THE CITY BEAUTIFUL.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16485, 26 February 1914, Page 6

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL.

SoiiE of the suggestions made by Dr J. W. Barritt in his references to townplanning sound positively revolutionary in colonial ears. New Zealand and Australia have made a virtue of laying out towns like chessboards, with very little regard, indeed, for beauty and comfort. They have looked upon every wide, macadamised street as a sign of civic progressiveness, whether its broad expanse of dusty surface was required by traffic or not, and they have thought of "lanes" and "courts" as obsolete things tolerable only in elderly and old-fashioned countries. Their devotion to the fence, constructed often of palings or corrugated iron, has been almost religious in its intensity. The modern town-planner comes to tell us that as a matter of fact and experience we have made a sad mess of the designing of new cities in Australasia during the last half century or so, and few people who have listened to Dr Barritt will doubt that the new ideas, which often are old ones revived, are sound. Christchurch, to quote an illustration near at hand,- is struggling with a dust problem due very largely to a passion for tho construction of hundreds of acres of unnecessary macadamised road surface at very great cost to the ratepayers. All this city's streets, with a few exceptions, are a chain wide, and they are macadamised for their full width quite regardless of the amount of traffic they have got to bear. A typical suburban street, carrying little or no through traffic, consists of some forty-five feet of dusty, metalled surface flanked by asphalted pavements and a diverse assortment of private fences. If a student of scientific town planning had been entrusted with the making of such a road, ho would have metalled a strip about sixteen feet wide in tho centre, planted trees on either side with footways running ander the branches, and then suggested to the residents that they should dispense with tho fences, substituting low curbings or simply garden borders. The result would have been a beautiful street, worthy of the pleasant homes that are the pride of Christchurch people. Wo cannot "make over" our city at this stage of its history, but undoubtedly there is scope hero for the ideas that Dr Barritt and tho other town planners are- pressing upon public attention. New residential areas are being brought into use year by year, old streets are being remade and subdivisions are being undertaken, ana wo should liko to hear that the municipal authorities are taking something more than an academic interest in this subject.

ST PAUL'S. The appeal of the Dean of St Paul's for funds to carry out a scheme of strengthening the great cathedral building is addressed to tho British overseas as well as to tho people of the Old Country, but wo aro afraid that it is not likely, in the absence of a special stimulus, to draw any great support from tho colonies. The danger that threatens the cathedral arises not so much from actual weakness of the structure as from changes in the condition of the subsoil. The cathedral rests on a thin bed of potter's clay, under which is a stratum of shingleand sand, and trial borings have proved the existence of running sands, which are safe so long as they are enclosed, but which cause subsidences whenever excavations are made in the neighbourhood. From time, to time new buildings are erected in tho surrounding area, and as the ground is opened up for deep foundations the sand escapes, allowing the clay to settle and 60 weaken the basis of the cathedral. Experiments have shown that this process is going on almost continuously, and during the past decade a marked leaning of the dome has been detected. The trouble would have been worse but for the fact that Wren laced tho building with iron ties, an early application of the idea that is at the back of the modern ferro-concrete construction. It is not, however, to discuss the danger that is threatening the historio pile that wo mention the matter just now, but rather to suggest that the maintenance of the cathedral church of the diocese of London might become a subject of very real interest to the colonies. It is more than a little strange that there should be no single building in the heart of the Empire tc which colonial communities have peculiarly attaclfed themselves. Whether St Paul's Cathedral io precisely the institution that the dominions should take under their wing is an arguable question, but the most matter-of-fact imagination should be stirred by the contemplation of the possibilities of the idea. Westminster Abbey, with all its associations, is not really the Cathedral of the Empire, and its place in the history of the country and in the affections of the people is definitely fixed for all time. But St Paul's might yet bo made what the Abbey can never be, the true religious centre, at least the Protestant religious centre, of the Empire.