Native Sprawl My native city; how I wish I had
never left it, for then I need never have known just how brutally ugly and unnecessary those enclosing miles of semis are. Strung along narrow tracks with surfaces like billiard tables; where a million men, leaving their static boxes for tiny private moving boxes, use the sacred store of human in- telligence to avoid each other, and get still a little farther into the vast sprawl of dark, small houses, used air, used bedclothes, that is London. London is the only city left in Western Europe that I know where you can still, a generation later, smell bombed buildings. This is a matter of planning. There are large estates being built just a mile from here, I was told. But all over the warren of south London there are still the square open spaces, the boarded windows, the derelict houses, waiting for yet another lease to fall in before the area can be cleared. All of it takes time. What nobody knows is that time is what we don't have. Europe, America, the world is going past us, leaving us behind. Not, of course, in the Centre where Everybody is, where the new buildings are going up—some bad, but some with exciting new heights that enhance rather than detract from the old beauties. There, all is fine. There we talk of the Vassal! case.
Previous page
