SIR,—Perhaps I am not the only one of your readers
to take exception to the tone of Wyndham Thomas's letter in your issue of November 7 about Robert liodge's sensible and temperate article 'Anger in a Small Town.' No one disputes thaf in this over- populated island somewhere must be found for the `overspill' from our teeming cities to live; no one dis- putes that a new town, if decently planned, is better than allowing the parent city to sprawl. The theory, as usual, is unimpeachable. But does it work? Do new towns, or any other device, stop the endless swallow- ing of more and more good farmland around the existing cities? Of course not. And are not the inhabitants of an existing small town, like Alresford, justified in resenting the burying of their little com- munity under an avalanche of concrete and asphalt? But even the Alresford scheme is not as iniquitous as the LCC's cool proposal to turn Hook and the sur- rounding villages in North Hampshire into a second Pompeii. On no principles of sensible planning can this scheme be justified. The idea of a satellite town, surely, is to create a new centre of population and industry quite separate from the old; but this scheme will do just the opposite. It will simply continue the London sprawl from the point which it now reaches. The vast suburban wilderness which stretches down through Bagshot and Camberley already reaches the edge of Hartley Wintney; the LCC now propose to extend it to Basingstoke. The A30, already one of the most overloaded main roads in England, is to receive the extra traffic from a town of 60,000; and one of the few remaining areas of genuine country- side within easy reach of London is to be destroyed. No one pretends that this is an easy problem; but while Mr. Thomas is on the subject of viewing it through a telescope, he might pull out his own a bit farther and look beyond the ravaged countryside of England to Canada and Australia where, I believe, they can still squeeze a few more people in and are not averse to new industries.
But need Mr. Thomas have been quite so rude about Mr. Hodge and the people of Alresford and all those (myself, I hope, included) whom he jeers at as the 'preserve the countryside at all costs' school. After all, we do not matter. We have never really succeeded in preserving anything that London and the big bat- talions have been determined to destroy. One so securely fixed in Abraham's bosom as a member of the Town and Country Planning Association could, one would have thought, have afforded to be a little more generous to the defenders of the most lost of all Warblington House, Long Sutton, Nr: Basingstoke, Hants
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