A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TRH " SPECTATOR."]
Sut,—I have read your article on "Modern City Life" with intense satisfaction, but I note that you do not refer to one very obvious way of preventing the further formation of narrow streets as the business quarters of our great towns gradually encroach on the suburban roads. Why should not villa-gardens be always thrown into the thoroughfares they border, when the private residences themselves are converted into shops P By these means suburban roads would develop into spacious boulevards, instead of contracting into narrow streets, and the light and air space thus preserved would be of incalculable benefit, as the population increased with the advance of trade and industry in the locality. As a member of the Marylebone Vestry, I have recently strenuously opposed the advance of the line of frontage in Marylebone Road ; and I deeply deplore the short-sighted policy of Marylebone and St. Pancras in the past in not preserving the original space between the opposite lines of houses from Edgware Road all down the Marylebone, Easton, and Pentonville Roads to the Angel' at Islington, which might be by now one of the finest boulevards in the Metropolis. As many of your readers may remember. the New Road (as it was first called) from Edgware Road to Islington was made by special Act of Parliament, and frontages created for the landowners on the condition that the roadway should be 60 ft. wide, with fore- courts on either side of 40 ft., any erection on which was to be removed as a nuisance; yet in face of this the parochial authorities have repeatedly confiscated public rights of light
273 Oxford Street, W., January 17th. JOHN LEWIS.
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