City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN S this is Easter week I am opening with two matters of thanksgiving which I saw in Holy Week, instead of my usual grumble about the devastations wrought by borough surveyors, town clerks and Government departments. One is St. Mary's Street, which eventually becomes the Butts, In the limestone town of Chippenham, Wilts. It runs past the east end of the parish church and would never be seen by the ordinary, tourist. 1 think it is the most perfect un- selfconscious bit of English country townscape one could hope to find. Gabled stone-roofed cottages curve out of the noisy centre of the town and open on a street of splendid mansions of varying textures and dates, mostly eighteenth century. They are doctors' and lawyers' houses, with stables beside them and old stone walls above which one can see the tops of garden trees. One particularly fine house is of warm red brick with stone dressings and the name of a Caroline surgeon over the door. The brick contrasts with the silvery ashlar of neighbouring houses and the pebble-dash, lime- wash and half-timber of others. Between the houses steep Paths with stone cottages in them lead to a grassy quay on the Wiltshire Avon, which here widens and forms wooded islands. Beyond these an eighteenth-century stone house and timbered park complete the prospect. Going either way and looking either side of the road, there is delight for the eye. If one telly mast and two poles with wires could be removed, if the asphalt could be stripped from the cobbles, this would be the most perfect4own street in England. DELIGHT IN ES The other delight is a London one, rus in urbe of surprising extent. Tempted by the sun I opened my London atlas and looked for a public park I had not yet seen. 1 know most London parks; clock golf on the heights of Finsbury; the dull extent of Queen's Park, NW, whose acres are covered with that arid soot-resisting grass beloved by the LCC; Golder's Hill with its gorgeous sweeps of cedar-shaded lawn looking across to the azure heights of Hendon; but fortune took me to Springfield Park on the east side of Clapton Common. Tall trees, a pond and a slope of crocus were in the foreground, on the left a stucco regency villa, with the usual forbidding municipal cafeteria, then a steep grass slope to the River Lea and beyond the huge lakes of East London's reservoirs with wooded islands on them and in the distance the range of Epping Forest. It was a vast sun-dappled view totally unexpected. I hired a boat on the Lea below and rowing in the filthy water past Peggotty-like constructions in a boatyard on the Essex bank and the untamed flats of the Hackney Marshes, heard Great Eastern trains puffing emptily over viaducts to Chingford and Tottenham and saw the slender steeple of the Agapemonite church peering over the trees of Springfield Park.
CHRISTIAN ENGLAND Referring to the recent children's television programmes on the BBC and Commercial, a friend has told me of a con- versation of five-year-olds overheard in an infant class in East London : 'Have you seen the Life of Jesus?' 'What! aren't you converted yet? Roy Rogers is much better.'
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