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‘The ladies now, to take the air,

To Stepney or Hyde Park repair;

While many others do resort

For cakes and ale to Tottenham Court.’

In Pennant’s time, Oxford Street, then Oxford Road, had only a few houses on the north side of it. He remembered it ‘a deep hollow road, full of sloughs, with here and there a ragged house, the lurking-place of cut-throats’—a state of things the contrast to which was set forth in some crude lines of a song that a venerable relative, who died at the age of ninety-six, has often repeated to me, but of which I only remember—

‘That was the time for games and gambols,

When Oxford Street was covered with brambles,

Ponds, and sloughs, and running water,

Where now there’s nothing but bricks and mortar.’

This semi-rural state of things appears to have lasted west of Holborn for the first quarter of the present century. When Bedford House was built (1706), the north side of Queen’s Square was purposely left open that the inhabitants might enjoy the charming prospect before it, terminating in the Hampstead and Highgate Hills.