City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN IWISH I were a director, or at an rate an influential ` employee, of the firm of Patmacs, who own, among other attractive premises, the Tabard Inn, Bedford Park, Chiswick. There it stands among the delightful houses of that earliest experiment in suburban planning for 'artistic people with moderate incomes.' Many an old art worker of the William Morris tradition lived here, beating opals into pewter or painting sunflowers on panelling or weaving homespuns. Here the youthful Yeats lived when he first came to London and in the noble room above the Tabard, panelled in cedar- wood from a City church, no doubt artistic people from the suburb listened to William Morris lecturing or to ladies play- ing the clavichord. The Tabard Inn was designed by the great Norman Shaw and the walls of its public bar are lined with tiles by William de Morgan, but since the recent redecoration of this historic place, a beautiful painting by T. H. Rooke of the Tabard as first conceived has disappeared. I could have wished, too, that the redecoration had been in the Morris style for which Norman Shaw designed the building.
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