City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN ATjust about the time that I am writing this. Monday afternoon, Parliament is transferring the Cocos Keeling Islands from the Crown Colony of Singapore to the Government of Australia. The Cocos Keeling Islands are too small to be marked on my atlas, but they have 552 people on them, and I like .to think that somewhere in the Colonial Office there is a door with a man's name on it and 'Cocos Keeling Islands' printed under it in brackets, and that some- where on the Islands there is an English Residency with portraits of former Residents round the dining-room walls. I do not like to think of this Whitehall official returning disconsolate on the Southern Electric to Esher tonight, his job gone; nor do I like to think of the Resident returning with his wife and family on a steamboat, only to be posted to somewhere less picturesque. I wonder if these can be the Islands somewhere near the Date Line (Meridian 180 from Greenwich) which were visited, Christopher Hollis tells me, by Seventh Day Adventist missionaries. The Islands were on the American side of the Date Line, but preferred to work by Australian dates on the other side of the Line, so they were always a day in front. 'What do we have to believe?' said the islanders. The missionaries answered that one thing they would have to accept was having Sunday on Saturday. But they replied that they had that already.
Another Casualty A beautiful English country house which is likely to be destroyed is Duntish Court in the County of Dorset. It was designed about 1760 by Sir William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House in London, the pagoda and temples in Kew Gardens, and that perfectly proportioned Casino or summer house at Marino, near Dublin. Duntish Court, which used to be called Castle Hill, is one of the last remaining examples of this great arc,hitect's domestic work to remain standing It was bought by a speculator who divided it into flats and tried to sell off each of these flats as a freehold. He managed to sell one, which is inhabited. The speculator has disappeared, and the unsold part of the house is collapsing around the single purchaser.
Speculators' Rash The devastation of England by building is going on now faster than ever before. For every handsome country house which is allowed to decay or is pulled down by speculators, for every landscaped park that is laid waste, for every old street that is made gap-toothed by demolishing squads, a hundred hideous pink villas arise or flashy shopfronts in jazz-modern style replace Georgian and early Victorian dignity).
'347,605 Houses Completed Best Year since the War Private Building up by 44 per cent.'
I read in The Times last week. All who know of the tragedies of overcrowding. of young couples unable to marry because they cannot find a house, or living miserably with their in-laws, will be pleased to think that houses are being built. But need they be such ugly houses? The ones put up by private specu- lation that I saw last week in the East Riding of Yorkshire are as hideous as any put up in the bad between-wars period, and the same goes for almost every other part of England. The architectural advisory panels which are meant to approve speculators' designs are most of them no more than ciphers, either unable to compete with so great a flood of work or unwilling to- offend house-proud clients and ignorant or cunning builders. Houses with pink roofs in slate districts, houses with green-tiled roofs in old red-tiled districts, houses like slices of cake, houses with front gates like rising suns, and stained-glass front doors and awkward eaves, are rising in every old village and quiet town in England. Even the worst council estates look better, and one longs for the honest simplicity of some of the new town architecture and for a regard for local materials, texture and proportion.
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