It was a grand sight on the first of May to see the four-horse mail coaches pass along Knightsbridge at eight in the evening. As many as fourteen would pass all in their new livery of scarlet coats and broad-brimmed top hats, trimmed with gold lace, the guards blowing their horns. I have seen them take up passengers at the top of Sloane Street, who arrived there in one of the old two-horse hackney coaches, and it appeared quite an undertaking to get the passengers on board. They would branch off there, some going along the upper road through Kensington, and the others along the Fulham Road and across the river at Putney. The road from Chelsea to Buckingham Palace was mostly through fields, some of them called the Five Fields (now Eaton Square and neighbourhood), extending as far as Grosvenor Place and St. George’s Hospital, which you could see from the toll-gate in Sloane Squire, the only building on that part being Eaton Chapel. The road to the Palace was very lonely, as there were but few houses. The Chelsea Bun Houses—there were two of them—stood on the left side of the Pimlico Road, about one hundred yards beyond the toll-gate by the “Nell Gwynn” tavern. The first one kept at that time by London, had a frontage of at least fifty feet. It was built out fifteen or twenty feet from the house, and had a colonnade in front over the pathway; the other, kept by Chapman, was two doors further on, of the same style but much smaller. On a Good Friday morning I have seen a large crowd waiting to get served, which they did through the window. I have seen carriages and traps waiting as far as the tollhouse. A little farther on, where St. Barnabas’ Church now stands, was the “Orange” tavern and tea gardens, with a theatre where regular plays were acted, and beyond, just before you came to the wooden bridge over the canal there was a road leading down to the Chelsea Water Works reservoir and filtering beds, and at the bottom stood the “White House,” with its ferry over to the “Red House” at Battersea, a great sporting riverside house, where nearly all the pigeon shooting took place. There was always a great crowd of amateur sportsmen outside waiting for a shot at any birds that escaped, and frequently a dispute would arise as to who shot the bird, often ending in a fight. There were no buildings on the right hand side of the road, but some marshy ground and a row of willow trees between it and the canal as far as the basin, which was surrounded by a few shops and wharves, and where Victoria Station now stands. And nearly opposite stood Bramah’s Iron Foundry, where nearly the first iron lighthouse was built and fitted together and erected in the yard complete, and then taken and shipped to one of the West India Islands, I think Jamaica, and re-erected. It was afterward’s Bramah’s Great Unpickable Lock Factory.