The Author introduced the Paper with the aid of a series of lantern slides.Mr. H. J. Escreet said he was very interested in the Paper, because he dealt with gas in the City and West End area, which, he thought, was the district with which the Author was chiefly concerned, and he was fully aware of the difficulties due to congestion. He rather doubted, however, whether that area could be regarded as typical of what would have to be dealt with in the future. It should be remembered that the past 50 years had witnessed a tremendous development of all the utilities, and in thi early stages there had been competition, with three or four gas companies serving the City and West End area, and probably three or four electricity concerns also, so that there was an abnormal congestion of plant due to the overlapping of the various companies, all of which had laid their plant in the hope of supplying the district. Possibly that would account for the number of cables shown in Fig. 2, Plate 1, which certainly seemed to be far higher than would be required by the Author's ideal layout.With regard to the future, he hoped that, quite apart from the requirements of the utilities, the planning authorities would provide wider roads and wider footways. The present roads and footways were very narrow and basements projected out under the footways. A newly planned street should have wider footways and fewer obstructions ; then it would be possible to lay utility plant with much less difficulty than had been experienced in the past.He had always disliked detailed planning by the road authority as to where utility plant should be put. Pig. 6 looked very nice, and showed plenty of room for the one gas main, one water main, electricity cables, and G.P.O. cables ; but Pig. 7 showed that when the manholes had been introduced the plan did not look nearly so nice and there was much less room. He hoped that with planned development it would be possible to forecast the local requirements more accurately in the future ; but, even so, there were trunk routes which it was very difficult to foresee, and he thought that the utility undertakings should be a t liberty to choose the streets for those trunk routes. If a definite space were allocated to them, either there would have to be plenty of room for trunk routes in every street or the utility undertakings would be unable to put them in the streets they chose. I n order to avoid unnecessary expenditure the undertakings naturally chose the route which gave the most room and the least difficulty in laying.
