day.

Before I close this chapter, in which I am comparing the present with
the past, I cannot help calling to mind features of Birmingham nearly
fifty years ago, when I began to look about me with my boyish eyes. I
made some general reference to these in the opening chapter of these
sketches. I will now just indulge in a few brief details. To go no
further than quite the centre of the town, I call to mind some important
places that disappeared when the New Street railway station was made.

I remember Lady Huntingdon's chapel--a place of worship that was popular
in its day--and seem to have a hazy recollection of the King Street
theatre (or the remains of it), in which was held the first evening
concert of the Birmingham Musical Festival in the year 1768. Cannon
Street chapel has been too recently removed not to be remembered by many
people, but I can recollect going to this place of worship when it was a
real old-type Baptist chapel, and where special disciples or devotees
were deeply immersed in religion and water.

Most of us can also remember when some unostentatious private houses
occupied the side of New Street opposite the Society of Artists' rooms,
and not a few of us can call to mind the dirty, slummy buildings that so
closely blocked up the back of the Town Hall. It was, indeed, an
improvement when these wretched houses were removed and the back of the
Hall was finished and opened out. It is, I believe, true that what
became the back of the Town Hall was really intended by the architect to
be its front. However this may be, the proportions of the north side of
the Town Hall are, I think, more symmetrical and imposing in appearance
than the south side fronting Paradise Street.