A NEW LONDON ENVISAGED

Taranaki Daily News, 26 February 1931, Page 15

A NEW LONDON ENVISAGED

ARCHITECT’S ALLEGORY. An entertaining vision of England sixty years hence was described, by Mr. J. B. Priestley at the annual dinner of the Architecture Club at the.. Savoy Hotel, says the Daily Telegraph. Mr. Priestley imagined himself, accompanied by a well-informed secretary, coming .from America by air, after awakening from a long sleep. He noticed high towers dotted over the countiyside. “These,” said the secretary, are the villages of England. Since our population rose to 80,000,000, we found that it was only by piling the people on top of one another that we could keep any open space. Each tower contains all the inhabitants of the village, together with a restaurant and theatre.” Nearer London a ring of towers revealed themselves as factory towns. The capital itself emerged as a city of twenty-storey buildings intersected by great roads. Along these roads there° travelled no small vehicles, but only “fast beetles”—for private vehicles j had been forbidden, and everyone rode in huge public conveyances. From the airship Mr. Priestley detected a little glitter. ; “That’s the roof,” explained his sec-

retary. “We have left the old part of London exactly as it was, and we have roofed it in. Mayfair and the city have become a kind .of arcade. There are .no cars, and everybody goes on foot.” . . . , Other changes indicated m Mr. Fries vr ley’s survey were that Eastern and parts of North-Eastern London had been blown up in a war against bad housing declared in 1940, and, incidentally, that Yorkshire had become a free State. (Laughter). The year 1932 marked The declaration of a war against unemployment and bad trade. ' Aiderman Ewart G. Culpin, L.C.C., ur*ed the vital necessity for plan and programme in the future development of London. The time for sporadic development was long past. He criticised the Great London Regional Planning Committee as being divided by jealousy among its constituent bodies, . and not “getting on with its job.” .It should be put on an effective footing, instead of having, as at present, no powers. , , , . Mr. ‘d. C. Squire, invited by the chairman, Mr. R. Holland-Martin, to describe the future London as seen by the poet, said- “If vou ask a poet what.he thinks of London it is this: There was a great j plague in 1665; there was a great fire in 1666. The plague killed all the people, and the fire burned down all the buildings; and what the poet thinks is that those two things ought to happen again.” (Laughter).