PRESERVATION OF OPEN SPACES. 103 
turned to those smaller open spaces which are invaluable in 
crowded towns — square gardens, church-yards, and fields and 
gardens in private ownership. Miss Octavia Hill commenced 
this branch of open space work by a vigorous effort to save 
from the builder some fields in the neighbourhood of the Swiss 
Cottage at Finchley. In 1881, Mr. Walter James, as a repre- 
sentative of the Society proposed the Metropolitan Open Spaces 
Act, 1881, and in 1884 Mr. John Hollond piloted through Par- 
liament an Act prohibiting building on disused burial grounds ; 
several other Acts to facilitate the preservation of such open 
spaces — out-door sitting-rooms, as Miss Octavia Hill has styled 
them — have since been passed. At the same time the Society, 
when necessary, has challenged the attempts of railway com- 
panies and other promoters of industrial undertakings to obtain 
special Parliamentary powers to appropriate commons, town 
gardens and other open spaces ; its efforts in this direction have 
been signally successful. 
We have now, however, reached the time when the Commons 
Preservation Society was to have fellows in its work. The 
Kyrle Society was founded at the suggestion of Miss Miranda 
Hill, with the general object of “ bringing beauty home to the 
poor.” Its work in the first instance ran in two channels; it 
busied itself in decorating rooms and halls used by the poorer 
classes, by the execution of frescoes and the gift or loan of 
pictures; and it organised a choir to perform good music in 
churches and other public places without expense to the hearers. 
In the spring of 1879 the Society determined to establish a 
Branch to aid the Commons Preservation Society in its battle for 
open spaces, and a paper on the subject was read to a meeting 
of the Kyrle Society by the present writer, on the 6th of March. 
The Open Spaces Committee of the Kyrle Society soon found 
a special held for its activities, in laying out gardens in London 
— disused burial grounds and similar spots — and in supplying 
seats and aiding local efforts in the improvement of such places. 
While mainly interesting itself in this branch of the work, it 
cordially supported the efforts of the Commons Preservation 
Society both in and out of Parliament, to resist the appropriation 
of open land ; and to this Committee belongs the honour of first 
calling attention to the threatened sale of Burnham Beeches, 
and of particularly energetic efforts to prevent the spoliation of 
the lake country by unnecessary railways. 
The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, the youngest 
of the Societies having for their express object the preservation 
of open spaces, was founded by the Earl of Meath, then Lord 
Brabazon, in October, 1882. Its avowed aim was “to provide 
breathing and resting places for the old and play-grounds for the 
young in the midst of densely populated localities, especially in 
the east and south of London ; ” and the justification for its exis- 
tence is stated to be that “ the work is of far too vital importance 
to be dealt with as a mere detail in any general scheme of 
