All round London the roads were blocked everywhere by turnpikes. It is difficult to understand the annoyance of being stopped continually to show a pass or to pay the pike. Thus, there were two or three turnpikes in what is now called the Euston Road, and was then the New Road; one of them was close to Great Portland Street, another at Gower Street. At Battle Bridge, which is now King’s Cross, there were two, one on the east, and one on the west; there was a pike in St. John Street, Clerkenwell. There were two in the City Road, and one in New North Road, Hoxton; one at Shoreditch, one in Bethnal Green Road, one in Commercial Road. No fewer than three in East India Dock Road, three in the Old Kent Road, one in Bridge Street, Vauxhall; one in Great Surrey Street, near the Obelisk; one at Kennington Church--what man turned of forty cannot remember the scene at the turnpike on Derby Day, when hundreds of carriages would be stopped while the pikeman was fighting for his fee? There was a turnpike named after Tyburn, close to Marble Arch; another at the beginning of Kensington Gardens; one at St. James’s Church, Hampstead Road. Ingenious persons knew how to avoid the pike by making a long _détour_. [Illustration: KENNINGTON GATE DERBY DAY] [Illustration: THE OLD ROMAN BATH IN THE STRAND] The turnpike has gone, and the pikeman with his apron has gone--nearly everybody’s apron has gone too--and the gates have been removed. That is a clear gain. But there are also losses. What, for instance, has become of all the baths? Surely we have not, as a nation, ceased to desire cleanliness? Yet in reading the list of the London baths fifty years ago one cannot choose but ask the question. St. Annice-le-Clair used to be a medicinal spring, considered efficacious in rheumatic cases. Who stopped that spring and built upon its site? The Peerless Pool close beside it was the best swimming bath in all London. When was that filled up and built over? Where are St. Chad’s Wells now? Formerly they were in Gray’s Inn Road, near ‘Battle Bridge,’ which is now King’s Cross, and their waters saved many an apothecary’s bill. There were swimming baths in Shepherdess Walk, near the almshouses. When were they destroyed? There was another in Cold Bath Fields; the spring, a remarkably cold one, still runs into a bath of marble slabs, represented to have been laid for Mistress Nell Gwynne in the days of the Merry Monarch. Curiously, the list from which I am quoting does not mention the most delightful bath of all--the old Roman Bath in the Strand. I remember making the acquaintance of this bath long ago, in the fifties, being then a student at King’s. The water is icy cold, but fresh and bright, and always running. The place is never crowded; hardly anybody seems to know that here, in the heart of London, is a monument of Roman times, to visit which, if it were at Arles or Avignon, people would go all the way from London. Some day, no doubt,