Excerpt from The Ancient Halls of the City Guilds: Drawn in Lithography How differently our city has grown up from those delightful old towns in Flanders, where the homes of the Guilds are built round the sides of some great square, with the Hotel de Ville or great market building with its vast belfry as a dominating feature - and even too, as at Brussels, the ancient palace of the kings. It is a pity that the same scheme was not carried out in London, and a great square made, with the Guildhall as the dominating feature. Then perhaps there would have been less temptation to the Com panics to rebuild their halls, giving over the frontages to blocks of offices and banks. The value of these sites is now so enormous that there are but few Companies which have not given way to the temptation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.