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Another road ran out by Tyburn, crossing the road to Reading—the present Edgware Road—and going on by Lisson Grove to Kilburn Abbey, passing West End and Sutcup Hill, Hampstead, and thence on to Edgworth. But the most interesting of these roads, and which is distinctly traced in Aggas’s map, ran up from Charing Cross, through St. Martin’s Lane to Broad St. Giles’s, crossing the ‘Waye to Uxbridge’ (Oxford Street), and thence up Tottenham Court Road, which shows how nearly the modern highway follows the lines of the ancient one. It looks very like the present road to Hampstead, except that it appears to stop short at the top of Tottenham Court Road. The difference is in the road itself and its surroundings—running as it did over a track, which, once made, was left to take care of itself; dangerous with heaps of refuse and hollow places that in winter were full of water, and at other times absolute sloughs. Even in Charles II.’s time, when turnpike roads were made by Act of Parliament, the travelling by coach or waggon does not appear to have been much improved. The highways were in places so narrow that a lady traveller in 1764 tells us that, meeting another coach, her conveyance was brought to a standstill till the road was made sufficiently wide at that particular part to allow of the carriages passing each other. In winter and in rainy seasons, owing to the want of a proper knowledge of draining, it was not an unknown grievance for the waters in low-lying places to inundate the carriages; while at the close of such periods travellers frequently found their wheels so deeply embedded in the mud left in these hollows that they had to remain there till additional horses could be had from the nearest farmhouse or village to drag their vehicle out. The private letters, diaries, and memoirs of those bygone years are full of such adventures.

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