A CITY'S CHARACTER

Evening Star, Issue 18809, 6 December 1924, Page 2

A CITY'S CHARACTER

CAN BE READ IN STREETS AND SQUARES CHARM OF THE CURVED STREAM. The character oi a community can be read in the streets, squares, and suburbs of a city. This was the theory discussed recently by Lord Crawford in the course of an address to the Arundel Society of Manchester on ' The Soul of Cities.’ Througho it history, said Lord Crawford, the ingenuity and ambitions of mankind had been manifest in their cities. Our cities were influenced by climate, scenery, geology, site, occupation, by the style, cdor, and employment of materials, and thus they acquired a degree of personality, emphasised by the character of a dominant style, and to a less palpable extent by tho sentiment of their inhabitants. Speaking of the Junctions of streets, Lord Crawford dissented from the view that a street should have a striking terminal point. Paris was the classic example of street-planning of this kind, but, he added, the radiation of Hausmann’s streets was partly designed for convenience in handling an excitable population, and modern Paris was a little <oo stiff in aj plying die principles 'of perfect-on. There was great charm in the '-i-regular terminals so common in Southern Germany. He could forgive the hopelessly false alignment of St, James’s street, as it ran down to St. James’s Palace j and it was sometimes urged that the oblique approach to St. Paul’s Cathedral enhanced the stature rather than curtailed the dignity of that masterpiece. The ideal street, ho said, while serving its purpose as an easy thoroughfare, should keep the wayfarer’s interest active, should surprise him fro n time to time by unexpected pleasures rather than keep his eye fixed on some bonne-boa ibe at its termination. Herein lay tho charm of the curved street, an idea almost unknown to the geometricians from Hippodaraus in b.c. 450 to Baron Hausmann in 1860.

Speaking, of the suburb, Lord Crawford called attention to the danger- of its becoming detached from the full corporate life of the city. Good suburbs existed, ns at Toronto, Birmingham, and what Henley used to call “ Leafy Muswell Hill.” But he would whisper a word of warning aboifc another 1 kind of suburb, virtuous but perhaps a little stand-

offish, the long-range suburb of Southport, Buxton, or Blackpool. Berlin’s thirty suburbs and the suburbs of Paris, which vere nearly as many, had maintained their direct nexus with the mother town whik developing all their more local associations. This the suburbs could and did accomplish without danger of divided allegiance which, in the cases ho indicated, too often resulted in a very half-hearted service either to the residential or the occupational centre We now devoted much _ attention tc suburban problems, he said. Many oi tho old mistakes we would never repeat, hut tho problem of tho existing suburb remained acute. How to infuse variety, life, responsibility into it and bring it into closer touch with the corporate life of tho greater unit was the problem. It was in architecture and town-planning that the solution would perhaps he fount to some extent. “ Wc are now emerging from a period which showed lamentable dereliction oi civic duty,” he said, in conclusion. “W< arc beginning to take stock. I have often thought that every town of note should have its own honorary architect the consultant to whom questions o: policy, style, or conservation should ht referred.’.’