Breaking Up The advent of school holidays means one thing
to readers of the Spectator as parents and something very different as they notice the swarms of urchins of both sexes settling in these last few days like locusts on the London parks. There is always a cheerful streak in the typical Cockney of whatever age, and holidays are worth having, even in this weather, when the Green Park is doing more than ordinary justice to its name and the price of a fare to Hampstead Heath can sometimes be cadged from somewhere. But for the London child in the mass the holiday playground is the London street, and the streets of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green are unlovely places whether they shine in a rainstorm or bake malodorous in an August sun. You can break-up for a seaside holiday or for a street pavement holiday, and the unconscious pathos of the tens of thou- sands of boys and girls turned out for a month from the classrooms to the streets of Whitechapel or Ancoats deserves at least a fleeting thought. Houses cannot be rased to make playgrounds in the congested areas, but at least what open space there is can be jealously preserved, and it is matter for the profoundest satisfaction that the Foundling Hospital site is now all but secured for its rightful beneficiary, the London child. Readers of these lines still have the opportunity of making it quite secure.
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