City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN
VANDALS AT WORK
Until last week, there stood in Friar Lane, Nottingham. th Collin almshouses, most beautiful . group surviving in large commercial city. They were built in 1709 and hall chapel. sundial. old ironwork and leaded windows, and loolPie like a large seventeenth-century manor house. unaccountabL set down among lime trees in the middle of Nottingham. VI were listed under the 1947 Act and no threat to them was eve,0 heard of until three weeks ago. ,A letter of protest appeared the Nottingham Guardian-Journal and in a day or two el!), were demolished. Their trustees have sold the site and the cilt),1 Corporation will benefit by the addition of a site worth £60.m5 at the rateable value of the town. The excuse the trusteced offer for their vandalism is that if they had modernis the sanitation of these almshouses, not so many aImshollsd people could have been accommodated therein. So install" they are going to build twenty-four bungalows in a subo,ri of Nottingham. 1 think this is the worst case of officlho vandalism and disregard of a historic building entrusted posterity that has Occurred since the Imperial Institute.
PLACE-RHYMES
I have been thinking over some place-name rhymes to ill foreigners in England, and can get no farther than these tol couplets : 1 like to live richly
And hunt with the Pytchley
And then 1 drive over
For pot luck at Belvoir.
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