LONDON

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4428, 21 May 1941, Page 6

LONDON

TYPE OF LIFE. Writing in the New York Times, Mr H. Callender says:— “ In London feudalism and industrialism have combined to create palaces and slums, affluence and poverty, touches of beauty amid masses of drabness. “ But at the same time there has somehow developed in that huge community an exceptionally high type of civilised life and manners which better planned and organised cities have been unable to achieve. Perhaps that type of life cannot be achieved by design, but can grow through centuries only out of the character and selfdisciplined instincts of a mature nation, shaped by a tenacious love of individual freedom which in the long run is infinitely more precious than submission to any kind of design. “If so, London was right in instinctively preferring liberty to architectural symmetry—just as to-day it prefers destruction to enslavement.

“ Hence it seems to me that the great surpassing beauty of London is not that of Wren spires or Tufior wall or the Temple gardens, but the character of its people—the civilised gentility of the mild yet tough Cockney now fighting perhaps the most decisive battle of modern times.”