"...in the late 1000's Lewis Avenue was built, both the street itself and quarter of north-west Jalkin named after it. The wealthy fled there from their former enclave in central Jalkin, which they felt had become so noisy and odoriferous that it was only suitable for ordinary people. They settled in Lewis Avenue, conquered it and fiercely guarded it. They built their own houses, maintained their own roads and erected their own bridges; and they even prevented Jalkin being expanded further to the north-west to avoid being encircled once more. They rebuilt this little pocket of the world on the template of what the Cities should have been. Reality was politely requested to wait outside.
"Sneer as she might, however, Branwen was still a little overawed by the district. Directly facing her window was a tall terrace which gracefully curved around a courtyard adorned by fountains. Terraces are somewhat denigrated in the Cities but the symmetry, the contours and the sheer scale of the houses banished all stigma. Overshadowing them on either side were a pair of great stucco and brick dwellings, each of their looming entrances flanked by columns and each column capped by a statue. And if Branwen leant out of her window she could see, several doors down, the even more daunting spectacle of the Erish Embassy. Nick-named the Minicrom (an architectural joke; the palace of the Erish kings is called the Macronom) it was an unapologetic explosion of colonnades, stairways and frescoes, topped by an octagonal drum of a dome which pushed up through a pyramidal roof. Yet the Minicrom was not the greatest sight of Lewis Avenue. Stretching in either direction were apparently endless lines of grandiloquent houses, each one tall enough to tower over even the broad and spacious road. Branwen had almost grown accustomed to the characteristic Cities feeling of being surrounded by hundreds of feet of stone holding hundreds of unknown lives, but this was slightly different. Here she was also hemmed in by power, prestige and, above all else, money. The top families of Christoté - and although the nation has no rigid class structure, everyone knows who they are - all own houses on Lewis Avenue."(from The Innocents)