The report of the Pilgrim Trust for 1946, which has
just reached me, is more topical than its authors realised it would be when they wrote it, and it breathes a very different spirit in regard to the south
bank of the Thames at Southwark from that which animated the Government spokesmen in recent debates in the two Houses. The Trust has given specially sympathetic attention to the needs of Southwark Cathedral (the diocese of Southwark is described as the second largest but the poorest in England). Its report dwells on the associations of the Cathedral, once the Church of St. Saviour's. Chaucer lodged at the Tabard Inn close by ; Gower, Laureate in the reign of Richard II, lived at the Priory of St. Mary Overies ; Shake- speare's brother is buried in the Cathedral ; John Harvard was a parishioner. "It is known," adds the report very relevantly, "that some of his [Shakespeare's] fellow-dramatists and players on Bank- side held office in the parish church." For this is all Bankside, but a Bankside with something very different from a power-station flavour.
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