it was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other , not uncomfortably , but without respect ; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes , of parks and churches , of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces ; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names-crouch end , chalk farm , earl 's court , marble arch-and oddly distinct identities ; a noisy , dirty , cheerful , troubled city , which fed on tourists , needed them as it despised them , in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years , following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic , whether horse-drawn , or , more recently , motorized , and the needs of pedestrians ; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind .