The growth of the conurbations, particularly London, has been accompanied by the growth of the suburbs. Of course, many of the older suburbs are now part of the conurbations. But the immediate pre-war and post-war building developments have established urban outposts in the serene green countryside. Today more than a million people travel into the city of London and six central metropolitan boroughs to work each morning and return to their homes each night. Another 240,000 come in from the surrounding areas to work in other parts of greater London. The advance of suburbia and conurbia has imposed upon vast sections of the United Kingdom a dreadful sameness. The traveler finds himself driving for hours through an endless urban landscape. First he encounters miles of suburban streets: television aerials, two-story houses whose differences are discernible only to their inhabitants, clusters of stores. Then a town center with its buses and bus center, the grimy railroad station, a cluster of civic buildings, a traffic jam, one or two seventeenth-century relics incongruous amid the jumble of Victorian and Edwardian buildings. Then more suburbs, other town centers, other traffic jams. Individuality is lost in the desert of asphalt and the jungles of lamp posts, flashing signs, and rumbling buses. On a wet winter day a journey through some of the poorer sections of the western Midlands conurbation is a shocking experience. As your car moves down street after street of drab brick houses, past dull, smelly pubs and duller shopwindows, occasionally coming upon hideous, lonely churches, you are oppressed. The air is heavy with smoke and the warring smells of industry. Poverty itself is depressing, but here it is not poverty of the pocket but poverty of the soul which shocks. Remorseless conformity and unrestrained commercialism have imposed this on the lively land of Shakespeare. Can great virtues or great vices spring from this smug, stifling environment? Yet bright spirits are bred. One remembers people met over the years: a sergeant from the Clyde quoting Blake one morning long ago at Arras; Welsh miners singing in the evenings. Out of this can come new Miltons, Newtons, and Blakes. A Nelson of the skies may be studying now at that crumbling school on the corner. In September 1945 I was riding in from London airport in a bus crowded with Quentin Reynolds (whose presence would crowd an empty Yankee Stadium) and returning soldiers and airmen of the British Army and the Royal Air Force. As we passed through the forlorn streets of Hammersmith, Quentin, brooding on the recent election, said: "These are the people who gave it to Mr. Churchill." A sergeant pilot behind us leaned forward. "That's all right, cock," he said, "they gave it to Mr. Hitler too."