WHAT WOULD ARNOLD SAY ?
My old Oxford tutor, lamenting both the desecration and the want of interest in it, said to me the other day that the only recourse was to stay at home and read Matthew Arnold. Well, Bablockhythe, beloved of Arnold for its English quietude, has recently been defaced by a row of ten railway carriages on brick piers. Such offences are wholly unnecessary. They may be avoided, without loss to any interest, by simple regional plans, by a system of zoning, py a definition of which parts may be built upon and which not, and by some architectural control where new bridges or new houses are meditated. The Thames with its lovely tributaries, so finely named, with its Evenlode and the Wind- rush, is the very core of England, fathoms deep in history. Is not Runnymede its very self, one of the eyes of the Thames Valley, in especial danger of disfigurement ?
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