Dickensian London

I took this photo while on the pub crawl described below. The large lamp hangs outside Ye Old Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. The street posts show it’s in the City of London while floodlit St.Paul’s almost hangs in the sky like a spectral moon.

A Dickensian View of Fleet Street

As mentioned elsewhere, the slope of Fleet Street downwards is one side of the valley where the hidden river Fleet runs underground. When you realise there’s a river there the geography of London seems quite different and it’s almost possible to imagine what it would be like without any buildings.

There are suggestions that this route had some sort of mythical significance for prehistoric settlers in the area — that a ley line runs towards St.Paul’s along Fleet Street and that Ludgate Circus (at the bottom of the valley half way between where the photo was taken and St.Paul’s) was the site of a stone circle and megalith.