Charing Cross

Charing Cross is a junction in the City of Westminster (London, England). Its name comes from being the site of one of the Eleanor crosses, a series of twelve crosses built by King Edward I between 1291 and 1295 in memory of his wife, Eleanor of Castille.

In London Labour and the London Poor edition

Phase 1

Boy Crossing-Sweepers and Tumblers. (Volume 2): "Now, there’s Lord Fitzhardinge, he’s a good gentleman, what lives in Spring-gardens, in a large house. He’s got a lot of servants and carriages. Every time he crosses the Charing-cross crossing he always gives the girl half a sovereign."

London Considered as a Great World. (The Great World of London): "Viewing the Great Metropolis, therefore, as an absolute world, Belgravia and Bethnal Green become the opposite poles of the London sphere - the frigid zones, as it were, of the Capital; the one icy cold from its exceeding fashion, form, and ceremony; and the other wrapt in a perpetual winter of withering poverty. Of such a world, Temple Bar is the unmistakable equator, dividing the City hemisphere from that of the West End, and with a line of Banks, representative of the Gold Coast, in its immediate neighbourhood. What Greenwich, too, is to the merchant seamen of England, Charing Cross is to the London cabmen - the zero from which all the longitudes of the Metropolitan world are measured."

Phase 2

Of the Blind Street-sellers of Tailors’ Needles, etc. (Volume 1)

Of the Life of a Tin-Ware Seller. (Volume 1)

Of the Children Street-Sellers of London.(Volume 1) 

Of the Present Street-Sellers of Dogs. (Volume 2)

 

Lockwood, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Coordinates

Latitude: 51.509027500000
Longitude: -0.125501600000