A Georgian Town

A Georgian Town by E.V. Lucas (1907)

"A Georgian Town" by E.V. Lucas is an affectionate sketch of a small English maritime town, described as consisting of three essential elements: a long, curving High Street, a quieter residential street running parallel to it, and a quay. The narrator observes that both streets curve rather than run straight, and takes this as a natural consequence of their human origins, since any path made by foot will inevitably drift and oscillate. Despite this shared characteristic, the two streets differ greatly in character. The High Street is busy and commercial, and while it retains its Georgian and red-brick identity, it has conceded to modernity with plate-glass shop fronts and new facades. Its parallel neighbour, by contrast, has made no such concessions and remains entirely eighteenth century in appearance, with window frames flush to the wall, square dormer windows, fanlights, steps, knockers, and blinds, as well as a town hall with elegantly curving double staircases and almshouses five hundred years old. The narrator expresses a clear preference for this quieter street, suggesting it as a place where the illustrator Miss Greenaway might have found her subjects. The houses of the residential street, though still handsome, no longer shelter the prosperous merchants and shipowners for whom they were built. Successful business people have moved to villas on the outskirts of town, and the old Georgian houses are now occupied by managers, clerks, shop assistants, and their families. Viewed from above, the narrator imagines, the town's growth across the centuries would be legible as concentric rings of architecture, with the oldest buildings at the centre and the newest twentieth-century villas forming the outermost fringe. The High Street is characterised by a few telling details. Its finest house, a superb Georgian mansion, now serves as offices for the Gas Company. Both booksellers supply Punch only on order. There is an Amity Hall, used for occasional entertainments, and an electric theatre recently opened. A white building near the Custom House, historically associated with a smugglers' raid in which a large haul of contraband was recaptured, now serves as the practice venue for the town band, which fills the night air with music. The street also has numerous small inns suited to a maritime town, and two large coaching inns with spacious yards and worn billiard tables. Saturday nights bring the town to its liveliest, when country people arrive for market, and young men and women promenade up and down the middle of the street in groups, exchanging jokes and, the narrator suspects, losing their hearts. The third and most celebrated element of the town is the quay, which the narrator considers its saving grace. However much modernity may intrude elsewhere, the quay and the harbour keep the town anchored to something older and more permanent. Wind-tanned men in blue jerseys, living their days by the sea, resist the encroachments of progress. Even the introduction of petrol-powered fishing boats capable of ten knots against a headwind has not diminished the sea's essential character, which the narrator describes as a capricious, jealous, and never fully trustworthy mistress. Two small tugs move in and out of the harbour throughout the day, sometimes towing in three-masted vessels found in the bay. At the time of writing, a large German barque with a green hull and a Dutch tjalck are moored at the wharves, and coasters raise their masts and spars against the evening sky. In a nearby shipwright's yard, a large schooner damaged by a chance collision with a man-of-war in the Channel is being fitted with a new bowsprit and prow. The narrator recounts a conversation with one of the blue-jerseyed harbour men on the subject of smuggling. The man speaks with nostalgic tolerance of the practice, cheerfully admitting to having done some himself and expressing no moral objection to running a cargo of tubs from Guernsey. His reluctance to attempt it again is entirely practical: the risk of being caught, and above all the impossibility of trusting a partner. Smuggling, he explains, cannot be done alone, and yet in smuggling one cannot trust anyone, not even one's own brother.

By E.V. Lucas · First published 1907 · Genre: Travel Writing, Local History, Architectural Criticism · 1,507 words

First lines

This little town may be said to consist of three things -- a long, narrow, and not very straight High Street, an almost equally long and equally diverging street parallel with it, and the quay. Both the High Street and its parallel neighbour might as easily have been straight as not; but it is very much to their advantage to curve a little, for not only are curves more beautiful, but they remind one of the street's human origin, since before there can be a High Street there must be a path, and every one knows that no one can walk straight for more than a very few paces. Blindfold a man and tell him to walk across a field, and he will unconsciously bear to the left, I believe; and he will oscillate too.

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Georgian architecture · English history · urban development · 18th century · town planning · historical description · British culture · social history · heritage · landscape · community · nostalgic

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