BRICK AND STONE. 279 



Without paper and its haiulmaid the bamboo-cane, 

 where would be the innumerable pretty little col- 

 ored nothings that at small cost now make bright 

 innumerable homes with the quaint exotic decora- 

 tion of the Far East? 



But if the material which comes naturally to 

 the hands of the artisan has often had so great an 

 influence for good on the development of handi- 

 craft, it cannot be denied that it is frequently 

 answerable for much that is painfully ugly and in 

 every way to be deplored. London itself, above 

 all other English towns, affords us a most unfor- 

 tunate example of the bad results that necessarily 

 flow from a great city being confined to a cheap 

 and bad form of raw material. English architec- 

 ture has suffered terribly from the fact that Lon- 

 don stands in the very centre of a great stoneless 

 valley, surrounded by numerous patches of inferior 

 brick-earth. There is no good sound building- 

 stone to be had anywhere within Ctisy reach of 

 London or the lower Thames. The great city is 

 built for the most part on stiff London clay or on 

 loose glacial gravel, with here and there a single 

 suburb stretching away upward on to the soft and 

 friable Bagshot sands. The consequence is that 

 from the very first the only building-material that 

 could possibly be used for the common class of 

 London dwelling-houses was the very unsatisfac- 

 tory local brick-earth. True, in the Middle Ages 



