City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN IWAS walking down Newgate Street with a girl in the hot weather of last week. She remarked on how unattractive men were. Looking at their clothes, I realised she was right—retired tea-planters bursting out of linen suits; youths With rows of pens and pencils in their pockets, and badges and combs and tubular grey-flannel trousers; businessmen in dark suits minus the waistcoat, with the sweat showing through their shirts. But perhaps this prejudice is induced by contrast, for there is no doubt that hideous as the fronts of Chain-stores are, the cheap cotton dresses for women that come out of them are simply delightful. I cannot believe that English Women have ever looked prettier than they have done in the Bummer weather of this year.
DITCHING THE CANALS
The public relations officers of the incompetent British Transport Commission are always very vocal when they can answer a question. I wonder if they will have any reply to these about canals? Why is the British Transport Cotnmission removing paddle gear from the Kennet and Avon Canal and removing cranes and lowering weirs on the Macclesfield Canal in advance of abandonment? Has the Bill been passed in Parliament yet? Was a single visit of a few hours, including lunch at Marlborough, a sufficient basis for the Board of Survey to recommend the immediate abandonment of the Kennet and Avon Canal, which is a broad one, fourteen feet wide and eighty-six miles long? Did this Board of Survey, which was set up by the Commission, consist of three men, none of whom had any experience of smaller inland water- ways? Did this Board of Survey recommend exactly the same programme for shutting down canals which the British Transport Commission had publicised before the Board was set up? Why was there not an independent inquiry?
MASTS ON THE DOWNS
The Air Ministry is proposing to erect a mast, 350 feet high, on the top of the Berkshire Downs at Sparsholt Firs, .near the famous Uffington White Horse. The Berkshire County Council's Planning Committee has protested against this decision. It will be remembered that when the Post Office decided to put wireless masts on near-by White Horse Hill. the Postmaster-General of the Labour Government, which was in power at the time, personally visited the site and ordered the scheme to be abandoned. Is there any hope that the Minister for Air will have the same sense of reverence due to one of the most beautiful stretches of downland in England?
MORE SPOTS TO SPOIL
I see that the Central Electricity Authority, which hag never been noted for its love of English scenery, has decided to put atomic power stations in that elmy and remote stretch of country between the Crouch and Blackwater in Essex, also in the Severn Valley near Avonmouth. Ten more sites have yet to be decided on. Let me suggest some : White Horse Hill at Uffington, where a power station would blend well with the Air Minister's mast on the next hilltop; Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds, where the existing small town could provide accommodation for the scientists; anywhere in Rutland, which is sadly unspoilt, as are inland Cornwall, Dartmoor and Herefordshire. On the other hand, beauty spots like Slough, Dagenham, Mansfield, Rotherham, Camberley and West Bromwich should be studiously avoided.
DEAR 338 Lord Birkenhead has just told me of a joke made by Noel Coward. Coward was writing a letter to Lawrence of Arabia when the latter, was an aircraftman in the RAF, with the RAF number 338121. Coward began his letter, 'Dear 338121 (May I call you 338?).'
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