City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN IHAVE good news on the chain-store front. One of the scandals which called The Georgian Group of the SPAB into existence in 1937 was Woolworths. That firm had demolished a magnificent stone house in Chippenham, probably by Wood of Bath, and erected their usual acreage of plate-glass with a broad red band above it and the name in gold letters, and on top of this a mean red-brick block like the facade of a garage on a by-pass. I have learned that Woolworths are going to build shops on the site of the Lion Hotel in Guildford, a key position in that most beautiful of Surrey high streets, in the Market Square at Wantage, on the site of a seventeenth-century cottage used as a butcher's shop, and at 2 Market Hill, Buckingham, which is an eighteenth- century listed building of great distinction. So 1 wrote to Woolworths and asked them if it was still their custom to erect the plate-glass and red facades. I had this reply from Mr H. C. Dear, who is the Director Concerned with new buildings : It is very rare now for us to put the old red facias on our new stores. As you know, our plans have to be passed by the local planning authorities and it is always our endeavour to erect buildings that are a credit to the town in which they are situated. We also co-operate to the fullest extent wherever possible with any other local interests which may be concerned in matters of this nature.
W H. Smith & Son have consistently erected self-effacing and attractive shop fronts or preserved existing Georgian shops as at Wokingham and Brecon, and they have not, so far as I know, lost business by this policy. Now that Woolworths is following their lead, perhaps Burton, Dorothy Perkins. Lyons and the Co-op will work on the lines of Mr. Dear's letter. If they do, there is some hope that the surviving individuality of our old country towns may be preserved.
CONCRETE WORSHIP One of the latest crazes of those comic public characters, Borough Engineers, is the taking up of good old York paving stones and substituting concrete slabs and concrete kerbs to roads. I suppose they make smooth running for the `kiddiz' in prams or perhaps they are a compensation for concrete lamp-posts which are now going out of fashion, thank God. Whatever the reason, you may sec this happening needlessly on Chelsea Embankment. A really ghastly example of con- crete worship comes from Maidenhead where many people bought their houses in Ray Lea Road, a backwater which leads nowhere, because of a splendid avenue of fifteen chest- nuts down either side of the road. As a resident writes to me:
The trees in no way interfere with the making up of the road, but the Council wish to put in a concrete road with wide pavements on both sides and plant flowering cherries. The arguments put forward by a leading alderman and the woman deputy mayor were that the chestnut is a coarse, common tree and that the leaves were untidy. Another extraordinary argument put forward by an alderman was that the trees were undesirable because boys were tempted to throw up stones to knock down conkers which might bounce off the roofs of cars.
A petition to save the trees signed by 900 people was brushed aside and the Borough Engineer was upheld. Now the residents lie awake listening 'to the branches of the trees so soon to be felled and thinking of how helpless we are against the forces against us.'
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