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28
MORTALITY OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
diction extends, is maintained in a sodden and
malarious state.
With respect to the second part of the City in
which considerable groups of cholera cases were
observed, it has a not dissimilar peculiarity. I refer
to that northern part of the City which extends (on
the other side of London Wall) from Bishopsgate
to Aldersgate. The epidemic prevailed there with
far less severity than in the Fleet district, but still
with a preference which easily shows itself in a
cholera-map. At the intersection of Whitecross
street by Beech lane, in a space that the point
of one's finger would hide in Wyld's large map,
there were 12 deaths: in that small portion of the
City which lies north of Barbican and Beech street
there were 40 deaths: in the immediate vicinity of
Half-moon street, Bishopsgate, 60 deaths, of which
more than half were in the workhouse. Now, certainly
in all this space (and probably still further
in both directions, east and west) without the former
gates of the City, there is a marked local character.
It is a reclaimed marsh. Throughout this district,
in the olden times of the City, there lay (says Stow)
"a moorish rotten ground, unpassable but for cawswaies
purposely made to that intent;" and one reads
how "divers dikes were cast, and made to drein
the waters of the said Moorefields, with bridges
arched over them, whereby the said field was
made somewhat more commodious, but yet it stood
full of noisome waters;"till gradually "by divers