View report page

218
Square again, the next thoroughfare calling for notice is
Tothill Street, under the entire length of which the District
Railway was built in 1805-7. The works connected with
this undertaking led to the widening of the street, the
partial re-building of the south side, and subsequently, in
1875, to the erection of the Aquarium on an area nearly
three acres in extent. Just off the Broadway, close by,
stood St. Ermin's Hill, with its workhouse, and in York
Street, Vandon's Almshouses, almost on the site of which
the new Town Hall casts its shadow. Looking south-west
from the windows of this building (a description of which
was given in the Board's twenty-eighth report) several of
the present members of the Board, who were resident in
Westminster in 1855, readily recall a strange ill-assorted
mixture of the rural and urban district which, as it seems
to have escaped the notice of local historians, is entitled to
more than a passing mention. Cut off by bricks and mortar
from the neighbouring fields of Tuttle or Toot-hill, or more
recently Tothill, it retained all the characteristics and the
name of a village—Palmer's Village—so called after the
Rev. Edwin Palmer, B.D., for many years a preacher
at St. Bride's Fleet Street, who, in 1560, founded with
a chapel and school attached, the almshouses already mentioned
as having preceded the present Hotel Windsor,
the name of the founder being preserved in the
present Palmer Street on the west of the Town Hall.
Surrounded by crowded streets, dark narrow lanes, and
fetid courts, and in the very midst of the district (its
principal boundaries may be roughly stated as parts of
Artillery Row, Coburg Row, St. Margaret's Place, Francis
.Street, Brewer's Green, and James Street) it was thus
described by a writer five and thirty years ago.
"It had still a village green, though the narrow strip of dusty
grass which justified the appellation was finally trodden out
under our own eyes It had an old-fashioned wayside
inn, the "Prince of Orange," which was a model of a
village inn as village inns are found in rural districts. It stood