City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN 0 one can blame the shopkeepers of the City of Lon- don for lodging a complaint to the Corporation. So far none of the immense cliffs of offices designed for the City, whether they are in process of construction or still in the stage of catchpenny drawings in shiny brochures, makes enough provision for shops. The new office worker in the City will be expected to stick to his own ant-heap, to eat in the canteen with the rest of his firm, and if he wants to shop he will have to do so at home if the shops there are still open. There will be little chance for the girl secretary in her lunch- hour to look at windows of lingerie, nor for employers to buy presents for girl secretaries, nor for clerks to try on new suits or to escape for a moment into a bookshop. The new City will be a dead place and no encouragement• given to an enjoyable lunch-hour. There will be no shops in Gracechurch Street except at the corner of Eastcheap, none down Bishopsgate as far as Wormwood Street, none in Moorgate Street until Lon- don Wall. Almost the whole of the centre of the City will be offices only, and Cheapside and Poultry, once the busiest shop- ping street in London, is to have no shops for half its length. This policy may well suit certain types of employer who object to their slaves going out for lunch or having lies of their own. Such procedure may be characteristic of a Government de- partment or the mass welfare organisation of a factory on, a trading estate, but it is uncharacteristic of the long tradition of the City of London. It is inhumane and it will be the end of the City as a pleasant place full of people who were once individuals in their own right.
Condemned Cottages
That was a splendid letter signed by Lord Euston and Mr. Grimes in The Times this week about listed buildings. It was no doubt inspired 'partly by the Fulham Borough Council's determination to let The Grange, Fulham, an historic house which they own, fall into disrepair, and thus make the preser- vation order, which has been made on it, useless. But there is a further anomaly, and nearly all our most beautiful old vil- lages are being made hideous and derelict because of it. Before the war an Act was passed as part of a grand, self-righteous campaign against 'rural slums' whereby - medical officers of health, who know about as much about the repair of cottages as I know about the cure of appendicitis, were given carte blanche to cpndemn old cottages they considered unfit for human habitation., The Medical Officer of Health for a county in the Midlands, a county particularly rich in old villages, declared to a friend of mine that no house ought to be built to last more than forty years. He must by now be having a fine destructive time. Today we know a good deal more about the repair of old cottages. We know that they can be enlarged and given sanitation, very often for less cost than a new coun- cil house. But thousands of people who would like to repair old cottages are not allowed to do so because tese dwellings have been condemned and there is no machinery for reprieving them. Into the Mixer I would not like to give the impression that I like things just because they are old. I think too much attention is devoted, in overcrowded Britain today, to the preservation of archTo- logical sites, those mounds and those dreary foundations, which look like unfinished drainage. schemes. Not half enough attention is paid to noble architecture, whatever its date. I can sympathisel with the workmen on the site of the Temple of Mithras in the City, who are said to have been so annoyed at being held up by that discovery that they say that if they find anything old again it will go straight into the concrete mixer.
The Land of Green Telephone Boxes I was walking last week down the street in the old city of Hall which has the beautiful name of 'The Land of Green Ginger.' It reminded me that Hull and district could be called 'The Land of Green Telephone Boxes.' In Hull the telephone system is owned by the Corporation and not by the General Post Office, It has, its own directory and its own colour schemes, and is run, I believe, at a profit. I cannot think how it escaped from the red paint of nationalisation. But seeing these telephone boxes made me wish that counties might emphasise their independence by using different post office colours, so that not every village in England, except those round Hull, was defaced with the usual red telephone box. Grey, pale blue, even Eccles-mauve and brownish-red, could be used. In the Channel Islands the telephone boxes are pale yellow with white glazing bars, and very charming they look.
Chemin Faisant Driving through rather depressing suburban country west of Hull, I spied, beyond the vista of concrete lamp-posts along the by-pass outside Hessle, the Italianate towers and windows of Tranby Croft, a Victorian mansion of no great beauty. It is now a girls' school, and the headmistress told a friend of mine that the girls know one of the rooms as the Baccarat Room. 'And what is it used for now?' Prayers,' she said.
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