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I am looking at a view of Westminster in the early eighteenth century; more specifically at the adjacent church of St. Margaret Westminster, next to the Abbey. More interesting than both to me is a glimpse at the very back of the picture, some two hundred yards distant, of what I know (from Ogilby's map of 1682) to be King Street. Pepys describes a major traffic jam in this street.

It looks like an unprepossessing row of houses; indeed why should it be anything other than that? What interests me is that it is a way out of an otherwise dull, if worthy view of the Abbey. Because I find that, for mental ambulation to begin it has to do so "out of' some or other scene.

We turn left into King Street then; overhanging eaves, narrow, no pavements to speak of; or perhaps simply no pavements; about this I don't know; but I don't need this detail. Moving up the street we get a glimpse to the right into New Palace Yard, and the Thames with ferries clustered around Westminster Stairs. Forget Canaletto's pellucid views. The weather is poor. Much more interesting, helpful, to think of London in poor weather. It authenticates the experience somehow. (Canaletto's 'definition' of eighteenth century London is wonderful for its topography, wrong in this weather; how much more exciting are the grubby brown and grey views of a squat London under leaden skies cross-hatched with wind-driven rain of certain, often by anonymous Dutch landscapists.)

The narrow street reclaims us again; as we walk on we look ahead and see the approaching pepperpot turrets of the Tudor King Street Gate; we pass beneath this (dank, echoey) and out again, now skirting for fifty yards to our right a wall too high to see over that separates us from the Privy Garden, denied to us because it is part of the royal Leisure Centre through which we are now passing; tennis courts, cockpits, tilting yards and the garden, unseen behind the wall, leading down to the Thames; the sound of a woman's laughter perhaps? The plop of a shuttlecock? Courtly railleries? (OK! but even perambulant topographers need a little Georgette Heyer in their arid lives.)

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