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Hong Kong Builder
Well, we are prepared to raise immense sums of money to re-arm on an adequate scale; why should we be reluctant to allocate some of that money, or to raise some more, for the equally intelligent process of defending civilisation?
(2) They would disturb the serenity of the country- side.
They would, but not nearly so much as speculative building, aerodromes, and the extension of industry into rural areas. (Presently I will outline the possible form of such cities.)
(3) You will never get people to live in them.
They are not intended for people to live in: they are intended purely as well-organised funk-holes when it is impossible for people to live anywhere else, and where it may be possible to sustain life and to keep civilisation going when nearly the whole surface of the country is a shambles.
(4) We ought to concentrate on protecting what exists, instead of embarking upon such an experiment.
All right, the alternative is to put a concrete roof,
many feet thick, over the whole of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and a few other centres of population. The cost would be gigantic; as an engineering feat it would be spectacular; but it doesn't sound really practicable. That would really be the only adequate form of defence from bombs dropped over those areas.
Now what sort of a place would a shelter city be? I suggest that it would be built in a huge excavation. Take four square miles of land and sink a pit, so that the level of the ground was four or five hundred feet below the surface of the country. In this gigantic pit, the shelter city could be constructed. Skyscrapers have soared, in New York, above a thousand feet high. Although those skyscrapers are surrounded by the open air, they are centrally heated, air-conditioned, and often their rooms are hermetically sealed, with double windows, and, when darkness falls, they are artificially lighted. With our present building methods, with air-conditioning, central heating, and with artificial light, we could make underground cities which would at least be as pleasant to live in as a skyscraper, and would only deprive people
of daylight. There are a number of buildings which do that already. The interior of Broadcasting House in Portland Place is artificially lit, and air-conditioned, and daylight never strikes through to the studios and inner recesses of that most efficient piece of building. The city would have roads (but no fume-making traffic), escalators, lifts, water, light, heat, fresh air, a large supply of food, churches, recreation grounds, theatres, cinemas, hospitals, schools, its own power stations, its own artesian wells, and perhaps tunnel links with other shelter cities.
All this is very wild; it won't be done, of course; but the existence of half-a-dozen such cities in England would make us far more secure in the world to-day than an air fleet big enough to darken the sky. It would be the most vivid proof of our unaggressive determination to secure immunity from war; and it might well be a gesture of far-seeing commonsense which would save the world from the horrors which sadage and frightened people all over Europe are preparing. It would mean,