William Henry Toms after Jean Baptiste Claude Chatelain.

A View of the Mall in St. James's Park

16 x 10.5 inches

London is a city that exists in a state of almost perpetual change. Around every corner there is a site about to be redeveloped or ''improved''. This engraving from the 1750s shows, with undoubted artistic license, how The Mall in St. James's Park, running down from Buckingham House to Whitehall, had been successfully remodelled as a fashionable, tree lined avenue where the most fashionable of London society could promenade. There are no pickpockets, slatterns or ruffians so prevalent in Hogarth's satirical prints, only gentrified folk taking a stroll and enjoying the fresh air. A soldier leans against his sentry box, a reassurance that should trouble arise it will be dealt with swiftly by way of his musket. Cows appear to be grazing perilously close to gentlemen relaxing on a bench and deer can be glimpsed through the trees affording an almost rustic vista in the heart of the city. In the 1740s, a visitor to London, Baron von Bielefeld, describes his experience of walking along the Mall: ''I enter a long and spacious walk they call The Mall. It is now mid-day and I find it thronged with the beau monde of both sexes, who pass hastily along…here we meet some of our friends…and learn the news of the day''.