3-034-772 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Opening Queen Victoria-Street, City of London, 1871. 'The ceremony of formally opening this new street, from Blackfriars Bridge to the Mansion House, was performed at half past three o'clock on Saturday afternoon...Having arrived at the hustings erected on the triangular space at the side of the Mansion House, Colonel Hogg [Chairman of the Metropolitan Board] and the Lord Mayor briefly addressed the persons there assembled, reminding them of the various City and metropolitan improvements which had been accomplished during the last ten or fifteen years...The Lord Mayor remarked that, if the Corporation of the City had preserved to it the powers which it had enjoyed for centuries, and if those powers were extended over a larger area, they would be able to perform works of quite as great a magnitude and quite as beneficial to the public as any carried out by the Board of Works...The entire thoroughfare along the Victoria Embankment and Queen Victoria-street now affords a positively shorter, and a very much quicker, way, from Charing-cross to the Bank of England, than the route along the Strand, Fleet-street, Ludgate-hill, and Cheapside'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.