City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN IWAS very surprised to find I could easily get in ° Marlborough House, which is open until the end of this month. Like most people, I had never seen file inside of this building, nor ever thought I would. I knew that sonic' where among all those mid-Victorian additions and heighten' ings there must be the original house designed by Sir Christopher Wren for Sara Duchess of Marlborough in 1709 and one of his only authenticated domestic works. On shillings entrance fee, and sure enough there it is, a WO hall with paintings by Laguerre on the walls and a ceiling I))1 Gentileschi, all blackened by London smoke. The state woos are open with their richly moulded ceilings and Corinthian columns, but the general effect is Edwardian and not Wren' I think it's well worth visiting for two things—the atmosphere,' and the Exhibition of Needlework organised by the Royal School of that craft. Wren only comes third. It is amazing to step out of the Mall into such utter country-house quiet. to stand in the sunny rooms and look out over green spring lawns to budding planes and not a house in sight, and 10 hear, instead of the noise of traffic, the quiet assured voices of ladies who shop at Harrods and 'the Stores' talking about the technicalities of tapestry. Needlework has not hither°, interested me, but I don't think anyone could pass the reu, and purple copes worn at the marriage and funeral 0` Charles II without being moved by the beauty of their design and colour and shocked by the decline in taste which the coPc worn at Edward VII's coronation displays by comparisna' Indeed, modern design in this exhibition is unadventurous'n perhaps mercifully so, for a little panel of toadstools, in til manner of Mabel Lucy Attwell and described as 'contene rary' on a notice below it, made me glad that most modern work was a pastiche of earlier.
LONDON AIRPORT I have found a new London pleasure, and that is Pill to London Airport and sitting on that roof-garden which has just been opened, smelling the cheroots of rich Belgians and South Americans as they stroll behind me and watching 111°r"',, of them being absorbed whey-faced by the great building from the airfield in front. And I venture to think that it is a great building, the best work so far of its architect' Frederick Gibberd. For one's entry to London this waY is smooth and, despite the Customs, welcoming, with its climax the Great Hall. by night as splendid with clusters of naked bulbs as the nave of Westminster Cathedral, by day splendidtY proportioned and detailed. The subsequent hideous bas journey into London is an anticlimax indeed. The airl)°,1t ,, is an enormous machine. It sucks the passengers up gent') sloping corridors to the Customs Hall. One can select pas' sengers from the roof garden and the restaurant as they leavn the aeroplanes and decide which one one would like to 5n at closer quarters and guess what their luggage will be iii',.n„. Then one walks round to the entrance hall and finds the as I am to railways, London Airport is more interesting shattered door by which they will emerge from the Customs, or triumphant. There.are comfortable waiting enclosures by these doors, and one can see the luggage sliding out, crerna' torium fashion, from the Customs on a revolving band to the porters waiting on the ground floor. The doors operici and here is the passenger going to join his luggage. Devote even than Euston or St. Pancras.or beautiful, doomed Cann° Street.
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