136 Plans for Improving London. 



PLANS FOR IMPROVING LONDON. 



The present year, a.d. 1866, marks a period of exactly two 

 centuries since the great fire of London, an event at that time 

 naturally considered as a great national calamity, but which 

 might have tended to a great national good, if firmness and 

 sound common sense had been allowed to prevail over preju- 

 dices and self-interests. The little mind and short-sightedness 

 were unfortunately as common in those days as at the present 

 time, and Sir Christopher Wren's noble plan for rebuilding the 

 destroyed portions of the metropolis was rejected in the same 

 obstinate manner as the proposed principal lines of our rail- 

 ways were in our own days, when first brought before the 

 public. In 1766, exactly one hundred years after London's 

 great conflagration, John Gwynn published his London and 

 Westminster Improved, illustrated by some admirable plans, in 

 which more than one hundred improvements are mapped and 

 described. In the present year, after the lapse of another 

 century, the Engineer and Surveyor to the Commissioners of 

 Sewers for the City of London brings forward a most able and 

 elaborate report on The Traffic and Improvements in the Public 

 Ways of the City of London. 



It may, perhaps, be interesting to take a glance at these 

 centenary productions. John Gwynn was a bold man in his 

 way ; expense to him was a matter not to be thought of. The 

 title of his work states that his illustrated plans were prefixed 

 by " A Discourse on Publick Magnificence," and in 132 pages 

 of letter-press he contended for his several suggested improve- 

 ments with all the ardour and ability of the Prefet Haussmann. 

 Gwynn proposed two royal palaces — one in Hyde Park, with a 

 circular road of one mile in circumference to enclose it, and 

 another to fill up the space from the Green Park to St. James's 

 Street, with one end towards Piccadilly and the other on the 

 site of the present St. James's Palace. The Houses of Par- 

 liament he proposed to rebuild; and not having the fear of the 

 medievalists before his eyes, he desired to make a clear sweep 

 of Westminster Hall, in order that the site might be raised to- 

 a proper and higher level above the river. And although at 

 the first sight we may be astounded at so audacious a proposal,, 

 yet, in so large an outlay as there has necessarily been in the 

 construction of the Palace of Westminster, the additional 

 amount in raising the ground floor — the piano nobile — of the 

 whole structure some fifteen feet, and rebuilding Westminster 

 Hall on its present site, raising the roof, and making every 

 portion of it a strict restoration of the present venerable pile, 

 would have been at a cost justified by the national importance 



