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changed its name.’
    ‘Lord yes, years ago. Got much bigger since then. They say we’re the biggest of them all now, by a long way.’
    ‘I dare say,’ Queston said. ‘Thank you.’ He gave the old man fifty cents and moved back to the lift. The children were already jostling and chattering round him again.
    ‘Lovely view then, isn’t it, Bobbie? ’ said one of the nuns to a small boy. Queston smiled involuntarily at the voice; it bore a strong, crude Birmingham accent, somehow incongruous against the medieval black robe.
    ‘I don’t go much on it,’ the child said, with the same rising ugly inflexion. ‘It’s all right, like, but I’d rather have home.’
    ‘O yes, Mother,’ the children said.
    ‘Tisn’t like home.’ The lift dropped towards the street.
     
    ‘For two weeks, perhaps three,’ Queston said. ‘Only that I’d prefer it to a hotel. I’m in one at the moment, but they seem to cost a fortune nowadays.’
    ‘Ah. They would.’ The estate agent nodded obscurely. ‘Well, for two weeks we should be able to find you a furnished flat without much trouble. It’s when the time’s more than a month that difficulties start.’
    ‘I thought it would be the other way round. It always used to be.’
    ‘O no, not now. The London Plan, you see, that’s made the difference. You’d need London birth and residence qualifications if you were proposing to stay for long.’
    It was like a familiar chord ringing through the room. ‘That’s just for the new blocks of flats surely? ’ Queston said.
    ‘No indeed—anywhere. Furnished or unfurnished, houses or flats. Makes life very difficult for us, I can tell you. My partner, he’s an Irishman, it looks as if he’ll have to get out. Outside the Plan boundary, anyway. Luckily for me I was born in Camden Town—proper birth right now, being a Londoner. Strangers are beginning to have a hard time finding these short-term places. Still, I think we can get one for you. Chelsea district, did you say?’
    Queston said, with more decision than before: ‘Only for two weeks.’
     
    He learned more, in those two weeks, of the achievements of Arthur Mandrake’s Ministry of Planning. Its powers seemed undefined, but large. Public and press alike had clearly accepted it as a messianic deliverance from the chaos, in a crowded island, of sprawling houses and slow roads. Behind the Minister, he gathered, was the same nucleus of men which had made up the original Oxford Committee. But he did not try to go back to Oxford, to see Thorp-Gudgeon. He was not sure why. He bought a road map, and saw new unfamiliar patterns: the motorways sweeping unbroken round Oxford, parting and joining again, like a river enfolding an island. The railway was still marked, but no roads into the city at all.
    The same patterns lay now round the other towns which the Ministry had made into modern walled citadels: Cambridge, Durham, York, Gloucester, Bangor, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Aberdeen. And London seemed to be contracting too, into its old series of villages. He heard fewer foreign accents in the streets; few accents at all, except those of Londoners. The children from Birmingham had clearly been unusual. Yet there were plenty of guides near public buildings, in the same uniform and insignia as the old man he had met on the Piccadilly Tower. Were they for the Londoners themselves?
    Everywhere he saw Ministry of Planning posters, on hoardings and underground stations, all preaching the same theme. ‘Londoners, know your London ’—beneath a picture-map of the city. ‘London Belongs to You ’—with a sentimental portrait of a beaming family entering a great block of flats beside the dome of St Paul’s. And one poster in particular, cryptic and apparently purposeless, he saw more often than any: an enlarged aerial photograph of London, overprinted, in giant luminous red capitals, with the words:
    ‘Guard Thine Own.’
    He wondered that no one, no one at all, should see any sinister