# Pimlico had already been made, rather than merely found

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH05.P004](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH05.P004/#char=0,69): "Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing--say Pimlico."

The joke chooses a London district rather than an imaginary wasteland. Grosvenor's account of its own estate describes Pimlico as a nineteenth-century development by Thomas Cubitt: marshy ground was reclaimed and laid out as a grid of terraces, largely attracting the middle classes. It also records charitable housing projects there in the late nineteenth century. This is a modern institutional history, not a contemporary witness to what every Edwardian thought of the neighbourhood. [Grosvenor, ‘Our history,’ section on Belgravia and Pimlico](https://www.grosvenor.com/about-us/our-history/).

That background sharpens the experiment. Pimlico is already an instance of people turning land into a designed urban environment; Chesterton asks what could make its inhabitants undertake a further transformation. His extravagant comparison with Florence measures the imagined result against a city assumed to be beautiful. ‘Desperate’ and ‘awful’ belong to the comic provocation, not to a demonstrated survey of Pimlico's living conditions. The argument does not require the district to have been uniformly squalid: it requires a place the reader can imagine dismissing, approving complacently, or loving enough to change.

## Sources

- [Grosvenor, Our history](https://www.grosvenor.com/about-us/our-history/), The 1800s and the creation of Belgravia and Pimlico; paragraphs beginning ‘In the 1820s’, ‘At the southern edge’, and ‘Pimlico meanwhile’

Revision 1 · 2026-11-07 · https://glosses.org/a/a_eiuzvibn/