London in my Time by Thomas Burke

Attending last year a revival of that "heart-throbbing, domestic drama" of the sixties, "The Streets of London," I was moved by the title to compare the streets of Diamond Jubilee time with the streets of to-day. The streets of to-day are the streets I trod then, but how different in complexion and atmosphere! How much lighter, cleaner, brisker; how improved in visibility! The streets of the old London in wet weather always implied mud. Women crossed the street gingerly, with skirts lifted high. Even men went carefully, picking their steps here and there. The surfaces used then seemed to produce mud, and the horses' feet churned it and kicked it up, and the many wheels going over it corrugated each roadway with little hills of viscid mud. The street-orderlies were busy all day, if not with mud then with horse-droppings. With all their efforts, the streets were still not half so trim as they are to-day.

It was during the nineteen-noughts, if I remember rightly, that Bernard Shaw (or was it H. G. Wells?) made some comment on these conditions, and suggested that with the increased use of petrol Londoners would begin to realise that their streets might and could be as inoffensive to the sight and to the boots as the floors of their drawing-rooms. We have not quite reached that ideal, but the wholesale use of the car, the decline of horse-traffic (which agitation may in time completely ban from the main streets), and the new surfaces of our roadways, have helped us a good way towards it. Falling down when crossing the street on a wet day is not now the wreckage of your day which it was. You may get somewhat soiled, but a quick brush will put you right. Forty years ago you could only put yourself right by a complete external change.