Is London Too Large?

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 41, 11 May 1927, Page 10

Is London Too Large?

Great City's Growing Pains According to the last census, the population of London is just under 7.500,000, who live upon an area of 443,424 acres. It is, of course, by far the largest city in the world, though New York, with its 6,000,000, is rapidly approaching it. London is also the most densely populated of the great cities of the West, for it has 10,800 people to the square mile. The last census showed that all the large English cities were growing very fast. In ten years Birmingham had added 79,000 to its population, Liverpool 50,000, Sheffield 30,000. Big cities are magnets drawing people from the country, and an unpleasant fact disclosed by the census of 1921 was that there were 97,000 fewer workers on the land than in 1911, and that lin the past forty years the area under wheat had fallen by 1,800,000 acres.

These things are bad. but there are others worse. A traffic expert says that if London grows much larger it will be flatly impossible for its people to get to and from their businesses. Already the time consumed in getting to and from work averages an hour and a-quarter for each worker. An hour which is worse than wasted, for in many cases it means running and fighting to get into tram, train, or bus, and then standing during the whole journey. Another expert says that within the next ten years motor traffic will be beyond the capacity of the streets to carrjs. There are only two alternatives. One is to pull down London and rebuild it with streets two to three times as wide as at present; the other to legislate against fresh inhabitants. And both seem equally impossible. These things may serve to show Auckland’s civic authorities that they naed look far ahead..