The conclusion looks at early nineteenth-century invocations of John Gay’s Trivia as a way of marking the past from the present, before looking in more detail at one work that draws on Gay’s poem in this way. Metropolitan Improvements; or London in the Nineteenth Century celebrates the development and improvements that were reshaping the West End, drawing a distinction between the London described by Gay and Hogarth and the city of “our improved days”. As it surveys the new buildings, streets, canals, and parks that were transforming the cityscape, James Elmes confidently asserts that London in the nineteenth century will be the admiration of foreigners and the text seemingly resolves many of the tensions highlighted in previous chapters between an ideal of the city and its commercial character.