Excerpt from London, Past and Present, Vol. 3: Its History, Associations, and Traditions Paddington, formerly a village at the west end of London, containing, in 1801, 357 houses; now a large and increasing parish, and part of the great metropolis, having in 1881 a population of 107,098. Pitt is to Addington As London is to Paddington. - Canning. King Edgar gave the manor of Paddington to Westminster Abbey; the grant was confirmed by Henry I., King Stephen, and Henry II. At the Dissolution it was made part of the revenues of the Bishopric of Westminster; and when that see was abolished soon after its establishment, Edward VI. gave it to Ridley, Bishop of London, and his successors. - Newcourt's Repertorium, vol. i. p. 703. Dodsley, writing in 1761, has nothing further to say of Paddington than that it is "a village in Middlesex situated on the north side of Hyde Park," and long after that artists used to come to it to sketch rural scenes and rustic figures. George Barrett, R.A. (d. 1784), one of the old school of English landscape painters, "resided in a most delightful spot, at the upper end of a field adjacent to old Paddington Canal." Paddington was then a rural village. There were a few old houses on each side of the Edgware Road, together with some ale-hooses of very picturesque appearance, being screened by high elms, with long troughs for watering the teams of the hay waggons on their way to and from market; each, too, had its large straddling signpost stretching across the road. Paddington Green was then a complete street; and the group of magnificent elms thereon, now fast going to decay, were studies for all the landscape painters in the metropolis. The diagonal path led to the church, which was a little Gothic building, overgrown with ivy, and as completely sequestered as any village church a hundred miles from London Angelo, p. 229. Hilts. Where is thy Master? Pup. Marry he is gone With the picture of despair to Paddington. Hilts. Prithee run after 'un, and tell 'un he shall Find out my Captain lodged at the Red Lion In Paddington; that's the inn. Ben Jonson, Tale of a Tub, Act ii. Sc. 1. 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.