The outlay on keeping our cathedrals from falling down seems
endless ; here is Peterborough, which has just spent a large sum on the roof of its eastern chapel, finding that a larger one must be spent on the founda- tions, unless everything just dealt with is to collapse. I wish that while the nation (usually with heavy aid from America) preserves its cathedrals in being, it would do a little more to save their effect from being effaced by incongruous surroundings. Peterborough is a bad case of that, perhaps the worst. The town with its engineering works and brickfields (especially since the post-War demand for its bricks) ' is one of the most hideous examples of industrialism that even England can show. Sprawling over an incredible area, it is a sort of hybrid between the Black Country of legend and the approach to Passchendaele at the end of the War. Suddenly in this panorama of gigantesque squalor the eye lights on the cathedral—dwarfed, dulled, and degraded by its environment, like a precious jewel mislaid in a rag-and-bone shop. Whether past follies can be redeemed now is doubtful.
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