Excerpt from Hints to Paviors

London, is some gain in point of smoothness, and a diminution of the noise occasioned by the passage of carriages and waggons - benefits that compensate but poorly for the many serious evils with which it is attended. In all the great thoroughfares that have been te-laid on Mr. M'adam's system, such as Westminster and Blackfriars' Bridges, Oxford, Bishopsgate, and Coleman Streets, where the traffic is busy and incessant - where carriages of all descriptions are constantly passing to and fro, and in the most zig-zag directions - the metal, as it is called, is so rapidly ground to dust, that it is only by a constant supply, at a great expense, of new materials, that the carriage-ways are kept in a passable state; and in all weathers, whether wet or dry, the produce of this perpetual grinding process, is alike annoying and injurious to the inhabitants and to passengers. At one time you have to wade your way through pools of mud, at another to buffet it amidst clouds and whirlwinds of dust; clothes, houses (inside and out), furniture, health, and comfort, are all alike sufferers by the nuisance. Every passing creature and thing serves as it were the office of a mud or dust-cart, and every adjacent building as a resting place for the flying favours of Macadamization. Nor does the evil stop here for, after all the mud and dust thus carried off, there still remains an abundant residue, which finds its way into the public sewers, supplying them with a sort of food which must ere long (should the system not be abandoned) produce obstructions most injurious to the bodily constitution of this great metropolis, and which can only he removed at great inconvenience and expense.

Streets constantly in want of repair, always mending and never mended - a great increase of expenditure (amounting in some cases, as the writer has been assured, to triple and quad ruple that incurred under the old system); inundations of mud in winter and clouds of dust in summer; persons and property injured the very primcc vice of the city obstructed - such are the evil consequences of a system, which offers in return only a little less noise, and a little more ease to those who ride.

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