London

London features as a scene in several of the the Wessex Novels - most particularly in A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Hand of Ethelberta - as well as some short stories.  This is not surprising, as Hardy himself lived here for many years, and retuned often after his marriage to Emma.  In fact, both of his marriages took place in London.  

Westbourne Park Villas, where Thomas Hardy lived from 1863-7.  He later lived close by in Celbridge Place.  The brick wall on the right of the picture hides the Great Western Railway: Westbourne Park Villas is numbered with even numbers only.  

Hardy married Emma in 1874, at St Peter's,. Elgin Avenue.  The original St Peter's Church was built in 1870, and so was an extremely modern building when the marriage took place.  Nevertheless it was knocked down and rebuilt, in much smaller style, in 1975 (see below).

Hyde Park, setting for social scenes in A Pair of Blue Eyes

"The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six o'clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream. 

Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low musical voice--the only beautiful point in the old woman-- prevented from being wearisome. 

'Now,' she said to Elfride, who, like Arneas at Carthage, was full of admiration for the brilliant scene, 'you will find that our companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow- creatures here. I always am a listener in such places as these-- not to the narratives told by my neighbours' tongues, but by their faces--the advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have acquired some skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,--how truly people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.'"