PRANK PICK

security, but also for easier traffic to such focal points as railway
stations. Haussmann was, however, not interested in housing, in
the slums that developed behind his new facades, nor did he extend
his appreciation of traffic to the railways themselves.

But this problem, too, could not in the long run be neglected
by the architect, once he accepted it as his job to design whole
estates and suburbs. These new estates of small houses in their own
gardens took a great deal of space. They were only possible right
outside the built-over areas of towns. So the question of well-

ioo. CHARLES HOLDBN: ARNOS GROVE STATION, OF THE LONDON UNDERGROUND, 1932.
organised road and rail traffic became imperative. This question
until then had been in the hands of the business man and again the
engineer. Both had shown themselves staggeringly obtuse to archi-
tectural values. Some of the best vistas of London were cut into by
railway bridges: the approach to St. Paul's, e.g., and the views down
the-Thames. Station buildings themselves, except for a few early
ones such as old Euston and King's Cross, and except for the be-
wildering splendour of Gilbert Scott's Early English St. Pancras
Station, were mean and untidy—at least in Britain. This unwilling-
ness to accept the care for decent design as a public duty still applied
quite universally to British big business and public services thirty
years ago. The first to set an example of what immense improve^
ments personal initiative can achieve was Frank Pick, to whom
London owes a transport system beautifully designed firomthe station
building down to the lighting standards and the litter baskets.
Frank Pick must be mentioned in a history of architecture as the
prototype of the 20th-century patron. A Medici, a, Louis XIV, are
impossible in an age such as ours* The new Maecenas is an admin-
istrator, a worker himself, with a house not much bigger than yours
213