a chance of replanning London you can greatly improve on this idea. All green-grocers should be placed in Hornsey Lane (N.6), all butchers in Mile End (E.1), and all gentlemen's conveniences in Bloomsbury (W.C.).
Now I should like to give you a little practical advice on how to build an English town.
You must understand that an English town is a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners. You have to use century-old little practices and tricks.
1. First of all, never build a street straight. The English love privacy and do not want to see one end of the street from the other end. Make sudden curves in the street and build them S-shaped too; the letters L, T, V, Y, W and O are also becoming increasingly popular. It would be a fine tribute to the Greeks to build a few ? and ?- shaped streets; it would be an ingenious compliment to the Russians to favour the shape of Я, and I am sure the Chinese would be more than flattered to see some [chinese-character]-shaped thoroughfares.
2. Never build the houses of the same street in a straight line. The British have always been a freedom-loving race and the “freedom to build a muddle” is one of their most ancient civic rights.
3. Now there are further camouflage possibilities in the numbering of houses. Primitive continental races put even numbers on one side, odd numbers on the other, and you always know that small numbers start from the north or west. In England you have this system, too; but you may start numbering your houses at one end, go up to a certain number on the same side, then continue on the other side, going back in the opposite direction.
You may leave out some numbers if you are superstitious; and you may continue the numbering in a side- street; you may also give the same number to two or three houses.
But this is far from the end. Many people refuse to have numbers altogether, and they choose house names. It is very pleasant, for instance, to find a street with three hundred and fifty totally similar bungalows and look for “The Bungalow.” Or to arrive in a street where all the houses have a charming view of a hill and try to find “Hill View.” Or search for “Seven Oaks” and find a house with three apple-trees.
4. Give a different name to the street whenever it bends; but if the curve is so sharp that it really makes two different streets, you may keep the same name. On the other hand, if owing to neglect, a street has been built in a straight line it must be called by many different names (High Holborn, Notting Hill Gate, Oxford Street, Bayswater Road, Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park, and so on).
5. As some cute foreigners would be able to learn their way about even under such circumstances, some further precautions are necessary. Call streets by various names: street, road, place, mews, crescent, avenue, rise, lane, way, grove, park, gardens, alley, arch, path, walk, broadway, promenade, gate, terrace, vale, view, hill, etc. 3
Now two further possibilities arise:
(a) Gather all sorts of streets and squares of the same name in one neighbourhood: Belsize Park, Belsize Street, Belsize Road, Belsize Gardens, Belsize Green, Belsize Circus, Belsize Yard, Belsize Viaduct, Belsize Arcade, Belsize Heath, etc.
(b) Place a number of streets of
6. Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully. Place them too high or too low, in shadow and darkness, upside down and inside out, or, even better, lock them up in a safe place in your bank, otherwise they may give people some indication about the names of the streets.
7. In order to break down the foreigners' last vestige of resistance and shatter their morale, one further trick is advisable: introduce the system of squares — real squares, I mean — which run into fours streets like this:
With this simple device it is possible to build a street of which the two sides have different names.
P.S. — I have been told that my above-described theory is all wrong and is only due to my Central European conceit, because the English do not care for the opinions of foreigners. In every other country, it has been explained, people just build streets and towns following their own common sense. England is the only country where there is a Ministry of Town and Country Planning. That is the real reason for the muddle.
Civil Servant
There is a world of difference between the English Civil Servant and the continental.
On the Continent (speaking now of the Scandinavian countries), Civil Servants assume a certain military air. They consider themselves little generals; they use delaying tactics; they cannot withdraw armies, so they withdraw permissions; they thunder like cannons and their speech is like machine-gun fire; they cannot lose battles, they lose documents instead. They consider that the sole aim of human society is to give jobs to Civil Servants. A few wicked individuals, however (contemptible little groups of people who are not Civil Servants), conspire against them, come to them with various requests, complaints, problems, etc., with the sole purpose of making a nuisance of themselves. These people get the reception they deserve. They are kept waiting in cold and dirty ante-chambers (some of them clean these rooms occasionally, but there are hired commissionaires whose duty it is to re-dirty these rooms every morning); they have to stand, often at attention, whilst they are spoken to; they are always shouted at in a rude manner and their requests are turned down with malicious pleasure. Sometimes — this is a popular cat and mouse game — they are sent to another office on the fifth floor, from there they are directed to a third office in the basement, where they are told that they should not have come there at all and sent back to the original office. In that office they are thoroughly told off in acrimonious language and dispatched to the fifth floor once again, from there to the basement, and the procedure goes on endlessly until the poor fellow either gets tired of the whole business and gives up in despair or becomes a raving lunatic and goes to an asylum asking for admittance. If the latter case occurs, he is told in reception that he has come to the wrong place, he should go to the another office on the fifth floor, from which he is sent down to the basement, etc., etc., until he gives up being a lunatic.
(If you want to catch me out and ask who are then the people who fill the continental lunatic asylums, I can give you the explanation: they are all Civil Servants who know the ways and means of dealing with officials and succeed in getting in somehow.)
If a former continental Civil Servant thought that this martial behaviour would be accepted by the British public he would be badly mistaken. The English Civil Servant considers himself no soldier but a glorified businessman. He is smooth and courteous; he smiles in a superior way; he is agreeable and obliging.
If so — you may ask — how can he achieve the supreme object of his vast and noble organisation, namely, not
