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John Rocque started work on his survey of London in 1737. The plan measures six feet by thirteen at 26 inches to the mile (1:2400). It shows The Borough as recognisably still the southern bridgehead to the City. Indeed the area was administered by the City as Bridge Ward Without.

The main roads to note are Borough High Street (The Borough) leading from London Bridge (still built upon) and then extending south only as far as St George°s Church (newly rebuilt in 1734č6). There it met Blackman Street, now Newington Causeway, which led to Newington Butts at the Elephant and Castle. Newington Butts was then a small village. Walking northwards from Newington Butts along what became Newington Causeway to the City you passed the Artichoak (sic) Inn, Horse Shoe Inn, Crown Inn, (all on our side of the street), the Yorkshire Grey Station and the White Swan Coach Yard on the left č all of them before reaching St George°s Church. The coaching inns continued in Borough High Street, where The George still survives in part.

Note St George°s Fields (hence St George°s Circus), which was open ground until the early nineteenth century and a place of refuge during the Great Fire of London. During the day soldiers paraded there and it was a resort on Sundays, with inns and taverns around it, with circuses and swimming pools like at the Dog and Duck (where the Imperial War Museum now stands).

To the east, Kent Street was rebuilt as Great Dover Street in 1815. The Trinity Estate began with the building of Trinity Square (as it then was) and Trinity Church in the 1820s. Our estate in the eighteenth century was mainly tenterground and smallholdings or meadows with trees and must have been rather pretty. Probably the fields were for vegetable and fruit production, with dairy meadows for the City°s milk. Tenterground is where cloth was hung to stretch and dry on frames (tenters) after the fulling of woollens (cotton and satin were expensive luxury items

Tentergrounds surrounded the built-up area at this time. Dirty Lane to the west became Great Suffolk Street and it leads to the quaintly named Melancholy Walk by St George°s Fields.

Robert Holden