City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEM AN
IWISH there were less official taste. Because public houses and by-pass villas are no longer built in bogus Tudor, because biscuit and sugar and matchboxes have had their packaging re- designed to look as though it had passed a com- mittee of taste from a goyernment office, because so many factories have flower beds in front of them and because greeting telegrams are so artis- tic, we are inclined to think that art, like history, is leading on to some glorious hygienic warless world where no one will ever die and everyone will have a moderate income and nice safe taste. Works of art are made by artists despite commit- tees and public opinion. They are never made by committees of even the most disinterested officials. A few solemn pundits, but very few Londoners, praise the new tall office blocks and regimented flats which are choking the city and mucking up the skyline in what once were countrified suburbs. There is still talk about 'clean modern lines' which certainly, when they are of glass, will need plenty of cleaning. These buildings arc euphemistically called towers, though really they are slabs. Too timid to be skyscrapers and with awkward sky- lines (for no one yet, in England, seems to have solved the problem of how to make the lift machinery on the roof look elegant), they really are designed with the gaining or saving of money as the chief motive. In the office blocks in the City and West End, the idea is to make as much money as possible for their promoters out of the rents. In Council blocks of flats the idea is to pack in as many people as possible at a minimum cost to the rates and regardless of the fact that London is a horizontal city and that Londoners have always preferred living in streets with their own back gar- dens. Lip service to architecture is paid by the curtain walls having garish colours or amateurish juxtapositions of texture.
The latest affront to London. is the tall slab erecting on the Monico site of Piccadilly Circus. Here official taste has come down with a ven- geance and commanded that all the electric signs we enjoyed seeing at night scattered at random over the old vulgar and jumbled buildings shall be gathered into a frame. This seems to me as pretentious and pathetic as those modern 'advertisement stations,' which we used to call hoardings, and which have a garden in front planted with snapdragons and floodlights. Bill- posting on the side walls of temporary vacant lots and on wooden fences and even straight on to brick and stone is at any rate unselfconscious and removable. This official blessing to electric signs —`Yes, you may have them if you are good boys and put them in the standard approved LCC frame'—seems to be making permanent some- thing whose whole justification is its temporary nature and hitherto unselfconscious vulgarity.
* * Now that M.I has drained off Mum, Dad and the kids, the lorries, the Jags and the neurotics, it is possible to enjoy the old main road from Lon- don to Birmingham. Dunstable becomes once more the broad street of a market town. The long length of Stony Stratford displays again its Georgian facades and the splendid ironwork of its hanging inn-signs. The twisting streets of Tow- cester reveal a charming town instead of a traffic block. One can turn off at Weedon to see the classic length of the Remount Depot, designed, think, by John Nash, with its portcullis and canal. Some more of these roads will set yet further towns free; Stamford, the most perfect of lime- stone towns, will soon be itself again when its by-pass is completed.
The months have arrived when vicars and con- gregations begin to think more urgently than ever about their church heating. Only the most devout can face the eight o'clock. Terrified by his dwind- ling congregation, the vicar succumbs to the blandishments of a gentleman from some elec- tricity concern who shows him the latest device which will be out-of-date next year. A very rough sketch plan is submitted to the Diocesan Advisory Committee and this committee, either too tired or too ignorant, passes it. The most terrible van- dalisms are perpetrated. Electric stoves are clamped on to medieval arches. Gleaming aluminium troughs with red tubes in them are suspended from roofs. A new Clapham Junction of pipes and wires and switchboxes is fixed to the interior walls and even bigger and more horrify- ing than the neighbouring junction for the electric light, because power seems to take up even more room than light. Electrical fittings which might look at home in a 'factory become far more pro- minent than any monuments or architecture in the church.
One of the worst examples I have seen of this sort of thing is in the glorious fifteenth-century church of Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire. It is one of those churches lucky to have escaped Victorian 'restoration.' The old woodwork is there with raised benches for a choir at the west end, clear glass in most of the windows, singularly graceful arcades of the nave with its clerestory. The old roofs and floors re- main. The walls have the old uneven plaster, pleasantly lime-washed. Fixed to the last are enor- mous stoves slightly above one's head, and a thick black pipe leads down to the ground and rambles round to the new Clapham Junction. Not content with stoves on the walls someone has also placed large stoves on the floor below them. On the same day 1 saw a coke- or coal-burning apparatus in a church which was so preposterous that it was funny. It was Ratley. Warwickshire, near Edge- hill, and I would advise picnickers to that beauty spot to turn off and see Ratley's heating apparatus if they want a laugh. It is an enormous igloo of metal which fills most of the west end of this old but scraped church. It is more prominent than the altar and has a pipe which looks thick enough for a blast-furnace running at a curious angle into the west wall and wrapped round with asbestos. I could not help noticing that it was near the pew where the church wardens' staves were fixed.
It is about time the Central Council for the Care of Churches issued a pamphlet about church heating. One general temporary piece of advice may, however, be useful. Whatever the sort of heat, oil, gas, electric, coal or coke, its source, in a high building, should always be the floor.
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