Published in Chiang Mai CityLife Magazine – December 2003

CHIANGMAI, Thailand – 14 October 2003

Inexpensive Progress
by Sir John Betjeman
(28 Aug 1906 – 19 May 1984), UK Poet Laureate

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.

Let’s say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor car is master
Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
‘Keep Left,’ ‘M4,’ ‘Keep Out!’
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small ‘amenity,’
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we’ll be erecting
A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted
By concrete monsters sited
Like gallows overhead,
Bathed in the yellow vomit
Each monster belches from it,
We’ll know that we are dead.

Sir John was a mischievous rebel, loved by environmentalists for his constant haranguing of authority and their unconsidered modernisation, hated by the establishment, yet revered as one of the greatest poets and social commentators in twentieth century England.  It has been said that no-one who encounters his work is left untouched by it, that the reader is never left in the middle of either loving or despising what he had to say and how he said it.

Friends often commented that he was a soul left yearning for an England that began to vanish after World War One, an England unpolluted by foreign influenced development, where everyone had a place in the social order, and knew where it was.  He repeatedly criticised replacement of “traditional” architecture with “modern” design and fought vigorously for conservation of heritage and the historical.

Inexpensive Progress became one of his most famous statements in support of his passions.  Written in the 1960s, during Britain’s post-war reconstruction, after years of rationing and austerity, the poem became a required text for high school “graduation” in the Cambridge series of GCE exams during the mid-1970s.  In a BBC documentary commemorating his life, it was stated that from that study requirement the environmentalist and conservationist movements of the 1980s and 90s evolved.  The activists, thirty-somethings educated in the 1970s, remembered with fondness Sir John’s words, and many (like myself) claim this poem is the only one they can still recite from their school days.

For me, it has always been a measure against which to gauge the actions of contemporary city and countryside planners.  I admit it has influenced many of my views concerning what is and is not acceptable in the moulding of our planet for our descendants.  Should we enjoy today what will be absent in the future, and then try to reminisce with our grandchildren those treasures, which we ourselves destroyed?

Such considerations, in part, contributed to my “campaigning” on behalf of Wieng Kum Kam, and the Lan Na tourism industry generally, during the last few years.  Today, a year after my book about the medieval city was first published, I look back with warmth at the growth in interest in that city.  Yet, also with some sadness that it and other contemporary sites remain underused in promoting the region.

In marketing Wieng Kum Kam – Atlantis of Lan Na more copies have been sold outside Thailand than have been sold inside the Kingdom.  Here, bookstore owners place it amongst guidebooks such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guide.  Internationally it is marketed as historical reference, or archaeology, or as an archaeological guidebook.  That latter category alone has accounted for more than a quarter of all sales, and almost every buyer has contacted me about their copy; they want more information – about the site, the region, the period, and how to plan a holiday to experience the sights for themselves.

Invariably, they ask if Lan Na is the tropical idyll stereotyped in movies and travel brochures, and what to expect when they get here.

I tell them the truth – that the people, the food, the culture made me want to stay and will make them want to return, and that once experienced Lan Na is never forgotten.  I remind them that we have no beaches or islands in the north.  They say they prefer to learn and experience the architecture, culture, history, and personality of the places they visit.

In response to a particular group of questions, I practice what I preach, and to help Lan Na’s tourism statistics advise that Lan Na can be inexpensive, and is making progress.