Any Friends of the Lake District are friends of _mine,
though I wish they could do something about the rain there. However, there is plenty else that they can do something about, and they are doing it both vigilantly and actively. The organisation is now ten years old, and its annual report for 1943-44 is devoted very largely to the important question of National Parks. It is, of course, desired to turn the whole Lakes area into a National Park—which does not involve nationalising the land, but does involve the control of its use, to be exercised by a National Parks Commission, which, so far as planning is concerned, would co-ordinate the activities of the eleven local planning authorities now concerned with the area, and " use national funds for a national end, to preserve—always against a background of good and improved fell farming and of native rural industries—the beauty, the simplicity and the grandeur of the Lake District." In this the Friends of the Lake D:strict deserve every good citizen's support, the more so since they take no narrow or local view, but urge the erection of National Parks all over the country. One of the strongest claims concerns Dartmoor ; in that the re-planned Plymouth, for which the moors to the north of the city form the natural playground, has a strong and direct interest. Some galvanisation of the Minister of Town and Country Planning in this connexion might be serviceable. * * *
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