ON SEEING LONDON


I see that the _Spectator_, in reviewing a new book on the Tower, says
that, whilst visitors to London usually visit that historic monument,
Londoners themselves rarely visit it. There is, I suppose, a good deal of
truth in this. I know a man who was born in London, and has spent all his
working life in Fleet Street, who confesses that he has never yet been
inside the Tower. It is not because he is lacking in interest. He has been
to St. Peter's at Rome, and he went to Madrid largely to see the Prado. If
the Tower had been on the other side of Europe, I think he would probably
have made a pilgrimage to it, but it has been within a stone's-throw of him
all his life, and therefore he has never found time to visit it.

It is so, more or less, with most of us. Apply the test to yourself or to
your friends who live in London, and you will probably be astonished at the
number of precious things that you and they have not seen--not because they
are so distant, but because they are so near. Have you been to the Record
Office, for example? I haven't, although it is within a couple of hundred
yards of where I work and although I know it is rich in priceless
treasures. I am always going, but "never get," as they say in Lancashire.
It is too handy.

I was talking the other day to a City merchant who lives at Sydenham, and
who has never seen Hampstead Heath. He had been travelling from Sydenham to
the City for a quarter of a century, and has worn the rut so deep that he
cannot get out of it, and has hardly more likelihood of seeing the Northern