Another characteristic of this singular movement was its utter disregard of what we now call “town-planning.” When Ruskin advised his audience to treat railway-stations as “the miserable things that they are,”[2] because he disliked railways, he seems to have been voicing the spirit of his day, which was quite content to speculate on the symbolism of a piece of carving in a remote foreign city while men continued to build the most appalling slums. No town was “planned” in those days: it “just growed.” Occasionally a manufacturer like Sir Titus Salt coquetted with the idea of a rational lay-out for a town, but no scheme got very far until the idealist founders of Bournville and Port Sunlight inaugurated a new school of thought, proving effectually that good housing was not necessarily bad business. At the present time, when authorities on town-planning have long made it clear that orderly development is both desirable and practicable, the haphazard growth of suburbs into the country is a deplorable and even a painful sight to every intelligent person. English individualism, sometimes an asset, becomes almost a curse when it interferes, as it still does, with nearly everything that can be done to save the English countryside from complete uglification. Consideration of the possibilities of town-planning in this direction must be deferred to our last chapter; for the moment let us consider one or two characteristics of nineteenth-century town growth. Almost without exception, any man could buy a plot of land anywhere, and build on it anything he wanted. Tripe-dressing, sausage-skin making, and one or two other “noxious” trades might be prohibited in a few favoured localities; the obscure and often absurd law of “Ancient Lights” occasionally restrained his ardour. Otherwise, so long as his building was strong enough to remain standing, and provided with adequate means of drainage, he was as free as air. Building was essentially a commercial business; the rights or needs of the community did not enter into the question. Each man built for his day and generation: the future was left to take care of itself. Yet even from a financial point of view this was a short-sighted policy. When Wren’s plan for rebuilding London was upset by vested interests, a chance was lost of making wide streets that are now urgently necessary but cannot be formed except by payments of incredible sums for compensation. A more modern instance is to be seen in the Euston Road, which was a residential thoroughfare looking over fields when my grandfather knew it a century ago. Then shops came to be built over the front gardens as the old residents fled from the invading streets: and now these shops have to be swept away with heavy payments for compensation to allow the road to be converted into the great artery that any intelligent person could have foreseen when it was first built. This phenomenon is not peculiar to towns: it applies with equal force to the country