Zoological Improvements There are few pleasanter spots in London on
a fine Saturday afternoon than the Zoo. At any time it has always been a favourite haunt of mine, but I had not been there for some months before last weekend, and so had missed the start- ing of the reconstruction along the canal banks which, I think, represents the second stage in the Zoo's plan. Already a good-looking new bridge across the canal, freshly banked terracing and one or two nearly completed buildings show that Mr. Cotton's generous gift is being well spent and that, with Sir Basil Spence as consultant, we may in future come to Regent's Park to see some good modern architecture as well as the beasts and birds inside it. This I find cheering. I suppose that for so long after the war and well into the Fifties one beard tell of agreeable projects of one kind or another which were either dropped or mutilated for want of money that to see some- thing actually realised step by step gives a peculiar type of thrill—a little like hoarding, a little like racing against time. Perhaps when (I hope not if) we get rid of economic crises, this feeling of shoring fragments against ruins will be lost. At present it is still characteristic of post- war England. But in x number of years we shall have a Zoo fit for lions to live in, and one of London's nicer institutions is becoming nicer still, These are sizeable fragments.
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