The River did not make a new London as it had made the old city. Shops, markets, quays, public buildings, did not spring up naturally in places where the trade of the time demanded them, as they had done in the old days, otherwise much would have changed. Instead, the new city very largely rebuilt itself on the foundations of the old, quite regardless of comfort or utility. Its supremacy as a Port was never in doubt. With the tremendous break in London’s commerce, caused first by the Plague and then by the devastation of the Fire, it would have seemed possible for the shipping to decrease permanently; but it never did. So firmly was London Port established in the past that it lived on strongly into modern times, despite many excellent reasons why it should lose its great place. CHAPTER NINE _The Riverside and its Palaces_ To-day, when we stand upon Waterloo Bridge and let our gaze rest upon the Embankment, as it sweeps round in the large arc of a circle from Blackfriars past Charing Cross to Westminster, it is hard indeed to picture the time when these massive buildings—hotels, public buildings, suites of offices, etc.—were not there, when the green grass grew right down to the water’s edge on the left _strand_ or bank of the River, when a walk from the one city to the other was a walk through country lanes and fields. It is hard indeed to brush away all the ugly, grey reminders of the present, and see a little of the past in its beauty—for beautiful the River undoubtedly was in Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart times. We have spoken of the growth of the city, and what the River meant to it; of the wharves and warehouses which extended from the Tower to the Fleet River. That was the commercial London of those days. Westwards from the Fleet, along the side of the Thames, spread the more picturesque signs of London’s prosperity—the dwellings of some of the wealthy and influential. [Illustration: THE FLEET RIVER AT BLACKFRIARS (A.D. 1760).] From the western end of the city—Ludgate and Newgate—spread out westwards the suburbs, part of the city, though not actually within its walls, until an outer limit was reached at Temple Bar, situated at the western extremity of one of London’s most famous thoroughfares, Fleet Street, named after the little river which flowed down where Farringdon and New Bridge Streets are, and which emptied itself, and still empties itself, in the shape of a main drain, into the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge. Between Fleet Street and the River stood the Convent of the White Friars, and that most famous of places the Temple.