Great world of London

In the opening chapter to the book 'The criminal prisons of London and scenes of prison life' by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, the authors describe London as the most densely populated city in the world. As such, London "should be regarded as a distinct world" where "Belgravia and Bethnal Green become the opposite poles of the London sphere - the frigid zones, as it were, of the Capital; the one icy cold from its exceeding fashion, form, and ceremony; and the other wrapt in a perpetual winter of withering poverty. Of such a world, Temple Bar is the unmistakable equator, dividing the City hemisphere from that of the West End, and with a line of Banks, representative of the Gold Coast, in its immediate neighbourhood. What Greenwich, too, is to the merchant seamen of England, Charing Cross is to the London cabmen -the zero from which all the longitudes of the Metropolitan world are measured." The authors later describe the best view of the Great World of London as being from the top of St. Paul's.