from the historical associations which are indissolubly connected with
it, cannot but regard with pain and abhorrence any cause which tends
towards the demolition or destruction of the monuments of the past. To
these it is a significant and distressing fact that hardly any modern
English buildings or streets possess the qualities which give the
value and charm to the old cities, towns, and villages of which we are
the grateful inheritors. If any reader is inclined to doubt the truth
of this statement, or to consider the sentiment expressed extravagant
or groundless, let him consider the difference between the old towns
and the new.

Evesham provides a typical and sufficiently striking instance of the
contrasted methods and results. Here there is hardly an old house
which has not a local and individual character. Many of them may be
plain, severely plain, some possibly ugly; but in each can be read by
all who will, a distinct and separate thought, or series of thoughts,
connecting the dwelling with its builders and owners, and with the
soil out of which it has sprung.

As the varying undulations of the face of the country tell a plain
tale to the geologist, so the shape and materials of human habitations
tell their story to the student of architecture and the history of
man.

The poet Wordsworth pointed out that one of the great charms of the
Lake country lay in the way in which the dwellings sprang out of the
hill side, as if a natural growth born of the requirements of the
peasant or farmer and the materials provided by nature. Throughout
England this was once the case; no two houses were precisely alike
because no two people had precisely the same ideas, wishes and
requirements; and the material was dictated by the stone or timber
provided by the district. Every building was in old times the
combined expression of the individual man and the _genius loci_.

The timber cottages which are still to be found in the town tell of
the time when tracts of the original forest still lingered, and oak
was the cheapest material fit for building. Often the foundation of
the walls is of stone, and the earliest stone to be used was that
which could be had for the digging, the blue lias found in thin layers
embedded in the clay of which the vale is composed. In the back
streets which retain, as would be expected, more of their primitive
character than the more respectable thoroughfares, this blue stone has
been much used, and i