City and Suburban BY JOHNBETJEMAN T HIS is the time when
I notice the national love of gardening. Cacti look rather out of date in 'contempor- ary' rooms and people forget how much they like tele- vision in their joy at welcoming rain on the garden. I made the journey from Uxbridge to Ealing Common on Monday morn- ing. along with the pipe-smokers and readers of the Daily Telegraph. It is surprising to s9e country, the misty morning fields of Middlesex, with their cattle and their cow parsley, their elms and hawthorn hedges, from a train which one knows will soon be passing under Piccadilly Circus. What touched me most was the way the station staffs had taken trouble over flower beds. The London Passenger Transport Executive tells me that the winner of last year's station competition for gardening was West Hampstead, and indeed it is a triumph of nature over science that in that waste of railway lines a station- master can win a prize with a bed only one foot deep. The most countrified bit of line through which tube railways pass in the open air is that from Uxbridge to Rayner's Lane. The stations where country , and flower-beds come nearest to London are West, Kensington (that unexpected interpolation between Barons Court and Earls Court) and Walham Green. now miscalled Fulham Broadway, a borough notorious for its dislike of the beautiful.
PASTORS AND FLOCKS
I see that the Bishop of Ripon and his delightful Archdeacon are trying once more to destroy the fine churches of Holy Trinity. Leeds, and St. Edward, Holbeck, on the grounds that to keep them standing is a sentimental idea and that pastoral considerations must come first. Anyone who calls a building beautiful is considered a sentimentalist, but that is beside the point in the present instances. Before Dick' Sheppard came to the Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields in London, it was almost empty and might well have been called redundant by people who thought in the terms of the Bishop of Ripon and his Archdeacon. The administrative mind is notorious for its lack of imagination and if a church is empty, pastoral committees are given to saying it is redundant, even if it is in the middle of a city, thickly populated on a weekday. We can thank God in the City of London that Bishop Wand and his Archdeacon saved our City churches and pursued the policy of putting the right man in the right place and considering that Sunday was not the only day in the week on which man can worship his Creator.
POOR OLD GOWER
1 read in the South Wales Evening Post that the foreshore rights of three seaside villages on the Gower Peninsula, Horton, Portlynon and Oxwich, have been bought by a com- pany which intends to develop them. This western part of the Gower Peninsula is the nearest unspoiled seaside to Swansea. Gower scenery is preserved by legislation and it is interesting to see how the developers are going to get round it. One declares that merry-go-rounds and coconut shies, instead of having bright red tilts as heretofore, 'will be continued, but all the colours will be changed to match the local scenery'! There will he kiosks on the beaches . to supply material wrapped in what will be litter, but these kiosks will be 'built in olde English rustic ,style and will be manned by attendants in smart, hygienic uniforms.' One promoter says there will be chalets, another says there will not. Poor old Gower.
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