NEW LONDON

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 37, 12 August 1930, Page 4

NEW LONDON

CITY'S CHANGING FACE

G'KEAT BLOCKS OF FLATS

The great thing about underground railways is that they are never content with, thoir system, however advanced their changes and costly their reconstructions. Since the war period they have changed all thoir coaches, remodelled their, system, thrown out new lines to Mordcn and Watford, and rebiTilt their two chief stations with escalators in a way that makes them superior to anything else in the world, says the "Manchester Guardian." The Underground' Railway, indeed, has become one of the sights of London which are sure- to produce envy in the hearts of our foreign visitors. The Piccadilly station, I know by experience, creates almost as much admiration among our American visitors as the Pennsylvania Railway station in New York creates amongst English visitors there. The Piccadilly station cost the railways about £500,000. Work is about to begin on the new Leicester Square station, which is to cost about £400,000. The overhdad station will disappear, and bookinghall, arcade with showcases, escalators, and so oh will be constructed on tho same scale, design, and finish as the Piccadilly Circus station. It will have four entrances and. three escalators. At Hyde Park Corner anothor grand circus station will bo constructed under-

ground. About & 13,0.00,000 is to bo spent on the Underground• Railway's new extensions and stations. Dover street station is to be reconstructed and greatly enlarged. Messrs. Adams, Holden, and Pearson, the company's architects, who designed the Portland stone and glass overhead entrances that are so pleasant a feature of the London ■. streets, and also the Piccadilly and Charing Cross Underground circuses, have certainly added a new feature to London of which we can be- proud. PUZZLED VISITORS. . Those enormous Underground operations are only one of several manifestations of the confidence and resource in the British capital which puzzle our visitors who are arriving here this year with a mom sympathetically adjusted to friendly mourning over the departing prosperity of England. Other features that strike their' eye are the rebuilding in Portland stone on a grandiose scale of tho centre of London City and the enormous new blocks of oxpensivo flats to house prosperous people that are springing up all over Mayfair, Kensington, and other fashionable places, the extension of Bush House in the middle west, and the astonishing appearance of the vast office building called Thames House on the river beyond the Houses of Patlia men I;. Bush House was thought to be rather a rash \ experiment when Mr. Irving Bash some seven years ago decided to build it in the No Man's Land on tho Strand site. It is now being extended over every vacant part there, and the tenants were settled in tho bottom part before tho roof was on in the last-com-pleted section. Thames House, which is about a mile and a half farther west, will house almost as many office tenants, and 'its construction is being rushed forward so as not to' lose an hour of paying occupancy.

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