A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE volume of protest against the Bankside electrical power- station, I am glad to see, is growing. The more the project is examined the more indefensible it appears. I have been down to Bankside—the stretch of river bank between Blackfriars and South- wark Bridges—this week to see the site for myself. I found several things of interest ; for example, Bear Gardens, which I discovered perpetuates the memory of some famous bear-pits on this spot. There is a Cardinal Hat Lane, or Passage, which I imagine was not called that without reason. There is a Rose Alley, which recalls the Rose Theatre. Here, too, far more famous, was Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Near here Christopher Wren lived and John Harvard was born—which gives America some interest in the future treatment of the site. As for the possibilities, enough has been cleared by the blitz to show how splendid a riverside garden or park can be created her; as Sir Patrick Abercrombie's plan for the new London provides, with an unrivalled view of the whole south side of St. Paul's across the river when the buildings between the cathedral and the river bank are cleared, as the new London plan again provides. It is not because a power-statign need be particularly unsightly in itself that the proposals the Government has approved must be condemned, but because to put a power- station here would shatter utterly one of the most necessary and desirable reforms in the whole re-planning of London. It raises the plain question—and the test question—whether sheer materialism is to be triumphant at every turn.
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