THE BUTCHERS' ROW, WHITECHAPEL WHITECHAPEL, which is associated in most people's minds with murders and hospitals and an Art Gallery that is said to set the fashion in Old Masters to Burlington House, furnishes one of the most unlikely sensations that London gives. It has a genuine Haymarket believed to have been in existence since the time when the City of London was enclosed by walls, and it originated in the congregation of farmers' wagons outside the walls upon the country road. About the same time the butchers must first have planted their stalls, buying their stock from the farmers who came to market, and selling it to the motley crowd who would gather there to deal or stare. Beaumont and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," however, gives one of the first mentions of them. . . But have a great care of the butchers' hooks at Whitechapel they have been the death of many a fair ancient." Several of the butchers' houses here, despite modern additions and plaster-fronts, must have known the street in Jacobean days. The stagger of the woodwork, the short wide oblong of the garret-windows, and the little red-tiled cock-gables peeping over the projecting square-faced windows like the small ruddy face of a corpulent farmer, the brickwork, the chimneys, all tell of a time when the straw and hay that lit up the street in market days had not travelled far from their own fields. Something of the placid old country town can still be surprised in the Row |