The proposed Society for the Preservation of Rural England will be launched at a meeting to be held here some time in the autumn. Mr. Neville Chamberlain is keenly interested in the scheme and it is hoped that he will help in giving it a send-off.
It is the outcome of Mr. Guy Dawber's presidential address to the Royal Institute of British architects last year, in which he spoke of the urgent need of combined efforts to arrest the growing destruction of the beauty of the English countryside. A conference was held later of representatives and of a large number of societies and a definite plan is now being prepared. The new organisation will co-ordinate the many bodies that exist to preserve beauty and to see that what is added to the face of the land is not unbeautiful.
There will be a central council in London to deal with matters of general importance and to organise opinion against threatened dangers to villages and the landscape. The Society will be concerned with such things as improving the layout and architecture or new suburbs and, what is even more urgent now, the protection of old villages from ruination by incongruous building and from the hideous accompaniments of the vast increase in motor traffic. If, for instance, the Society had been in existence now that the Sussex Downs near Eastbourne are threatened with a rash of bungalows, it would, if it had been impossible to prevent building altogether, have striven to get the layout and architecture of the new settlement placed in the hands of the most enlightened experts on town-planning and architecture.
Good Houses Not Costly.
The Society will try to impress upon local authorities the bread-and-butter argument that in allowing the destruction of the local character and beauty of the old towns and villages, they are killing the tourist that lays the golden egg.
Another important point is that beautiful building, contrary to the common belief, does not mean costly extravagance Ñ that houses built in good proportions and attractive material may cost little more than jerry-building.
It will probably be found necessary to press for powers to be given to the local authorities to exercise control over the elevations of new houses as well as over the ground plans. At present there is nothing to prevent anyone putting up a house which, while it conformed to all the regulations, is utterly out of harmony with its environment. Up to the present the Health Ministry has never granted such powers as part of town-planning schemes, perhaps because it is thought that public opinion is  not yet sufficiently advanced for such an interference with private rights. This is exactly where the new society will come in Ñ the organisation of public opinion on this and other points, so as to secure that something is done which will put a stop to the unregulated chaos of architecture in building schemes, whether small or great.
It is certain that there is a widespread alarm about the steady spoiling of rural England, and one hopes that this new movement will catch on and be effective. A good example of enlightened action by a local authority is the town-planning scheme which has just been prepared at Torquay, which aims at regulating the inevitable development of the heights round the town. The Town Council is seeking powers to control in a harmonious scheme the growth of the place over the hills behind the town Ñ in a word, to introduce order instead of the usual higgledy-piggledy growth.