BEAUTIFUL CITIES

Evening Star, Issue 20135, 27 March 1929, Page 18

BEAUTIFUL CITIES

PARAMOUNT CLAIMS CF LONDON Few lliink of London when the talk F of beautiful cities. Mental pictures of Home. Paris cnice charm the memory. London is supposedly grey and gigantic, or black and foggy (writes I’rincC'S Lichnowsky. widow ol Prince Lichnowsky, German _ Ambassador in London, in 1 Die Times '). I have no rose-coloured spectacles she savs, yet I see it as “ a rose-red city."' 1 have counted in one street fourteen houses ill a row each wearing a different shade ol rose. '1 here were Deux rose. Iresh tulip. pastel. and water-colour shades. 'Die city is drawn in charcoal, in every tint from dead black to iiot-qnile-white. and a rosecoloured thread runs all through them beautiful smoky tones. Huby-red omnibuses sweep in extravagant numbers along the tarred parquet of the streets. U is a satisfying red, and_ so is the sea 1 1 ug-wa \ ied ol the pillar-boxes, which stand like chessmen on Hie payments, The streets are not, as elsewhere, drawn with a ruler; they deviate, turn, go uphill and down dale, wind, become narrow at the corner like a tip of a crescent moon, and disappear. 'The j xaxieabs look like tall cupboards or like | tea tables on wheels. 'They are nimble as cats, sturdily built as uild boars, and since they are made man-high one need neither bang one’s head noi kneel on the floor after struggling in, as in Berlin. They recall the sedan chair and also the vanished hansom, and ten can park themselves in the space occupied by eight Berlin taxicabs. SI[AKESPFRFAX SFHEXITV. London is for me most beautiful in mid-summer because then the, evening sky supplies a background of Shakespearean serenity, and also because it lies so easily, with slowly throbbing pulse, upon its oily flowing Thames, as if at. rest. To see it through Guardi's or Canaletto’s eyes one, must go on an evening to the Embankment below the Cecil Hotel, when rose-red palaces seoni to rise on the opposite bank against the deepening bine of tin.; sky. Then the Thames is the. Grand Canal, only twice as wide. In the square by the Houses of .Parliament the limestone rhere covered with soot, there washed while. There is nothing in the fabric of the city to compare with this limestone; hard as granite, rough as cartridge paper, the weather changes it from milk white to coal black, and the rain washes it clean again. In Hyde Park there is no grass upon which one may not walk, sit, or lie * down; there are no muzzles, no leashes. Instead, one _ may admire the most splendid dahlias and lilies, delicately reined sapilglossis in undreamt-on colours, and, besides, in an enclosed Liliputian wild preserve, all kinds of exotic or native waterfowl and wild rabbits. One day it was so hot that the rabbits lay on their sides like fox terriers, their four paws and their two ears stretched Car apart. The men who distribute tickets for the hundreds of green seats.are very capable. They detect a newcomer at a distance of many kilometres, and approach him in a wide, circling movement across j meadows and paths.