LONDON'S NEW STREET by N. Y. World

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Dec 13, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 50.

LONDON'S NEW STREET.

By N. Y. World

WHAT is designated as the most important municipal improvement in London since the construction of Regent Street in 1820 has been completed by the opening of a new thoroughfare connecting the Strand with Holborn.

This new street is three-quarters of a mile long, and it has cost $30,000,000. It wipes out a slum neighborhood and incidently puts fifty-one liquor shops out of business. The cutting of a new street through our own Five Points extirpated haunts of vice which once made that quarter of the city notorious.

The sum spent illustrates the enormous outlay required for the physical reconstruction of a large city. The statement that two-thirds of the expenditure will be recovered by the sale of building sites throws light on the English method of laying out streets through congested districts. Following Joseph Chamberlain's precedent with Corporation Street in Birmingham, the authorities condemn a strip of land sufficiently wide to allow for building sites on either side of the projected thoroughfare, and by the sale of these materially reduce the expense.—N. Y. World.