20 OCTOBER 1928, Page 3

Excellent sense was talked and valuable proposals were made at

the " Save the Countryside " Conference at Leicester. As Professor G. M. Trevelyan said, a hundred years ago England Was nearly all beautiful ; to-day there is beauty and ugliness ; and a hundred years hence there will be little beauty left unless people take thought to check the blight of ugliness which advertisers and builders are spreading all over the land. The right place for advertisements, he said, is the newspapers, not the hedges, the woodlands, or even the streets. . Professor Patrick Abercrombie truly pointed out that ugliness in building is not even excused by cheapness. Simple building may be the cheapest and the ugliness often comes from meaningless embellishment.

* * * *