Now ordinarily, not being able to see into Broad St. Giles’s would have been accounted some small act of Grace. It was not precisely a street, and not a square, but a kind of drain-trap plumbing High Holbourn (which ran off to the right, toward the City) to Oxford Street (left to Tyburn Cross). As a district of Greater London it no doubt had a history and a perfectly legitimate reason for existence; but as a conduit for traffic between Tyburn and London it was a lamentable improvisation. A few kegs of gunpowder detonated in the slum to the north side of it would create a direct through line uniting the two thoroughfares, and relegate Broad St. Giles’s to a stagnant ox-bow lake, alienated from the main stream; but such improvements still lay in the future as Johann and Caroline rode toward it.