City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN THE current (June) number of The Architectural Review is called 'Outrage,' and is the most damning illustrated indictment of concrete lamp standards, 'Keep Left' signs, municipal rockeries, chain-link fences, truncated trees, gaiish shop fronts, pretentious hoardings, wires, poles, pylons and ill-sited power stations, that has ypt been published. I hope that it will go to every borough engineer and surveyor in this island, as well as to all Government departments which leave disused Nissen huts and blockhouses about and string the sky with wires. As its opening editorial says, 'This issue is less of a warning than a prophecy of doom; the prophecy that if what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plOts and bungalows.'
FOUND IN THE SOKE
I was travelling down to London last week in a train from the beautiful town of Grantham, which would be lovelier still if a main road didn't go through it. Opposite me sat a govern- ment official with a file full of photographs of old houses. 1 thought he must be some sort of planner and got into wary conversation. But he turned out to be a splendid man, mad about architecture, and we threw all responsibility to the windsl and interrupted our journey at Peterborough and hired a taxi. thence to the unknown village of Ufford he had discovered This proved to be one of the subtlest and most carefully thought-Out pieces of late eighteenth-century planning and sit• ing of houses. From a motor-car you would not notice it. You have to get out and walk and see how the church is made to appear and reappear through plantations, how the approaches to the village are by curves past limestone cottages and walls. and how the stables of the big house project to form a termina- tion to the main street. Wires, one modern bungalow, and the inevitable squalor of poultry farming, alone mess up the con- sidered and changing vistas, tbe pleasant levels and contours.
THE PLEASURES OF PEMBROKE
I have long thought Pembroke the most urbane and appealing of Oxford colleges. Inside its -small quadrangles, with their ivy-covered walls and, in summer, their window boxes with geraniums in the college colour of pale pink, one is back to the old coloured postcards of Oxford Alden's used to sell. Its Junior Common Room was the first Oxford Com- mon Room, senior or junior, to patronise art by subscribing to buy pictures by modern artists. Its Senior Common Room is small and select, a place of impeccable manners and generous hospitality. At Pembroke the Fellows do not ignore each other behind newspapers or grunt a greeting in a cloud of pipe- smoke, and there is not the hollow mateyness of Christian names. The epitome of the courtesy and friendliness of Pembroke was its Master, Dr. Homes Dudden, who died last week, and who had been Master since 1918. He was one of the greatest Vice-Chancellors Oxford can remember and his majestic eighteenth-century appearance fitted his scholarly mind and charm of conversation. His friends, Mr. Salt, who used to be Bursar, and Mr. Drake, who was Senior Tutor and Vice-Gerent of the Senior Common Room, are still with us to keep the truly Oxford tradition of Pembroke alive. Now that wine drinking is coming into its own again, invitations to Pembroke are eagerly sought by discerning dons from other colleges. The port at Pembroke, lovingly laid down by Mr. Drake, is the best and most famous in either university.
A PLOY FOR BUSES If youfeel yourself irritated by loudly spoken foreign lan- guage in a public conveyance, and are with a friend who does not mind humouring you, I can recommend a very effective antidote. Speak absolute gibberish, full of glottals and gutturals, in a very loud voice. Everyone in the bus, native or foreign, will be so interested in trying to identify the language you are speaking, that you will reduce even the conductor to complete silence. This may be execrable taste and bad manners, but both are often enjoyable.
Previous page
