Thames side is still fringed with "stairs to take water at" leading from the great houses on the margin, and there is as yet no embankment. Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges, however, afford easy access to the southern side. The labyrinth of the City is not seriously different from that of the present day except in the omission of Cannon Street. Bethlehem Hospital is still conspicuous, and the City wall has vanished strangely. What we now call Finsbury Square is marked as Upper Moorfields. We have to go far before we clear the houses to the east. Stepney and Bethnal Green are fairly thickly populated, and though surrounded by open ground, are connected by houses all the way from the City. But in the bend of the river by Wapping the chief area is occupied by market-gardens. Crossing over to the other side, we find the market-gardens very prominent; as London grows larger she thrusts her sources of supply further from her. The central ganglion of the Borough Road and its ray-like connections are marked out. At one end is the "King's Bench," which was close to the Marshalsea, associated with "Little Dorrit." The Marshalsea itself is not marked. Dickens was yet to come, and it was only through his writings that it gained a sentimental interest. A great part of the Borough is very marshy indeed, and we note frequent ponds. The "Dog and Duck," otherwise "St. George's Spaw," is almost surrounded by them. To sum up in Sir Walter Besant's words: "London, then, in the eighteenth century consisted first of the City, nearly the whole of which had been rebuilt after the Fire, only a small portion in the east and north containing the older buildings; a workmen's quarter at Whitechapel; a lawyer's quarter from Gray's Inn to the Temple, both inclusive; a quarter north of the Strand occupied by coffee-houses, taverns, theatres, a great market, and the people belonging to these places; an aristocratic quarter lying east of Hyde Park; and Westminster, with its Houses of Parliament, its Abbey, and the worst slums in the whole City. On the other side of the river, between London Bridge and St. George's, was a busy High Street with streets to right and left; the river bank was lined with houses from Paris Gardens to Rotherhithe; there were streets at the back of St. Thomas's and Guy's; Lambeth Marsh lay in open fields, and gardens intersected by sluggish streams and ditches; and Rotherhithe Marsh lay equally open in meadows and gardens, with ponds and ditches in the east....