14 MAY 1927, Page 13

Most of the ugliness is due indirectly to the motor

and the new social life it has encouraged ; and one would like to see some motor , organization offer a prize for designs for the apparatus especially concerned with the car. Ruskin in his most intolerant manner used to argue that a railway station was such an ugly thing essentially that no attempt should be made to conceal its vice ; but since his time fine, if not exactly beautiful, railway stations have been built, as at Montreal, or even in New York, and artists have grown fond of engines. Is it quite impossible to design a petrol pump rather less like an enamelled caterpillar ? Perhaps the worst of all the smaller blots on our blotched landscape is the pump Frith the tin-shed behind it, and sometimes the tea-shacks or jerry-built bungalows in its repulsive vicinity.

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