The Radcliffes

At five o’clock on any weekday evening homegoing Londoners throng and bustle in Bishopsgate, spilling over into the roadway and confining the impatient traffic, their numbers constantly fed by powerful streams from the side alleys which debouch on the east side into this main artery of the City. Pushing into the entrance of one of these passages, opposite Liverpool Street Station, and making way against the station-bound crowds, one emerges at the end of it into a large open space — Devonshire Square. It is one of London’s many minor surprises, though not now a specially pleasant one. Most of the character which the Square had when it was first created in the eighteenth century has long since been destroyed. Though a few trees still stand among the parked cars, the vast blank wall of the Port of London Authority’s Cutler Street Warehouses (built in 1782) looms over the far side, while to the right a stretch of bomb damage lies unrenovated after a quarter of a century. Two sides are sober office buildings, most of them small and occupied by professional firms, premises of a character appropriate to a quiet backwater of a great city.