City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN IT is good news to hear that , the Methodists are contemplating redecorating the inside of Central Hall. Westminster, whose baroque entrance staircase is rich Edwardian at its very best. A Government department `creamed out' the building during the war, • and it deserves Sympathetic repair. The architects were Lanchaster and Rickards, and the Hall was opened in 1912. E. A. Rickards was the artist of this fine partnership and Lanchaster did the planning. Rickards, who did the well-known caricature of Arnold Bennett which is reproduced on the Penguin edition of his books, was the only English architect since Thomas Archer in the eighteenth century who could produce the authentic baroque in England. I have always admired the dome of Central Hall, which is so successful a foil to the towers and. pinnacles of the Abbey and the Palace of Westminster. The building itself is four-square and beautifully detailed and looks good from any angle. Originally there were to be two towers on the Parliament Square front, but Westminster Hospital objected. Now that the Hospital is demolished and any new building there is to be set back, let us hope the towers will be completed. They serve to define the entrance front. Rickards also designed the Civic Buildings in the City Centre of Card i 11'. the delightful Deptford Town Hall, with its nautical details and gilded galleon for weather vane, and that baroque fountain of dolphins and gods in front of the Victoria Rooms, Bristol.
HAN/EN IN HEREFORD
I do not think there are enough readers of the Spechnor, and certainly not enough readers of this column in it, to give an effect of overcrowdedness to the county of Hereford. I have. therefore, no hesitation in recommending this vast, remote and undesecrated county to those who want to see England of a century ago, with oil lamps winking from half-timbered farmhouses, lanes with well-laid hedges and no telegraph poles, wind-swept holly trees, red sandstone churches. deep green valleys and the brooding western guardianship of the Black Mountains. Last Saturday and Sunday I saw sixteen Herefordshire churches, of which six must be among the finest in England—Kilpeck and Peterchurch, ancient, Celtic- looking Romanesque; Madley, enormous, middle-pointed. with medheval glass; St. Margaret's. high on the Welsh border with a rich old screen of silvery-grey oak like the tiny untouched church of a Welsh hamlet; Clodock, with its high pews and galleries, and Shobdon, that Georgian Gothic extravaganza of the eighteenth century, beside which Straw- berry Hill is nothing, in the desolated park of the extinct Lord Bateman.
GLOUCESTER WELCOMES CAREFUL EATERS
My wife, daughter and I arrived in Gloucester at half past one last Friday. Thinking that everything would be 'off' for lunch if we delayed, we went to the nearest cafe. It was unlicensed and old-world. After ten minutes a lady came and asked us if we had ordered. When we said no, she said she would send someone. After another five minutes, of neglect we moved to a public house dining-room, cream and brown and cold. Some soup came at two minutes to two, but nothing else. We paid and moved to another inn, where we were turned out of the dining-room because we were told it was too late and sent to a smaller room where there were no tables avail- able. We then tried one more hotel and by half past two we had started to eat.
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