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The growth of the conurbations, particularly London, has been accompanied by the growth of the suburbs. Of course, many of the older suburbs are now part of the conurbations. But the immediate pre-war and post-war building developments have established urban outposts in the serene green countryside.

Today more than a million people travel into the city of London and six central metropolitan boroughs to work each morning and return to their homes each night. Another 240,000 come in from the surrounding areas to work in other parts of greater London.

The advance of suburbia and conurbia has imposed upon vast sections of the United Kingdom a dreadful sameness. The traveler finds himself driving for hours through an endless urban landscape. First he encounters miles of suburban streets: television aerials, two-story houses whose differences are discernible only to their inhabitants, clusters of stores. Then a town center with its buses and bus center, the grimy railroad station, a cluster of civic buildings, a traffic jam, one or two seventeenth-century relics incongruous amid the jumble of Victorian and Edwardian buildings. Then more suburbs, other town centers, other traffic jams. Individuality is lost in the desert of asphalt and the jungles of lamp posts, flashing signs, and rumbling buses.