THE DESECRATION. OF ENGLAND [To the Editor of Tire SPECTATOR.]
Sul,—Mr. W. A. Hirst's interesting letter in your isstie Of July 2nd contains an injustice to the Press and public' of this country against which I Grave permission to .protest. He writes " . . . in this country the -vast majority of the 'people. hate beauty. In every other country beauty and historical monuments are preserved. In this they are destroyed daily, accompanied by the applause of the Press."
At 5 Bennet Street, St. James's, a few yards from your correspondent's address, is the St. James's branch of the Londoners' League to defend and foster the virtues of-London home-life, architectural, horticultural and sociological. This league was brought into existence eighteen months ago on a wave of popular indignation against the depredations of the building speculator in St. John's Wood. Into the Mutilated House, Maida Vale, then in process of " bisection" by a flat-promoting syndicate, have streamed 2,000 members of the public, mostly of the working class, to sign a petition for. Amendments to the Planning Act, the first constructive step towards arresting the destruction in town and country of fine buildings, trees and gardens. Many of these signatories have deposited valuable data concerning depredations; threatened or in progress in other districts.
The founders of the Londoners' League, a group of pro- fessional and working-class people, met and became associated through the medium of the Press, a leading section of which was voicing widespread indignation in correspondence and editorial columns.
Among the earliest archives of the Londoners' League is a letter from the late Mr. A. R. Powys, for many years • the valued secretary of the S.PA.B. Writing on January 24thi 1936, when his society was still unable to act in defence of Georgian architecture, he said : " I am particularly interested in your last paragraph. It entirely confirms my experience as secretary of the S.PA.B. Postmen, dustmen, small' traders, odd people of no consequence, all call here asking us to protect buildings from time to time. Feeling for architectural decency, ignorant though it is, is much more widely spread than people believe." " Haters of beauty "- in this country arc in fact confined to the small but powerful minority who derive wealth from its destruction.
Mr. Hirst rightly condemns " County Councillors and the like " as " greater vandals than the vandals themselves." But exception must be made of certain Local Authorities who entrust " the preservation of existing amenities," enjoined on them in Section 1 of the Act, to non-party-political town- planning experts. These are labouring, in the words of a great planner of the largest metropolitan borough, the late Alderman Henry Prince of Wandsworth, " to lift town-planning and housing out of the political cockpit to which it has been consigned by the wreckers."—Yours obediently,
Brooks's, St. James's Street, 'PLLELIP TROrrER.
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