City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN
AN old and distinguished Oxford Don I knew, who is now with God, used to say that if any wsthetic matters connected with building or tree- planting or decoration came up at his college meetings he could always count on the scientists for a sensitive treatment of the subject. His col- leagues in the liberal arts were less dependable.
In the last century clergymen were much admired. In the first half of this century the honour passed to doctors and now scientists are our national heroes. Lesser scientists imagine that msthetic matters are of no importance, fussed about by old fogeys like the writer of this column. They seriously believe the world is divided into 'tech- nologists,' that is to say, horn-rimmed go-getters who string wire all over the place and bring the inestimable benefits of washing-up machines to weary housewives, and the rest, a diminishing number of silly fools who paint pictures of old churches. The complete man should, of course, be like the great men of the Renaissance in Italy with an appreciation both of arts and of sciences.
A hopeful sign of a return to civilisation in this country is a quarterly called Impulse, published by an enormous firm called The Mitchell Group of Companies which builds power houses, pylons, cooling towers and the like. This quarterly, which costs 10s. and must therefore, I suppose, have a big free list, is the first attempt I have seen from the side of science to bring the arts into perspec- tive. An extremely sensible article by Sylvia Crowe in it called 'Our Landscape Can Be Saved' calls for what has long been needed, a national • survey of the landscape which will determine where enormous new engineering projects will look well and where they will irretrievably ruin the old, intimate and irreplaceable village land- scape.
The worst method of siting is to select areas, small in extent, but at present comparatively unspoilt, such as the few remaining stretches of open country in southern England, or the Lake District as a whole, and to allocate to each dis- trict one monster which will effectively both de- humanise and de-naturalise its surroundings.
Last week the East Anglian Daily Times said that boring at Minsmere, near Dunwich, which was taking place to ascertain whether the land Is suitable for building a nuclear power station, had suddenly stopped. Can it really be that the greater scientists are at last to make a national survey before the lesser scientists ruin what is
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