Encase your legs in nylons, <br />Bestride your hills with pylons <br />O age without a soul; <br />Away with gentle willows <br />And all the elmy billows <br />That through your valleys roll. <br /> <br />Let's say goodbye to hedges <br />And roads with grassy edges <br />And winding country lanes; <br />Let all things travel faster <br />Where motor car is master <br />Till only Speed remains. <br /> <br />Destroy the ancient inn-signs <br />But strew the roads with tin signs <br />'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' <br />Command, instruction, warning, <br />Repetitive adorning <br />The rockeried roundabout; <br /> <br />For every raw obscenity <br />Must have its small 'amenity,' <br />Its patch of shaven green, <br />And hoardings look a wonder <br />In banks of floribunda <br />With floodlights in between. <br /> <br />Leave no old village standing <br />Which could provide a landing <br />For aeroplanes to roar, <br />But spare such cheap defacements <br />As huts with shattered casements <br />Unlived-in since the war. <br /> <br />Let no provincial High Street <br />Which might be your or my street <br />Look as it used to do, <br />But let the chain stores place here <br />Their miles of black glass facia <br />And traffic thunder through. <br /> <br />And if there is some scenery, <br />Some unpretentious greenery, <br />Surviving anywhere, <br />It does not need protecting <br />For soon we'll be erecting <br />A Power Station there. <br /> <br />When all our roads are lighted <br />By concrete monsters sited <br />Like gallows overhead, <br />Bathed in the yellow vomit <br />Each monster belches from it, <br />We'll know that we are dead.<br /><br />John Betjeman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/inexpensive-progress/
