London's Gold Mine
[Few persons are more qualified to plan a better London than the writer of this article, Mr. Alfred C. Bossom, F.R.LB.A., an English- man with many years of professional experience in the United States. Mr. Bossom was this week elected an Alderman of the London County Council.--En. Spectator.] IT is partly because I am so great a lover of the London
of to-day that I find myself constantly picturing and working for the London of to-morrow. Partly also my American experience, the many contacts I have enjoyed with constructional engineering on spacious modern lines, help to keep the transfigured London of ten, twenty or fifty years hence, the London of my dreams, fresh and challenging in my mind. There is all the material here and the opportunity and the need for great schemes that will reorganize the life of London without impairing a single one of her distinctive and appealing charms.
Let me take one example. All the main line trains that reach their London termini are steam-driven. Some local and suburban services in recent years have merci- fully been electrified. But the great majority of the trains entering the Metropolis are still draWn, even in this age of petrol and electricity, by coal-burning loco- motives that puff their filthy soot over the greatest aggre- gation of humanity that the world has yet seen. They pollute the air we breathe ; they begrime everything we
touch and wear. They help to make a clean London atmosphere impossible. They are the delight of the Laundries and of no one else.
Yet all the facilities and the knowledge exist for modernizing these main-line anachronisms, just as Lord Ashfield has modernized the metropolitan system of underground transport. No coal-burning train is allowed to enter or leave the City of New York ; none should be allowed to enter or leave London. At points well outside the boundaries of the capital each and every train heading for London should be forced to switch over to electricity. The process takes no time and involves no delay worth mentioning, and the beneficent possibilities it opens out arc surprisingly far-reaching.
1)o people in London sufficiently realize that the most valuable residential street in the world—Park Avenue, New York—has been built on a railway cutting, and that the edifices which line each side of it, some of them fifty storeys high, were erected without a single train being thrown out of its regular running time-table ? This huge enterprise only became practicable when the obligatory electrification of all the trains passing through the cutting solved the problem of ventilation and guaranteed to all the householders and flat dwellers above the tracks a total freedom from the dirt and fumes of coal-drawn traffic.
What has been done in New York can be done—in fact, the engineering and technical problem is simpler—in London. The first step, then, towards London better- ment on a big scale must be the electrification of all trains entering or leaving the capital. The next step must be the boxing-in of the open cuts through which the trains pass to the termini of the various companies, all of which are situated at focal points in the life of London. Hardly a train should be seen, heard or felt in the London of the future. Every one of them should run decently underground or enclosed and with streets, houses and open spaces above them.
As nearly as I can ascertain, there are rather over forty miles of open railway cuts within the boundaries of the capital. Drop steel stanchions between the rails as your foundation supports, and on the area thus made available you could erect whatever you pleased. You could carve new thoroughfares, you could run up buildings of any and every size, you could lay out parks. I estimate that, if the open cuts were thus covered over, more than 350 acres of land would be added to the pro- ductive usable area of London-350 acres that at present are mere empty space.
There are two points of view from which it is worth dwell- ing on the significance and possibilities of this Aladdin-like augmentation of the building area inside the capital. There is, first, the point of view of the community as a whole. It seems a far cry from the slum problem to the steam locomotive, but in fact the connexion is of the closest. Electrify the trains, case in the open cuts, turn them into 350 acres of sites for building, and at last—at very long last—the central citadel of the slum housing problem is exposed to a relatively easy and inexpensive attack.
There are in London at the moment about 120 acres of slum property that demand immediate demolition, and another 40 acres or so that will need it before long. The difficulty in all such cases is to house the people who are forced to vacate their homes. That difficulty will not disappear, but it will be immediately eased when the no acres of covered-in railway cuts, many of them in the very heart of slumdom, are brought into play. Then for the first time there will be great virgin spaces in the immediate neighbourhood of the insanitary districts and capable of being so utilized that the slums of the present day will be no more than an evil memory to the
next generation. I take that to be an even greater gain than ridding the atmosphere once and for all of the foul by-products of the steam engine.
Next, there is the point of view of the railway cons- panics themselves. They ought to be grateful to me for
pointing out that they are sitting on a gold mine. Search the world over and you will not find any urban property so wholly unproductive, and yet so vast and sure a source of potential revenue as the railway cuts that lead to the London termini. Every inch of the property that would be created by covering them in and converting them into building areas would belong to the railways, and every inch would be a handsome dividend earner. The com- panies have at their call 350 acres of land within the confines of London, and they make nothing; of it ! By forming a subsidiary corporation to handle the con- struction work, build the land above the tracks, develop it by shops, offices, houses or whatever type of building was most suited to the locality, and collect the rents therefrom, they would soon pay for the costs of electrifica- tion and find themselves in permanent possessions of a large and expanding income.
There is one detail—a minor one to-day but a major one if one looks ahead—connected with and following from this whole project that deserves a word of notice. When the electrification of the trains entering the London termini is completed the need for those huge arched iron and glass edifices that we know as Euston, Liverpool Street, Waterloo and so on will disappear. A station will no longer have to serve as a vaulted funnel for the reception of locomotive filth. It will be flat-roofed, it will be reasonably low', it will make together with the adjacent goods yards, if not an ideal, at any rate incom- parably the most convenient and accessible binding-stage for the air-taxis of the not distant future. In fact, with vision and boldness, to their own and everybody else's profit, the railways can largely regain their old prosperity, first, by exploiting the gold mine which, as I have indi- cated, lies at their feet, and secondly by controlling (through their provision of the vital points of arrival and departure) the air services which will soon become the familiar form of transport for mails, first-class passengers, and light high-grade freight. An.latED C. Bossom.
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