City and Suburban PY JOHN BETJEMAN M OTORING through Stockport last
week I noticed a building on the main road inscribed with the words `Slumberland Research Laboratories.' I had long supposed that `Slumberland' was a kind of mattress. What have men in white coats and with bunsen burners and test tubes to do with mattresses except to sleep on them? Perhaps the place was a sort of sunset home for tired scientific re- searchers, or perhaps, and alas! more probably, 'research laboratories' was a euphemism for a factory. So many advertisements today tell us of products which 'have been scientifically tested in our laboratories,' that I, as someone who does not idolise science, quite look forward to something which has been 'unscientifically tested' by you and me and not found wanting.
CHESHIRE TROVE Nothing gives me more pleasure than a town I have never been to before. I persuaded a friend to set me down in Congleton, Cheshire, and let me continue my journey home by train. I had two hours to wait and pleasure in every moment of them. The famous town hall by E. W. Godwin (1864) alone makes the town worth a visit. It is a vigorous essay in simplified French Gothic making full use of subtly contrasted local stones. Unfortunately its fine interior has recently been 'creamed out' by some insensitive decorator so that it looks like a second-rate dance hall. The parish church of Congleton is not so well known as the town hall and it was one of those grand surprises that England so often pro- vides. It is a classical rebuilding of 1742, plain outside, but with an interior of such an unspoiled Georgian character as to be comparable with the threatened masterpiece, Christ Church, Salford. Congleton has box pews throughout, those in the galleries having crests painted on their doors and the names and addresses of long dead sermon-tasters engraved on brass plates on other doors. The pulpit and lectern are in front of the altar above which is a splendid renaissance altar piece like a City church. Triple wooden arches, leading to what once were communicants' pews, are on either side of it. A big chandelier hangs from elaborate wrought-irdn over the middle of the church.
PROFIT AND Loss Oh sad Sir Brian Robertson, England's most unpopular general, how heavily hung your spirit over my train journey from Congleton to Oxford ! I remember Mr. Chuter Ede telling me that the idea behind the nationalisation of the railways was that they should be a public service and not run from the profit motive. All the way along I saw sad little, weed-grown branch lines curving away to forgotten termini in midland towns. This devastation the general leaves in his trail is due to his deter- mination to make the railways show a profit rather than per- form a public service. And what doom has the general in store for the Great Western stations between Wolverhampton and Birmingham? In that hinterland of slag heaps, scrap iron and condensers, they were dirtier and more unkept even than their surroundings. But let us not give up all hope for the railways we are supposed to own. Perhaps the general is going to repair and paint these stations. He has at any rate made a very good job of Cambridge Station, and its cleaned yellow bricks and stone dressings, its noble entrance colonnade, and repainted platform stanchions, show a return of pride in our railways.
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