Excerpt from London: South of the Thames With this third volume of the topographical section Sir Walter Besant's Great Survey of London is concluded. The whole work is comprised in ten volumes, the first seven of which are historical, tracing the wonderful story of London from the earliest times up to the end of the nineteenth century. Ten years after the regrettable death of the modern historian of London his immense undertaking has been finished, and the publishers and the editors feel no little satisfaction in seeing the realisation of the great scheme to which Sir Walter devoted many years of enthusiastic labour. The great piles of ms. And the vast collection of prints, maps, photographs, and cuttings left by Sir Walter have now been converted into some 4700 quarto pages, copiously illustrated. By looking through the ten volumes in chronological order, the astounding growth of London from a prehistoric village surrounded by the wide marshes of the untutored Thames, to the vast city which has expanded all over those swamps, one seems to be seated upon Mr. Wells's Time Machine and able to watch the successive changes taking place epoch by epoch. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.