NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8306, 10 June 1907, Page 7

NEWS AND NOTES.

The ICaikoura Star is informed that Mr Jas. Tate, of Conway Flat, got a crop of magnificent turnips this year. Some of them, pulled at random from thd field the other day, were 48 inches in girth and weighed 331bs apiece. Is the Bank of England run on business lines? (asks the Daily Express). To those unfamiliar with the world of finance the question seems to be a piece of wild heresy. Yet there is a growing volume of opinion in the City that the Empire's greatest bank is as much behind the times as some of our Government Departments. It wastes the value of the richest site in the British Empire. If it utilised the wonderful value of this site it could put in its coffers each year from that source alone any sum between £250,000 and £500,000. A sevenstorey building would give the bank all the space it occupies at present, and leave a plot of land worth many millions sterling. Reckoning .its value at £50 per square foot, it has been computed that the Bank site is worth £6,534,000. And yet this wonderful piece of ground is occiipied by a one-storey building which is architectural incoherence itself, if we reckon the large garden, courtyards, and interminable galleries and passages apparently leading to nowhere in particular. The Bank was completed in 1788, when the land in and about the Mansion House was worth scarcely more than £5 a square foot.

It sounds amazing, but actually there will be no stonemasons, no carpenters. and no bricklayers employed in the building of the vast block which is to form the General Post Office extension in London. Indeed, no skilled workmen except the gangers and the foremen, will be necessary for the work. All the rest will be labourers. The explanation of this apparently miraculous undertaking is that the great buildings are to be erected on the Hennebique Ferro-Concrete system ; they will be all steel and concrete. Under this novel system, as described bv the Westminster Gazette, the whole framework of the building may be said to be steel—somewhat on the principle and yet greatly differing in detail from the American plan— encased in concrete, which it naturally strengthens .t and supports, but which, when the building is finished, is quite invisible. A complete building has the appearance of being composed of Portland stone.