Saving the Countryside The Thirty-sixth Annual Report of the National
Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty makes encouraging reading. In the past year both public opinion and Parliamentary action have combined to further, and in some cases to fulfil, the objects of the Trust. The tone of the whole Report expresses a guarded and justifiable confidence in the nation's enlightened attitude towards vandalism. There was accordingly a certain irony in the fact that The Times announced, concurrently with the publication of the Report, a glaring example of stupidity and bad taste on the part of a local authority in the Cotswolds. The Rural District Council of Chipping Campden intend building eight council houses on the outskirts of the town. The Campden Society, with other enemies to eyesores, has raised contributions sufficient to reduce the difference between the cost of the houses in stone and the cost of the houses in red brick to a negligible margin. The Council, how- ever, have now rejected the offers of help from private sources, rescinded their resolution to make a contribution of £10 a house, and accepted the lowest tender for the erection of the houses in red brick. This sort of thing makes one despair. The councillors of Chipping Campden cannot be excused, like the perpetrators of the worst architectural atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, on the grounds that they knew not what they did.
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