City and Suburban
T the moment that you are reading this, if it is not too late at night, the Minister of Transport will probably be considering schemes for dealing with London traffic., The A ' Ring Road, a colossally expensive plan, involving a tunnel under Hyde Park, cuttings through the Baker Street and Bloomsbury areas and also in the Goswell Road district, Will obviously cause the destruction of much attractive Georgian . London. The miles of viaduct south of the Thames approached 110m a tunnel a quarter of a mile downstream from Tower ridge will come out very expensive. The scheme was dropped in 1950. Before it is seriously reconsidered I hope the Minister s going to take a look at a more obvious remedy for traffic relief put forward by Mr. Simon Dale, the inventor of a way of saving Cambridge. Mr. Dale has seen that from Lancaster Gate to Moorfields Hospital via Westbourne Terrace, Maryle- one Road, Euston Road, Pentonville Road and City Road, there is a wide carriage way planned in Georgian times, except for two furlongs between Edgware Road and Marylebone Road Which were never wide enough. During the last century the original space of 120 feet between the house-fronts has been reduced in many places by second-rate forecourt building. But the wide road is still substantially there and could be recovered Without spending too much money. Thus could be made a thoroughfare of dignified Georgian proportions, retaining many of its original buildings and with a carriage way 80 feet wide running for nearly five miles through a congested part of London. Mr. Dale proposes to link his road from the west by !),1?c crossing the White City and passing south of the Great Western Railway to Westbourne Terrace. Eastward he pro- Poses broadening Great Eastern Street and Commercial Street swards a tunnel under the Thames very near that proposed 1 the A' Ring Road plan. This scheme seems so obvious that there is bound to be something wrong with it.
Religious Divisions Who will they appoint head of all the Religion Divisions of the BBC in place of the admirable present head who retires Next year? Though the Church of England is the Church of this country, with the same creeds as the Roman Catholics and most other Churches, there is always a possibility that ` they ' ft4a„ Y be so anxious not to give offence that they may even ,goint a Hindu to see fair play. Whoever it is, I hope we gill not have too much of this oecumenical attitude in which, t.You allow the Baptists half an hour, you must allow the Methodists three-quarters of an hour, and so on. The Sacra- ulents istj purpo of riva ses. l Churchessh should be the not bemeans televisedof b for Evangel- c They ouldringing the services of their Church to those who are house-bound by illness, just as monasteries have windows looking into the chapel from the infirmary. For other programmes it is the Christian attitude to current events that needs expressing, and without compromise. This is of more value than parading the rival attractions of various forms of worship.
Music Extra Massed choirs from St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey, the Chapel Royal, Southwark and Canterbury, the Bishop of Peterborough, a profusion of Deans and organists, and the Lord Mayor of London and his Sheriffs, assembled in St. Sepulchre's Church, Holborn, this Monday, which was St Cecilia's Day. That big creamy white Classic interior watt bright with colour and sweet was the sound of music in honour of the Saint. Yet an eminent hagiologist tells me that despite the representations we see of her playing an organ in stained glass and stone, there is no indication that the early Roman virgin martyr St. Cecilia was interested in music.
The Land of the Free An architect friend of mine is designing a house in a select outer suburb, fifteen miles north of London. The purchase of the land alone, on which the house is to stand, works out at £5,000 an acre. In an even more exclusive avenue of the same suburb the cost of land is greater. Yet one can buy for £5,000 a country house which would cost £100,000 to build today. Surely not only our land values are turned upside down?
Naked and Ashamed Now that streets and rooms are dark by tea-time, I notice more than ever the horrors of modern electric light. I see my tea looking like green custard under the strip lighting of a cafe, and cakes look mouldy and toast looks like cardboard. The light even seems to give the flavour of its colour to the food. And even for one's own house one cannot find a decent pendant lamp, for there is little to choose between pseudo- Elizabethan, plastic-`modern,' which makes one think of a redecorated hotel, and white globes like a government office. There are, of course, those paper shades folded intricately by clever Scandinavians, but they soon grow dirty. r have been trying in vain to find those crinkly glass shades from which the old-fashioned bulb burst like a flower, or one of those cut-glass pines in Which it sparkled like a diamond. The best electric light fittings I know are those simple coronals of naked bulbs which hang in the vast darkness of Westminster Cathe- dral. If one could get bulbs of sufficiently low power as not to dazzle the naked eye, a modified arrangement of diminishing coronals would look well as a centre light, by day or night. But no 1 In the electrical trade a naked bulb, however dim, seems to be thought rather indelicate. JOHN BETJEMAN
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