Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

STREET INDUSTRIES OF LONDON. 373 FLOWERS AND SALT not strictly costermongers, are generally classified as such. There are, for instance, vendors of salt and hearthstones, firewood, and other household necessaries. The fire- wood dealers are, in a sense, manufacturers as well as retailers, since they purchase the raw material, saw it into lengths, chop it up, bundle it, and, finally, sell it. Their wood they obtain in various forms from many quarters — sleepers from the iron road, beams and planks from old buildings in process of demolition, packing cases from warehouses. In the winter you may see scores of them hovering round a road that is “ up,” in quest of the old blocks, which, though practically worthless for fire-lighting pur- poses, make excellent chump wood or logs. Notwithstanding the many sources of supply open to firewood merchants, however, they are not infre- quently thrown on their beam ends through their inability to obtain any stock. A less important industry of the street is that of the musician. To him London is, in general, a place of hiberna- tion. In the summer he is on the road or at the seaside ; it is only during the winter that he is in town. Alone, or in company with other instrument- alists, he then “ works the pubs,” plays to the people waiting out- side theatres and music-halls, and makes “pitches” just out of the full tide of traffic. In his most familiar guise he is a cornet player or “ blower,” and he usually takes up his stand on the edge of the kerb. Chair-mending, tinkering, and knife and scissor grinding consti- tute another class of street in- dustries. The number of itinerant chair-menders is yearly becoming smaller, probably because much of the work formerly monopolised by them is now done at the institutions for the blind ; and tinkers are likewise, but for another reason, dwindling rapidly, though they may often be met on the fringe of Greater London. Grinders, on the other hand, are as numerous as ever. Even they, however, feel the pinch of foreign competition, SUNDAY MORNING SCENE IN “ PETTICOAT LANE.”