A NEW LONDON.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 22 October 1924, Page 4

A NEW LONDON.

CHANGES IN A FEW YEARS. Now that they are getting time for a closer study of London, visitors who are renewing their acquaintance with the capital are noticing what wonderful changes the last tew years have brought. London, they find, is changing her appearance quicker than ever before in her history. Her own residents are most blind to the changes that are going on. They see only the transformation at Kingsway, where the builders and housebreakers have merely moved across the road to the Strand; the vast buildings that have grown in the neighbourhoood of Regent Street, the disappearance of the old Oxford Circus. the magic growth higher of offices near London Bridge, the fast progress of widening the Strand, and the other big works. But the visitors notice these big improvements and a multitude' of smaller alterations that, cumulatively, make much more difference to London’s appearance. There are no longer grooms and chaffcutters in the mews of the West End, which have become their lockup garages or prosperous proprietorial garages. Some ,of the rooms over them have become flats.' Most parts of Mayfair have lost their appearance of dignity and aloofness. In big patches every other large house ’ is advertised for sale, and dusty .windows tell of families all but ruined by high taxation. Big hotels have gone and come. Small hotels have vanished from the side streets —a few more have blossomed. , Houses have become shops, some without an alteration of the window fronts. Every street has more changes than could be catalogued in small space. Small alterations—but amounting to enough, in twenty years, to make the Cockney boy back from Canada to hear Bow Bells again, think that he is in a foreign city.