City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN
ONE of the most repulsive forms of Subtopia is the current fashion for turning old country churchyards into semi-recreation grounds. These dreary little schemes are generally the result of collusion between the local council and the church. The churchyard is full and declared, I suppose, 'redundant,' and nice hygienic authorities think a collection of tombstones, mostly Georgian and very often finely carved and nobly lettered, rather morbid and serving to remind us of death, which, of course, will never come to any of us. The stones are taken up and ranged along the churchyard wall, so that their carving does not c4tch the light in the way it was designed to do, and a few tombs approved by antiquarians are allowed to remain isolated among the mown grass and the litter baskets. These tombs get in the way of the cricket and football which the older `kiddiz' would like to play, and the younger 'kiddiz,' who use them for hide-and-seek, are soon told off by adults who feel that the place is still a churchyard and not quite the cheerful recreation ground the council intended it to be.
ST. DUNSTAN, STEPNEY
A fate like this awaits one of the most remarkable and attractive Georgian country churchyards I know, and oddly enough it is in East London. It is that of the old parish church of St. Dunstan, Stepney. Extensive bomb- ing has turned the area beyond the churchyard into open country littered with prefabs. When the area comes to be rebuilt it should be possible for the LCC to create plenty of open space while keeping the churchyard the countrified place it is and retaining undisturbed the clustered Port- land-stone Georgian headstones of various elegant outlines and commemorating dead mer- chants and sea captains as the charming and essential foreground they are to the old church. Perhaps it is not too late to suggest this, and St. Dunstan's will be the first churchyard in London to he treated as something of beauty and not merely as something of antiquarian interest or a crazy-paved 'garden of rest.'
SUBTOPIARY
The feeling against concrete lamp posts, con- crete rockeries, 'artistic advertisement stations' and needless signs which litter our towns and villages which are included in the word `Subtopia' is now no longer confined to readers of the Architectural Review. It is becoming national. Mr. Reece Winstone, the photographer, who is chairman of the Bristol Civic Society, a volun- tary body which is trying to preserve what is left of that magnificent old city, tells me of an exhibition that was held at the end of last year of pictures of local bits of Subtopia. It had been arranged by a group of young architects and was shown at the Grand Hotel. It was then trans- ferred to the City Museum and Art Gallery, but here the Bristol Council stepped in and sup- pressed it. But it was again opened at the Berkeley Cafe in the city. Last week I received an invitation, which I was unfortunately unable to accept, to address the Walton and Weybridge Branch of the Workers' Educational Association on Subtopia. The Branch wisely intends to organise a course of lectures on this problem next autumn, 'with special reference to this district.' Meanwhile, here in the heart of things in London, Subtopia goes on. We are to lose the charming little suspension bridge in St. James's Park because it is too expensive to keep painted and in repair, 'But oh!,' as Peter Fleet- , wood Hesketh writes to me, 'those indented shores, the rock-work and the flower beds, where there should be nothing but a smooth grassy bank, gently and smoothly curved, as it used to be—the long, sweeping, strong curve of a river.'
CHANGING-ROOM
A Cambridgeshire vicar tells me that a young lady whose banns he called a few weeks ago was overheard asking whether, when one was married, one went into the little place where they changed their overalls.
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