"Our square, with its pretty houses and rustic enclosure, left with its natural undulations, very slight, but sufficient to diminish the formal look, its ivy-covered backs of houses on one side, and gardens and backs of houses on the other, was a curiosity which, when I first saw it, I could not account for on English principles, uniting as it did something decent, pleasant, and cheap, with such anti- comme il faut anomalies—such aristocratic size and verdure in the ground plot, with so plebeian a smallness in the tenements.
— from Highways and Byways in London by Emily Constance Baird Cook