Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
There is one in Lime Street Station, Liverpool (you
need not glance at that upper window; you'd have a job to find poor
Terry Armfield's Trwyn Avenue now). It is the "Welsh Giantess" one. She
is dressed in a black steeple hat with a white hood underneath it, red
check shawl, striped petticoat, and has buckles on her shoes. She holds
the town in a three-quarter circle in her arms, with children at play on
the sands and super-Briggses and super-Laceys all spilling out in the
foreground. The mountains are indigo, the hotels pink, the sands chrome
yellow, and the name LLANYGLO sprawls across the sky as if the Trwyn
Light had dropped it there in passing, a letter at a time.... The
poster, of course, is a little grandiose: nobody cries stinking fish.
The Pier, for example, isn't there yet. But it is somewhere, in
somebody's desk-drawer, perhaps, or perhaps it has even got farther than
that. Perhaps the caissons are already on the way; certainly a group of
strangers has been busy on the shore any time this past twelve months.
And the Promenade isn't ex-_act_-ly like that yet. It has railings not
unlike those, but not yet that fine stretch of impregnable sea-wall. And
so with the hotels.... But all in good time. These things will all be
ready quite as soon as those posters have sunk into the perception of
the public. We mustn't have a completely equipped town standing empty
for a number of seasons while folk make up their minds whether they'll
come or not. We have the money, the men, powers under the new Act ample
as our hearts could wish, and the certainty of the coming reward.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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