LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
GREATER LONDON SIR,—On page 611 of The Spectator, dated May 30th, I read that " London's population is at present increasing at the alarming rate of half-a-million a year." For the truth of this statement I cannot speak, but of its implications I feel somebody should ; if that rate of increase continues, Greater London will in twenty years from now have doubled its population and will contain half the people of this country. I am no expert—no town-planner, no statistician, no economist ; and I hope those who are may refute this conclusion or show that in the event such a change would not be disastrous. But a rate of increase only one-tenth of that suggested would be appalling ; and not Mr. Silkin himself will convince me that his present placebos are equal to the disease. Clearly most of the annual increase is due to an influx of provincials. What attracts them? The desire to be at the hub of things, to feel the throb of the great wen running through them ? Pus cells in an abscess ? In this provincial city (which I think is far too big) every kind of job is open to a man ; I can within ten minutes reach any one of six theatres, any one of fifty cinemas ; can regularly hear an excellent orchestra ; I can visit libraries, art galleries, museums good enough for all but the most fastidious. Also, within two minutes' walk of my home in the suburbs there is a field and there are cows grazing in it. When I read in my local newspapers that so-and-so has been married in such-and-such a church, it is most probable that I shall know the church, just possible that I shall knew so-and-so. T still have some roots in a community. What Greater Londoner can say the same of himself? Greater Londoners, indeed! They were better called the little provincials. Doubtless there are heights -I intellect and of society which I could scale only in London ; but one does not aspire to heights which are surrounded
by the exhaled miasma of 20,000,000 lungs. • To say that the problem can be solved by building satellite towns is
to say that an abscess can be cured by squeezing the pus into surround- ing tissues ; the result is a septicaemia, and as yet we have no penicillin for the body of a nation, :Ain less for its soul. But have we not a kind of scalpel? Perhaps our collective unconscious mind is wiser than we know : with our right hand ae build our crazy metropolis and with our left we toy with the atom bomb.. A psychiatrist might indulge in some tautology on the subject. The rational solutions are clear. First, we should divert some of the Londonward drifters on to the land of this country. If it is said that an urban clerk does not make a good farm- worker, I shall reply that any man, put down in the middle of a field and told plainly and repeatedly that if he does not till it he will starve, will work very well indeed ; and, if he won't, he deserves to starve. Such men could be temporarily accommodated in the many large houses now empty ; better that than make them into museum pieces of a dying culture. Second, the rest of the drifters and a good part of London's present populace should be settled—by inducement if possible, by force if necessary—in towns and villages none of which should be within a hundred miles of the capital. I would prefer 5,000,000 disgruntled, uncomfortably housed but scattered Englishmen now to 5,000,000 huddled English corpses in a few years time. Others may not, and they are free to differ. Third, and this is the best and most durable solution, we should with all haste ship a few million of our population to ether Empire countries, using the means I spoke of earlier. Our present difficulties are due basically to an overcrowding of this country ; as the Dominions are undei-populated, the remedy is obvious. I have no doubt there are many, many Europeans, especially in Germany, and even more Japanese who would sell their very souls to be allowed to settle in the Empire ; and I can't for the life of me see what right we have to deny them their wish when the Dominions can absorb settlers and the Mother Country will not supply them. The present trickle of emigrants is no more than that. We can either drift into an effete and doomed metropolis or we can choose to revivify our Empire with some of the same blood which first gave it life ; and, if the Commonwealth countries do not choose to be revivified at the rate we should maintain, we can but wish them well of their wide, open spaces ; they are wide open in more senses than one.
As I have suggested, the migration to the Thames is one symptom of a national disease ; and, reading the papers, reading of the strikes, the shortages, the conferences, the revisions of canon law, one is inclined to despair of our ever curing it. By we can try to do so. We can try making an appeal to the spirit of adventure in our people instead of to that niggling fear so miserably epitomised in the slogan, " We work or want." The problem is urgent, and it is huge. I knew it was urgent after Hiroshima ; I did not knew it was so huge until I read that sentence in your paper. My first instinct on reading it was to pack my bags and go, for I do not wish my life to be ended in a holocaust of psychopaths. I could myself lead a fairly comfortable existence if I remained in this country ; but, in case my sincerity is in doubt, I state that I am ready to go overseas in the first shipload and under the same unpleasant conditions as many of us endured in war-time. What we did then was not done that London might grow until it should hold more people than the whole of Canada or Australia, and then lie waiting for the bombs while they were crying out too late for men with whom to defend themselves. I ant a provincial, but I am also a citizen of an Empire and not unconscious of my heritage.—Yours faithfully,
3oB Muirhead Avenue, Liverpool, r3. S. BRADSHAW.
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