The Store, in the American sense of the word, is also less prominent in England than it is in the United States. Great retail establishments exist, and plate-glass fronts are as abundant in London as in New York; but the warehouse is, as a rule, more completely severed from the store or shop than it is in America. Great care is often bestowed upon the exterior architecture of warehouses and factories. In manufacturing towns like Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leicester, etc., this class of structures forms almost the principal ornament of the streets, equalling the public buildings in magnificence. The line of Oueen Victoria Street from the Mansion House to the Thames Embankment is filled with magnificent commercial buildings, chiefly stores and offices.
The mullioned window, often divided horizontally by transoms, sur vived from the Gothic to the Renaissance, and has been largely introduced with good effect in commercial structures of the so-called " Oueen Anne" type. Since this feature is really a Gothic one, and since the high gable and the projecting oriel have the same parentage, the general eflect of these piles, notwithstanding their classic or semi-classic detail, is not far different from that of domestic Gothic structures of the end of the fifteenth century.
America is the land of large hotels, England, and especially London, have some that are immense. It is now the system to combine a hotel with a railway-station, the train-shed of which is spanned by a huge iron vault. Cannon Street Station has its great hotel in florid Renaissance, and, with its attached semicircular iron vault, was esteemed Titanic until surpassed by the not dissimilar station and hotel at Charing Cross. Both of these are the works of the younger Barry, and both are greatly surpassed by the grand terminus of the Midland Railway at St. Pancras, with its immense Gothic arched roof and its huge attached hotel —a monumental mass of brick and stone Gothic designed by Scott and unequalled in external nobility. Another large and fine hotel of pictur esque outline is the Langham, and still another the Hotel Metropole. The Central Hotel, Glasgow, is a fine Free Classic structure with some details which recall the Florentine Renaissance, yet has lofty gables and dormers two storeys high. Grand hotels are also to be found at the various water ing-places, as Brighton, Hastings, Scarborough, Aberystwith, etc., which have risen into importance all round the British coasts, and these hotels are usually of substantial stone and brick. Akin to hotels are restaurants and dining-halls, which are becoming prominent in the large cities, especially in London.
English even when not conjoined with hotels, are usually substantial structures of brick or stone, or a combination of both, built with a view to architectural appearance. This is especially the case
upon the lines of the great companies that divide the North of England between them. Such depots as those of York or Rugby, although not great termini, are seldom equalled in America by the termini of grand trunk-lines, and the smaller way-stations have often considerable architec tural merit.
have not as yet come into great favor in London, which, like Philadelphia, is a city of homes. Nevertheless, a certain number of " residential suites," as the Londoners prefer to call them, have been, erected for the abodes of the rich, and for the artisan class a number of large but comparatively plain piles have been built by the administrators of the Peabody Fund and by the Industrial Dwellings Com pany. The greater part of the better class of residential suites are in Westminster, Pimlico, and South Kensington. Victoria Street, near the Houses of Parliament, is almost a continuous line of this class of build ings, which are here usually eight storeys in height, although there exists near by, overlooking St. James's Park, a lofty pile of thirteen storeys. Terra-cotta is freely used in the decoration, and on the whole the archi tecture is of a tolerably high order. There is not much pronounced Oueen Anneism here, but this style is prominent in the Albert Hall mansions and other tall piles of residential suites at South Kensington. Of red brick, substantial and purpose-like, with balconies, broad elliptic arches, thin brick pilasters, and other features of the school, these structures are possessed of home-like, though rather homely, merit.
large numbers of houses are continually erected in the older manners, the most noticeable recent dwellings of Lon don, as well as of other towns—for the style of the metropolis soon spreads throughout England—are Queen Anne. Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, has many large red-brick Queen Anne mansions, some with singular little wooden bay-windows peering out among the brick-work, after the fashion of old English farmhouses, yet on the whole not unpicturesque. Tite Street, Chelsea—the artists' quarter—is full of quaint eighteenth-century-looking structures for the most part the work of the late Mr. Godwin. Some of the most pronounced eccentricities of the Queen Anne style are to be found at Turnham Green, a suburb of London, where tiles creep down the fronts of the houses as shingles do in America, and where in many cases the picturesque is utterly missed by a too great angularity and au entire want of that veiled symmetry which is necessary to it.