Park was the fashionable promenade; it was lined with avenues of trees, and ornamented with a long canal and a duck-pond. St. James’s Palace was much as it is now, and old Marlborough House occupied the site of the present one, but on the site of Buckingham Palace stood Buckingham House, the seat of the powerful Duke of Buckingham, a stately mansion which the duke had built in a “little wilderness full of blackbirds and nightingales”. In St. James’s Street were the most frequented and fashionable coffee and chocolate houses, and also a few select “mug houses”. Quaint signs, elaborately painted, carved and gilded, overhung the streets, and largely took the place of numbers; houses were known as “The Blue Boar,” “The Pig and Whistle,” “The Merry Maidens,” “The Red Bodice,” and so forth. It was easy in those days to walk out from London into the open country on all sides. Marylebone was a village, Stepney a distant hamlet, and London south of the river had hardly begun. Piccadilly was almost a rural road, lined with shady trees, and here and there broken by large houses with gardens. It terminated in Hyde Park, then a wild heath, with fields to the north and Kensington to the west. Bloomsbury, Soho and Seven Dials were fashionable districts (many old mansions in Bloomsbury are relics of the Queen Anne and early Georgian era), though the tide of fashion was already beginning to move westward. Grosvenor Square was not begun until 1716, and Mayfair was chiefly known from the six weeks’ fair which gave it its name. One feature of the London of the early Georges might well be revived in these days of crowded streets and increasing traffic. The Thames was then a fashionable waterway, and a convenient means of getting from one part of London to another. Boats and wherries on the Thames were as numerous and as fashionable as gondolas at Venice, and the King, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and many of the nobility, had their barges in the same way that they had their coaches and sedan-chairs, and often “took the air on the water”.