City and Suburban By JOHN BETJEMAN T THINK the innocence
of Auntie Times has been 'taken advantage of by Sir Francis Meynell. Last week Sir Francis wrote her an amusing letter holding up to ridicule Sir Albert Richard- son's notice commemorating the devastation of the attractive Bedfordshire town of Ampthill with' concrete lamp standards. Sir Francis objected to Sir Albert's protest on the typographical grounds that it was not legible enough. The im- plication was that the concrete lamp standards, from which hugd lamps of the pig-trough pattern depend, provide clarity for motorists and lorry- drivers so that they can hurtle through the town full tilt without looking at it, while Sir Albert's lettering was less 'practical.' This may be true, for Sir Francis has done great service to letter- ing and thousands of us are grateful to him. But it Was perhaps unfortunate that Sir Francis should been, entered this controversy, seeing that he has neen, according to Who's Who, Director-General °I' the Cement and Concrete Association, and therefore an interested party. I am reminded of a more flagrant breach of Auntie Times's innocence a while ago, when a correspondent wrote a par- ticularly virulent attack on those who objected to concrete lamp standards, and as it came from some manor house in the 'shires I dare say Auntie thought the writer was some hunting man with all interest in the Arts. What she did not discover Was that he was a. director of a company which Made concrete lamp posts.
Never was an illustrated record of our sur- vv.tving theatres more badly needed than now.
the old theatres were preserved until lately by ie cinema industry which took them over and, II they were in an unsavoury neighbourhood and rather small, mercifully did not redecorate them t° the various jazz styles of the entertainment vv,orld. Now that cinemas are doing badly, these °,,ttl theatres are disappearing fast. They are not buthe sort of buildings that are preserved and listed the Government, for they are Victorian and most of them are Late-Victorian, which is still , :,t1 unpopular period. Inside they are sometimes very splendid, the only full-blooded Baroque our country ever attempted, and their designers were , `"iPa ratively unknown men in the eighteenth- Century tradition. Who can forget the Bedford In Camden Town which Sickert painted?
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I have just bought the Ward Lock Guide to Lon- '°1,1 for 1912. This lists fifty theatres and music- ails in the suburbs alone, and of these only five s_urvive as theatres—the Empress, Brixton, and Sadler's Wells (both, rebuilt), Collins's, Islington, the Lyric, Hammersmith, and the splendid 'Met,' Road. The Chelsea Palace is occasion- ally °Peri. But what has happened to the Crouch there still fish-tail gas jets in wire cages in the Passages of the Crown at Peckham, the Grand at ington and the Shakespeare at Clapham June- lion? Many of these old theatres are bombed. I believe the Britannia at Hoxton has gone and sO tlaS the Standard at Shoreditch, where I heard Leo Dryden sing 'The Miner's Dream of Home.' The television people have taken over some of the variety theatres. The Hackney Empire, where I saw George Robey in his old age and Hetty King only a year or two ago, is used by Com- mercial Television and has not been much harmed. But the BBC has played havoc with the Shep- herd's Bush Empire and tried to make its interior 'festival.' The effect is grey and plum and grisly. If all this damage has been done in London, who knows what other losses there may not be among provincial theatres? I hope someone with a camera and an eye will photograph the theatres that remain before it is too late.
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