BUILDERS ARE RUINING THE ENGLISH DOWNS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17854, 24 May 1926, Page 2

BUILDERS ARE RUINING THE ENGLISH DOWNS.

BEAUTY SPOTS ARE RENDERED UNSIGHTLY, (Special to the "Star."* LONt>ON, April 5. “ This building for sale.” Such is the notice which meets one in the very heart of many an old-world Sussex hamlet. One such plot fronts a beau* man church on its mound < Ouse—one of the only three 1 .c with the round flint tower. If the future of that "plot” is to be left solely to the buyer, what may not happen to it, and to the village? Will it mean the beginning of such unbridled, chaotic development as afflicts the downs all the way from Newhaven to Brighton? Already a start has been made. A second notice in a field adjoining the village announces "choice building plots with gardens for sale,” The first house is up—a good, homely hpuse, doubtless, but, architecturally, of the pinky-yallery sort: pink roof and yellow rough-cast walls. If one may liken the hamlet to a mellow old Sussex song, the new house is a twentieth century shriek. What will the next be like—and the next after that? Is the spirit of the adjoining town to engulf the beauty spot, too, until the merest vestige of its charm is left? Piddinghoe, because it is the latest beauty spot to be touched by the rising tide of building and industrial encroachment, demonstrates admirably the immediate need for some central controlling authority, town-plan-ning or otherwise, advocated by the "Westminster Gazette.” if the remnants of beauty in this South Down country are to be saved. ARCHITECT’S NIGHTMARE. ’Twixt Newhaven and Brighton few, alas! remain. For a space of five miles of splendid cliff coastline and a depth of some miles into the Downs, any and every kind of bungalow and cottage have been and are being dumped in any way and every sort of way, with no disciplined .• architectural lay-out and no attempt at harmony or relation of design. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow surely was more orderly than this welter, this disorderly mob of dwellings that straggle and thicken between Downs and the sea!

Asbestos roof, tile roof, slate roof; brick wall, concrete wall, timber wall; hut, bungalow, villa, verandahecl shack; all are in juxtaposition—a sort of demoniac architect’s nightmare. It is commercialism run riot in God's open places. Over a generation ago, in "The New Machiavelli,” Mr 11. G. Wells symptomised such building orgies on the outskirts of London under the name of " Bromstead.” And here, notwithstanding twenty years’ propagation of town-planning ideas (Letchworth. the first Garden City, celebrates its twenty-first birthday in May), is " Bromstead-on-Sea.” Ovingdean, scene of Harrison Ainsworth's “ Ovingdean Grange," with its little pre-Conquest church and russetroofed cottages, and farmstead in a quiet fold of the Downs, is being smothered by a chaos of bungalows. Army huts and even railway-coach shacks. Rottingdean, burial place <}i William Black, the novelist, and Burne-Jones, one-time home of Mr Kipling, has its blatant modern outcrop. " Bromstead ” litters the Downs towards Falmer, and creeps about Patcham to the north. Where virgin downland remains adjacent to these places, roughed-out roads and perhaps rows of saplings, mark the ever-multiplying Bromsteads of to-morrow. PLEA FOR PRESERVATION. One need not go to speculative builders and estate developers in order to find the spirit behind such obliteration of natural beauty. U encountered it to-dat* 1 in an archaeologist and "Sussex Downsman” of Rottingdean. " All this talk about spoiling the Downs makes me sick," he said. " Ordered control be damned ! People want places to live in, and cheap ones. The owner of the land has a perfect right to put up any sort of shack he likes, where he likes, so long as it's fit to live in. “We have to safeguard historic sites, but all this between here and Newhaven _\vas derelict downland. It'll right itself in fifty years. We don’t want any interference.” Bodies, like the local Archaeological Society and Society of Sussex Downsmen, on the other hand, deeply deplore this unbridled building orgy, which is robbing the Downs of their beauties and amenities. " We are doing all in our power.” Mr H. J. Sibley, secretary of the Downs Preservation Committee, told me today, “ to persuade the local Rural District Councils of these building areas to come voluntarily into the town-plan-ning scheme. " Steyning East R.D.C., which borders on Hove and Portslade on the east, has done so, and is preparing admirable schemes which will safeguard amenities while encouraging development. "If only some such scheme had been adopted under the advice of a Regional Committee, or the control of some central authority, between Brighton and Newhaven, this hotch-potch of buildings could never have defaced the Downs. “ t ontrol is needed to preserve,- what is left while there is yet time. " Along with all this building activity, there are continual attempts on the part of new owners to enclose with barbed wire downland paths which have been open to the public for centuries.”