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Chiswick and Richmond; simplification of western exits, by joining Fulham and Cromwell Road, over the railway and across Castelnau peninsula, with the Great Western Road; various tunnels-Greenwich, Woolwich, Rotherhithe, Blackwall-to be improved in approaches and other conditions; the GravesendTilbury tunnel to be acquired for the public, abolishing the only non-free cross-river communication in the London area; a new tunnel to be sunk from Dartford to Purfleet, rather than from Gravesend to Tilbury-for this, with the building of a Victoria Dock Road, is declared more practicable than the high-level bridge at Woolwich, which is pronounced ultimately desirable. These are the main points of a programme, on the whole of which no one man can be competent to have full information.

In no case does the Commission assume the right to sit as judge on details of construction. That is the work of the Royal Fine Arts Commission. But, in view of the expense entailed, the urgency of the matter, and the complexity of their schemewhich is meant to hang together as a whole-the second main recommendation, that a Central Authority should be set up by Parliament to carry it through, is obviously practical. The Bridge House Estates, under the control of the Corporation, concern the City alone. The London County Council ought not to be asked to carry their portion of the burden on the rates. The 170 independent local authorities concerned are very far from being equal, in financial strength or general experience, to any such task.

The total cost of the scheme is estimated at £27,000,000. A central authority, the Commission suggests, might borrow £19,000,000 on the guarantee of £1,000,000 a year grant from the Road Fund. Having regard to the amounts paid from the Metropolitan area in motor traction licences, it is eminently fair, should that fund have escaped being bled white by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for other purposes, that it should contribute to abolish the worst and most central of transport difficulties.

The remaining eight millions, the Commissioners report, should be raised locally. They fully admit that the total proposed is formidable. They are quite prepared for the accusation that they are fostering fevered expenditure. Their reply is, that they are unanimous, after exhaustive consultation with men best

qualified to judge, as to the urgent need of everything proposed. They are sure that a situation, already bad, will become very quickly unbearable, unless their plans can be accepted and worked out at once-" the Central Authority should, in the first place, apply itself to carrying out the programme herein recommended.

The proposals may sound at first as though a second Baron Hausmann were to be given carte blanche for straightening out London roads, bridges and tunnels. Nothing of the kind is really possible, of course. It is not our English way. The City with its resources will carry out-in its own way, with its own designers -the work which affects its area. If the estimate for the Charing Cross bridge, its approaches and transformations should amount to seven and a-half millions, the share of the London County Council would be about two millions. Local authorities would be asked to find only £350,000 a year as their contribution to a service for a loan of £19,000,000. A penny rate on the whole rateable value of Greater London may meet payment of interest and repayment of capital, supposing that the whole scheme be carried through. The action of the central authority is limited to providing some 75 per cent. of the cost. Local authorities would retain initiative and absolute control in their own areas. The balance, which Greater London does not raise, is provided by the community-on the ground that London area traffic is supremely and out of all proportion important to the commercial welfare of the country. This it is claimed is shown by the wholly disproportionate revenue raised from the taxes on motor transport.

It may be that this is the way through our tangle and impasse. It will none the less be surprising if a Bill, founded on these recommendations, has an easy passage. Not by all will it be admitted that a new central authority is needed. The parliament of Greater London entrenched in County Hall has a position and a tradition. It has grown up with the notion of extending, not lessening, its scope. And by no means is it agreed that any support should be given to further centralisation of London. The country at large has no itch to tax itself, in order that trade and industry may tend still more to leave the outskirts, and heap themselves together at the centre.

The various opinions held may affect the manner and atmosphere in which the scheme will ultimately be carried through. They will hardly affect the main question. The

country is determined that well-laid designing shall decrease our restricted locomotion. It sees itself, in this respect, lagging behind other capitals of less than half its importance and wealth. Wealth is now more evenly distributed than ever in our history, and the first effect of that distribution is that population must spread further afield than ever before. It must be taken to and from its work, and its food must be distributed with lessening difficulty and expenditure of time.

We may not, in our capital, have any such royal planning, such spacious perspectives as Paris shews at l'Etoile and the Place de l'Opéra. Nor, assuredly, can anything ever be reproduced in London equal in unique dominance to the Arc de Triomphe, guarding and crowning with sovereign majesty the Champs Elysées. Yet, with all the adequate fitness of the Pont du Change, the Pont Neuf, and the somewhat too frequent bridges which face Nôtre Dame, the Seine is no such dower of mingled majesty and might as is our Thames. Wanting is the pendant dome of St. Paul's and far to seek are the three-score spires and towers that pierce our sky. So much the more must wary affection and keen forethought preserve and ennoble what remains.

Widely welcomed as the recommendations of the Commission have been, it must not be supposed that they are all that is desired. Lovers of London with increasing diligence urge the necessity of many more transformations. To this end, the London Society has worked powerfully on the lines which the late Lord Curzon laid down at the Mansion House in 1913: "To make London beautiful where it is not so already, and to keep it beautiful where it already is." Certain precious aspects there are which we can never recall. Sir Reginald Blomfield tells of an aquatint he saw of old Westminster Bridge, with its thirteen large arches, its length of 1223 feet and 44 feet breadth.

The view was taken from the site of the new London County Council building before the Houses of Parliament were burnt and rebuilt, and shows Westminster Hall rising above the arches of the bridge and beyond it the towers and roofs of the Abbey.

Noble is the group that the present bridge makes with the Westminster Buildings, St. Thomas's Hospital and the County Hall, as seen from Charing Cross Bridge, with Scotland Yard in the foreground. It gives the apparatus of government, of directional protection. But not more moving is it, in historic

association, than that other view from Tower Hill. Here, but for the ignoble obstruction of a tea warehouse, you have the chaste delicacy of Trinity House in the foreground, across the sad site of the scaffold; you have the Royal Mint and the bluff Tower, flanked by what is after all the fine engineering creation of Tower Bridge; you are standing on the original open-air parliament of the race, and your eye can stretch above the Pool and the docks to Greenwich, while the grey-green swirling stream carries your imagination to the distant shores and foreign climes which beckon its mighty vessels.

Again, how pitifully mean and ungallant we have allowed the approach to London Bridge to remain on the south side. Blocked by the Southern Railway bridge, with no worthy spacing round St. Saviour's Cathedral, with a Bridge House Restaurant (relic of the famous fund) and business chambers eating into the roadway-the whole is common, crowded, undignified; it would seem that anxious effort had been used to combine congestion of traffic with banal surroundings. There should be spacious sweep of gradually narrowing inlet to the plainest, yet the finest, of all our bridges. At the north side, Fishmongers' Hall is a not unworthy flanking bastion on the one side and the new Adelaide House has solid bold lines, without any false pretension. But, how poor is this compared with the age-long flanking of St. Magnus, as once one could see it; how commonplace, compared with the one-time dignity of St. Mary Overy on the south. King William IV's statue makes no monumental impression upon which the eye might rest, and it has displaced a much more satisfactory pre-fire church.

The new Charing Cross Bridge, it had been hoped, would make up such a vista, with the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to rest upon. The latest proposal rules out this plan to our regret. It demands a trajectory which leaves the church on one side, and it will thus lose a most attractive feature. Presumably it will have to be in the main iron and steel, though only a bold man would allow that the resisting life of iron has yet been tested. Its constructional lines and simple efficiency must be the features upon which it will depend for adequacy to such a position. Greatly as we love the timber framing network of piers and tiebeams, or that substantial arched solidity of shaped stone which appeals to the most ignorant eye, the age of another material has

arrived. We are not to suppose that dignity and repose are of necessity denied to iron and steel. Nor because various of our iron bridges-Charing Cross and Cannon Street—are plain to ugliness, a mere system of lattice girders laid from pier to pier, are they the measure of possibility in this medium. Given but honest interest in constructional purpose, such rude and unadorned beginnings can lead to creation of beauty and fitness in the same medium. It is necessary that the public eye be trained to look for and to demand from its architects this welding of rigid stability with grace and excellence.

Not otherwise has it ever been, we are taught, with the development of architectural styles. The craftsman who faced his difficulties of construction and poverty of material with untiring courage, found a new way which was no wise inferior to the old. The London of the future will never surpass those monuments which it has preserved from an earlier age; it can never attempt to repeat them. It can insist that its public works, hereafter to be built, shall not fail to reveal the same honourable artistry and an enhanced understanding of what is due to the capital of the English race.

ARTHUR G. B. WEST

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