[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH'S FREE GRAMMAR SCHOOL]
[Illustration: ANCIENT BUILDINGS, HIGH STREET, BOROUGH
[Illustration: THE FALCON TAVERN, BANKSIDE]
The High Street of Southwark is now a crowded thoroughfare, because it is the main artery of a town containing a population of many hundreds of thousands. In the last century it was quite as animated because it was one of the main arteries by which London was in communication with the country. An immense number of coaches, carts, waggons, and 'caravans' passed every day up and down the High Street, some stopping or starting in Southwark itself; some going over London Bridge to their destination in the City. The coach of the first half of the century can be restored from Hogarth. That of the latter half of the century was in all respects like the revived coaches of the present day, adapted for rapid travelling along a smooth road. The carts were carriers' carts on two wheels with a tilt or cover; they carried parcels and small packages, and on occasions, but not always, one or two passengers. The waggons, which carried heavy goods and passengers not in a hurry, were also covered with a tilt; their broad wheels and capacious interior can be restored, as well as the coach, from that most trustworthy painter of his own time. As for the caravans, I am in some doubt. I suppose, however, that a caravan was then what it is now, in which case it was an elementary Pullman's car, in which people and their effects were drawn slowly along the road, in a four-wheeled covered cart. Perhaps the passengers slept in the car at night, drawn up by the roadside, like the gipsies. But of this theory I have no kind of proof.
[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN'S MEETING HOUSE, BANKSIDE]
From the Borough alone, without counting the vehicles which passed through to or from the City, there were sent out, every week, one hundred and forty-three stage coaches: one hundred and twenty-one waggons: and one hundred and ninety-six carts and caravans. And, of course, the same number came back every week. There was a continual succession of departures and arrivals; all day long, one after the other, the stage coaches came galloping up each to its own inn; while they were still far away the people of the inn knew when their own coach was coming by the tune played on the guard's bugle: the High Street, in fact, was like a railway terminus, where trains are arriving and leaving all day long.