You will see that the obstacles any planning on a national scale, the only planning of any use, will hav to be overcome by near-dictator powers. You know from the evidence of your eyes, nose and ears and by looking at your watch how noisy London is end what a time it takes to travel about in it. For most of the day the main streets of the West End are blue throbbing chains of motionless traffic between cliffs of Portland stone.
How has this come about? Not from lack of planning, but by too much of it. For years now we have been talking about town planning. with the result that most of south east England is one big town.
There hes been an ideal in minds of town-planners, an ide: London surrounded by a green belt and Brighton, St. Albans, Maidenhead Southend and Tonbridge, all with their own green belts. The idea has been to have a series of towns, each densely built up in the centre and radiating outwards in sing den sity to a green bel; of agricultural land.
There is the densely built-up centre all right, but the green belts ar negligible. They are peppered with houses. Except for certain parts of Essex, none of the Home Countie: have much agricultural country in them. Even Sussex ix almost a suburb. Surrey and Middlesex gave up the struggle years ago.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.