London – South of the Thames: Preface

London – South of the Thames
by Sir Walter Besant

Published in London by Adam & Charles Black
1912

PREFACE

With this third volume of the topographical section Sir Walter Besant’s Great Survey of London is concluded. The whole work is comprised in ten volumes, the first seven of which are historical, tracing the wonderful story of London from the earliest times up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Ten years after the regrettable death of the modern historian of London his immense undertaking has been finished, and the publishers and the editors feel no little satisfaction in seeing the realisation of the great scheme to which Sir Walter devoted many years of enthusiastic labour.

The great piles of MS. and the vast collection of prints, maps, photographs, and cuttings left by Sir Walter have now been converted into some 4700 quarto pages, copiously illustrated. By looking through the ten volumes in chronological order, the astounding growth of London from a prehistoric village surrounded by the wide marshes of the untutored Thames, to the vast city which has expanded all over those swamps, one seems to be seated upon Mr. Wells’s Time Machine and able to watch the successive changes taking place epoch by epoch.

The present volume consists of historical chapters written by Sir Walter Besant and a street-to-street perambulation by Mr. J. C. Geikie, who was given by Sir Walter the task of recording the actual condition of every street and building of South London within the area of control of the London County Council. It should be borne in mind that the survey was made at the beginning of this century, and that the changes which have taken place in the last decade are ignored, as Sir Walter’s scheme was to make his monumental survey a record of London at the commencement of the twentieth century.

London, 1912

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