LIFE IN LONDON

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 113, 9 November 1933, Page 12

LIFE IN LONDON

THE CHANGING CITY

CIRCLED BY A HUNDRED SATELLITE TOWNS

THE TRANSPORT PROBLEM

(Written for "The Post" by Nelle M.

Scanlan.)

LONDON, October 3

London is changing but if all the recent suggestions were put into operation, you could not break its ancient spirit, no matter how much you modernise this fine old capital of the Empire. . A new' generation is arising that is clamouring for a change. Conditions of modern life alter year by year, and make change imperative. The old, gracious, beautiful, happy, picturesque London, mellow and lovely, but often barbarously inconvenient, fails lamentably to meet the needs of swift transition. Park Lane, once the London home of the great families of England, is becoming the centre of fashionable hotels. The, mansion of Lady Louis Montbatten is the latest to be put into the hands of the house-wreckers. The big bay windows of many an ancient home stare blindly across the Park, while their owners jnow live in mansion flats. Business is thrusting its way into Mayfair, and the once lovely squaresHanover Square, Berkeley Square, Portman Square, and the rest bulge with- hat shops and flower shops and collections of antiques, and pushing venders of Paris frocks. Yesterday I was caught in town in the "rush hour." Tor thirty-five1 minutes I stood helpless at Selfridges corner, while packed buses rushed by, and. an increasing crowd ran back land forth fighting to. get perhaps standing room, but for half an hour there was not even that. It jnakes you realise what it means to work in. London, and every morning and every night, in sweltering heat and drenching rain, have to face this daily rush to fight for a seat or even standing room. And for many it is a long journey home, perhaps an hour. • TRAFFIC POSITION ACUTE. The traffic position is more acute, and something must •bo dono. One group demands the erection of skyscrapers, those tall blocks of steppedback buildings towering forty and fifty storeys. But London will have none of this. Others want to tear the fronts from buildings and widen the main streets. A more recent suggestion is the building of a hundred satellite towns around London, and the transferring of many of the factories and workshops from, what is valuable city space to this outer ring. They urge a comprehensive plan of design, with workers' home—real little houses with a garden;—instead, of tenement' flats, within easy reach of their work. There is to be a wide green belt around London, a breathing space, and then outside this, the hundred little Londons. Already there are many "dormitory" towns as they aro called where city workers go home to sleep.. But it means the long journey twice a day to and from work. The new idea is to reorganise all this. To stand at any crossroad between five and seven in the evening is to realise the appalling problem that faces this great city. Every day it is being further aggravated by the increase in motor-cars. The possession of a, car means that the family may live many.miles from its work, but the additional car increases the traffic problem, which already is extremely acute. Today, after four years of tinkering and delay, Waterloo Bridge is to be closed for repairs. Some of the piers had sunk and a temporary structure was erected to take much of the traffic. Plan after plan was J devised and rejected. ,Now they have decided to rebuild three of the arches, and it will take four years to complete the work. 'A vigorous fight is being made to exclude horse-drawn traffic from the city, streets. It is a common sight to sec a horse and-cart at the head of a long line of motor traffic, impeding its progress, and causing costly delay. Yet the city firms find horses cheaper for short-distance transportation. The need for practical reform .in this vital matter is gradually robbing London of its ancient pageantry, the glory that belonged to a more leisurely era. To hold up urgent traffic and clear the streets while some spectacular procession moves slowly by,, is becoming impossible. Massed thousands lining the streets to see it pass, block doorways, and mean a loss of business during valuable daylight hours. It is now becoming almost impossible to be punctual in London. You never know at what point you may bo held up, or the traffic diverted. Whon time means money, as it does more than ever today, the solution of this transportation problem is so urgent that even the most conservative, who love their old London with its narrow and rambling streets, are yielding to the practical demands of a modern problem. Even the extension of the underground railways, which ease the situation, cannot cope with the moving crowds. PUBLIC PAGEANTRY. Yesterday, the Law Courts opened for the Michaelmas session. Services wero h6ld at Westminster -Abbey and Westminster Cathedral, and all the splendour of England's legal pageantry was represented. The Lord Justice and all the Judges in their full-bottomed wigs^ their scarlet and gold and ermine, their silk gowns and knee breeches and buckled shoes, their train-bearers; it was the pomp and majesty of the Law. Judges plump and benign; Judges lean and hatchet-faced; Judges who stalked^ proudly; and Judges who waddled. But the annual procession of "Michaelmas Daisies" was cut short. No longer was the traffic held up while they crossed in Btately procession from the Abbey to the House of Lords for the Lord Chancellor's champagne breakfast. Economy had cut out this splendid meal, and they simply gathered their robes about them at the church door and disappeared into/ears, which drove them direct to the Law Courts. So England loses some of her public pageantry, and the disappointed crowd murmured, and told its children: "Its not like the old days; you'll never see that procession again." But only those things that hinder and hr.mper will be wiped out of the life of London. It is unchanging in so many ways. At 9 o'clock on Monday morning, the same old man with the same cracked cornet plays "Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes" as stutteringly as when I first heard him on a Monday morn five years ago, on the same corner. The grey of London's autumn sky hangs low over the parks, where the faint blue mist veils the trees, now turning gold. Armies of men with brooms sweep up the fallen leaves, and a coil of smoke rises from the pyro, a pungent breath of grey. You can hear the- muffin man, his tray on his head, ringing his little bell as he passes by. The Spaniards are here with long strings of golden onions on sticks across their shoulders, going from door to door. And as I came home in the dusk a crowd of children laughed delightedly at the antics of a Punch and Judy show that had set up its stand for a moment on the corner.

Conic back to London after five or ten or oven twenty years, and you will iincl much that is changing or has changed. But something that is essentially London, the soul'of London, some essence of the past, keeps alive for the younger generation a glimpse of the pageantry that Jias passed.