DR. JOHNSON UNNOTICED LONDON CHAPTER I CHELSEA “I have passed manye landes and manye yles and contrees, and cherched many full straunge places,.... Now I am comen home to reste.” SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE. If a hurried traveller had only time to roam about one of the London boroughs I think he should choose Chelsea, because in that small area of houses built along a mile and a half of the Thames riverside there is much that is typical of quite different phases of London life, from the sixteenth century to the present day. It lies between the Kings Road and the Embankment, beginning at Lower Sloane Street--Chelsea Bridge Road, and is reached by the district railway to Sloane Square Station or by the No. 11 bus passing the Strand, Trafalgar Square and Victoria: by Nos. 19 or 22 from Hyde Park Corner, and from Kensington by the 31, with its terminus at Limerston Street, and by the Nos. 49 and 49a. Perhaps the reason why this quarter has always been beloved is because while other districts have had their moment of fame and now live on their past in somnolent content, Chelsea has fallen in and out of fashion with a fine carelessness and has always guarded the creative gift of dwellers of all ranks, so that the name of the little village has been famous for such a diversity of things as literature and custards, art and water-works, china and buns, horticulture and learning. There is something cosy and charming about the name Chelsea, a good old Anglo-Saxon word that once meant, “The Gravel Isle, Chesel-sey.” It has not become quite so unrecognisable as its neighbour Battersea, but it has no more just cause for converting into “sea” the ey that means island with which it once ended. But you cannot lay down stern rules for a name that has taken the bit between its teeth like Chelsea. It started its career in the Domesday Book as Chelched, and by the time it got to the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More is dating a letter to Henry VIII. “At my pore howse in Chelcith.” Of the two Thomases whose memory pervades Chelsea, Sir Thomas More is perhaps the most lovable. His son-in-law once said of him: “whom in sixteen years and more, being in his house conversant with him, I could never perceive as much as once in a fume.” It is in Roper’s _Life_ that you read how his neighbours loved him with reason. Once, when he had been away on a mission to Cambrai in 1528, he went to report to the King at Woodstock, and then heard that part of his house and barns in Chelsea had been burnt. He had no thought of his own loss, but sent to comfort his wife and tell her to find out the extent of his neighbours’ loss and indemnify them as far as possible.