It looked upon the two neighbours which it linked together--London and Southwark--as being well enough as suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important.

It was a close corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village population and everybody in it knew all his fellow-townsmen intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers before them--and all their little family affairs into the bargain.

It had its aristocracy, of course--its fine old families of butchers, and bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for five or six hundred years, and knew the great history of the Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange legends; and who always talked bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts, and lied in a long, level, direct, substantial bridgy way.

It was just the sort of population to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited.

Children were born on the Bridge, were reared there, grew to old age, and finally died without ever having set a foot upon any part of the world but London Bridge alone.