Where I am moving

"However, supposing even that you have a passing acquaintance with Golden - lane, have you penetrated farther still in your explorations, and been in and out, here and there, among the Chequers? In a word, do you know Chequer-alley?
    Don't pretend that you have an acquaintance with it because you have seen the name painted up over a narrow, squalid, forbidding entry to a dark court, and have concluded that it was a mere foul cul de sac, or a neglected byway to some adjacent street. If that has been your conclusion, you were never more mistaken in your life. Chequer-alley means a whole zigzag neighbourhood, an agglomeration of alleys and courts, intersecting as wretched and poverty-stricken a district as can be found in all London-a puzzle-map of poverty, a maze of misery, in which the unaccustomed visitor might grow heart-sick and dizzy in the effort to find his way amidst the tangle of hovels and close yards; of which a key is not to be found in any map that I know of; the names of which are probably unsettled by any board of works, local or metropolitan; a vast sty in the midst of this Great City where 20,000 human beings herd together in a condition so wretched, that had a traveller to some distant land sent back a description [-250-] of a native colony disclosing such destitution, vice, and ignorance, we should at once have asked why no missionaries had been despatched to remedy a state of things more repulsive than many narratives of heathen life which have claimed and found immediate response from Christian effort."

Well, it has improved somewhat since 1870.

 

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