AN OUTSIDE VIEW

POLICE sniffer dogs trained to spot terrorists at railway stations in Britain may no longer come into contact with Muslim passengers – after complaints that it is against the suspects’ religion. This should be exploited. Teams of dog handlers with unusually friendly dogs, eg Spaniels, Poodles and Corgis, could be posted in all railway stations. The dogs would be trained to wag their tails and approach people and lick them. Bins full of dog biscuits would be placed at the entrances to every platform, and passengers would have to feed the dogs by letting them take the biscuits out of their hands, and then pat them on the head, tickle them behind the ears and be licked. I think these dog-welcoming teams would be very popular with the British public.

The public are complaining about the near-total shutdown of Britain's railways over the holiday period. It is an inconvenience, but allows Network Rail to carry out major projects in one go which would otherwise take months and cost a lot more. It takes a lot of time to bring equipment to the site and clear up afterwards, so this makes sense. People would complain even more if the system was allowed to fall to pieces. Congratulations to the people who have given up their holiday period to do this essential work.

Consider a country with nine million inhabitants and a stable population ie it just replaces itself. Now imagine a million arrivals with a slowly growing population, say 1% a year. After 50 years there will be 1.6 million of the immigrant group. If the growth rate is 2% a year, the figure will be 2.6 million descendants; at a 3% rate, it will be over 4.2 million, the original number having doubled after 25 years. Descendants of immigrants will then make up one-third of the total population. People in charge of immigration policies need to be aware of this. Decisions made today will completely transform the society within half a century. What kind of a future to we want for our grandchildren?

The key flaw in the argument for Västlänken is that Göteborg C is a terminal and consequently dysfunctional. This needs to be looked at in proportion. Göteborg C occupies a larger area than London Waterloo, also a terminus. Waterloo has only four tracks running into it, and the line is in fact only four tracks all the way from Basingstoke, about 60 km away, carrying both long-distance and commuter services. The approach to the station, on a viaduct, cannot be widened as there are buildings on both sides. The length of the platforms, mostly 180 metres, means that trains have only 8 cars, and remember that these are only 20 metres long ie 8 x 20 metres. Yet the station successfully handles 96 million passengers a year. Göteborg C also has the advantage of six approach tracks. So any suggestion that Göteborg C, possibly with some enlargement, cannot handle all the traffic that is likely to use it with the next 50 years is ludicrous. At present there are only about 20 arriva...

A court ruling has stated that in future charity shops in Sweden must charge value added tax (MOMS at 25%) on all the goods they sell. In Britain, charity shops enjoy valuable property tax concessions with the result that in some shopping streets, there is almost nothing apart from charity shops. The case was brought by the tax authorities, using the argument is that it gives them an unfair trading advantage. These charity shops in Sweden already enjoy the services of a free workforce provided under a system of workfare. Now they claim there will be a wave of closures as a result of the ruling. This looks like a bad move; by any standards, MOMS is a disastrous tax. But look again. The tax privileges enjoyed by these charities has made it almost impossible to earn a livelihood selling second-hand clothes, books, household goods and furniture, a once-flourishing business sector dealing in items that were not of sufficient quality or age to be considered as antiques. The tax is not ...

EMMAUS purports to be a welfare organisation to help the needy. In reality it has been captured by anti-Semites and is headed up by a Moslem - hence this display in the window of one of its shops in Gothenburg. The problem is not the olive oil but the map in the background. Where is Israel? Since no Jews are allowed to live in the Palestine Authority area, it can be assumed that they would not be allowed to live in the one-state "Free Palestine" shown on the map, which includes the whole of the area from the Jordan to the sea. So where would the Jews go? Presumably there would be another six million slaughtered, though the Christians and Druze who live in Israel would go the same way shortly after. In the window is a list of companies who are supposed to be boycotted. The one I shall boycott will be Emmaus, and I would advise anyone opposed to genocide to do the same.

The speech by Israel's ambassador at the UN General Assembly is a cogent overview of modern Israeli history. November 24, 2014. I stand before the world as a proud representative of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. I stand tall before you knowing that truth and morality are on my side. And yet, I stand here knowing that today in this Assembly, truth will be turned on its head and morality cast aside. The fact of the matter is that when members of the international community speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a fog descends to cloud all logic and moral clarity. The result isn’t realpolitik, its surreal politik. The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month. How many resolutions did you pass last week...

Railways approach Göteborg from five different directions. Starting from the twelve o'clock position, these are Strömstad-Uddevalla, Trollhattan-Älvängen, Stockholm-Alingsås, Borås and Copenhagen-Kungsbacka. There is no route across the city which has a significantly greater traffic potential than any other, and the connect must necessarily be arbitrary. Whichever lines are joined by a cross-city link, most journeys through the city centre will inevitably require a change just as they do now. If services from the two lines from the north continue onto the one line from the south, the result will be that the southern line will be unnecessarily congested and the potential traffic will be insufficient for the service provided. Or half the trains will have to turn round and go back. A further drawback is that passengers travelling to and from the south to the city centre and northwards will actually experience longer journey times due to the detour they will now be making through havin...

The idea has taken hold that because English is amongst the world's best known languages, it is suitable for use for Masses celebrated for students in countries which are not English speaking. The students will indeed probably all know English. Their courses may even be taught in English. With the English language seemingly on the way to taking the place that Latin occupied as a universal language from Roman times until well into the nineteenth century, this seems like an attractive idea. There are, however, difficulties with this assumption. Latin as a formal language, and particularly ecclesiastical Latin, was largely settled by the sixth century. What people spoke as vernacular languages would have been the dialects of Latin that would eventually evolve into, amongst others, Spanish, Italian and French. English, by contrast, remains a living language. It is constantly changing. The 1970 translation has already been replaced with a new one, which is truer to the Latin, but in t...

The principal motivation for the suggested relaxation of rules made at the recent Synod of Bishops was that it would arrest the decline in numbers by making the church more welcoming to homosexuals and people living in irregular relationships. In my experience at parishes in the south of England, declines in attendance during the 1970s and 1980s happened suddenly when new parish priests took over. It happened within a matter of weeks of their arrival. In each case the mass exodus was precipitated by the introduction of the vernacular liturgy. At first, people would move to adjacent parishes where Latin and Gregorian chant was still in use, but as these in turn were hit, there were fewer and fewer places to flee to. The situation eventually arose where for many people, attendance at a Mass where the liturgy was not dreadful could mean a ninety minute journey in each direction on sparse public transport. The experience of a family I know is perhaps typical. Dino, now in his 70s, is o...

What struck me about the synod of bishops which has just closed was its irrelevance. The teaching of the Catholic Church on sexual matters is clear - no sex outside marriage. That is not anti-gay or anti-anybody. We all find it difficult to keep to the rules. That is what the confessional is for, and the end of the matter. The real concern should be that families are failing, and that is what the bishops ought to have been talking about. There all sorts of pressures on the family - war and instability, economic insecurity, poverty, migration, housing priced out of people's reach, etc. For example, in most developed countries in Europe, one person's wages are often not sufficient to pay for the accommodation for a family. Wages are often dependent on employment opportunities which can vanish overnight. My former parish priest used to complain about the lack of large families, but the price of a house large enough for a large family was well out of reach of most people in tha...

This version of Purcell's Indian Queen by Peter Sellers is an example of the pernicious trend to re-work old material to present a left-wing political message. In this case, it is the dreadfulness of the Spanish and Portuguese occupation of America in the sixteenth century. Now, if we apply contemporary standards of what constitutes bad behaviour, it was indeed dreadful. The mistake is to do that. By their lights, they were mostly doing what they thought was right. People in the future will come back and judge us in a similar way for doing dreadful things that, judged by contemporary standards, we consider are right and good. Evil acts are normally justified by some argument or other to make us imagine that we are doing nothing wrong. The problem is that all this detracts from the work itself, which has the singers in contemporary military uniforms and is accompanied by sound effects of contemporary military actions, with the noise of bombs going off in the background. That is, ...

Decent Muslims are only just waking up to the unpleasantness of their religion, so they think it has been hijacked . Every Muslim is associated with the actions of its extremists, first of all because the mud sticks, but secondly, those extremists are modelling themselves on the words of the Koran and the actions of Mohammed, which all Muslims venerate. They are not getting their ideas from anywhere other than those sources. We do not get Zoroastrian terrorists or Methodist terrorists. If good Muslims do not distance themselves from the Koran and Mohammed, then they are in a position of moral ambiguity. The only honest thing to do is to cut themselves loose from it. That is obviously not going to be an easy thing for them to do as it will also involve cutting themselves away from family and community ties. One might hope that others in the family and community will follow the trailblazers.

EU environmental regulations have killed the last surviving ferry service. This will lead to around 100,000 extra annual air journeys.

Base from Google maps  Here is an even less ambitious and expensive way of achieving most of the benefits of Västlänken, the principal aim of which is to improve access to the west side of the city centre. A circular route in both directions, it incorporates some existing tram route, part of a section currently under construction, and about 3km of new route, all on the surface. The most expensive piece of civil engineering would involve replacing or supplementing the bridge over the canal at Skeppbron. With just two additional stops, one outside the Opera House and the other where it crosses Avenyn, close to Heden, it would give a fast route from Järntorget and Haga to the Central Station. Test the demand first One of the advantages of this proposal is that the travel demand could be tested at minimal cost, and satisfied without having to wait until 2028, by the simple expedient of running a bus service on the route, initially at rush hours only. In fact, one has to ask why this ha...

Base from Google maps The vote against the Göteborg congestion charge was probably motivated as much by opposition to Västlänken as to the congestion charge itself. This is a hugely expensive project to dig a tunnel in a loop around the city centre, in the some of the most difficult geological conditions imaginable - waterlogged clay alternating with granite. It will take about twelve years to build, result in claims for damage to buildings, involve the destruction of large numbers of mature trees in the city centre and cause immense disruption during the construction period, with huge excavations and massive volumes of spoil to be carted away. It is estimated that it will take sixty years to recover the energy that will be expended in the construction. There is no justification for it on transport grounds. There are five lines converging on the city, from(locally, clockwise) Uddevalla, Älvängen, Alingsås, Borås and Kungsbacka, four of these being the local sections of the main lines t...

My comments in the Guardian's Comment is Free section, under the name Nazarene1563, are being pre-moderated ie censored. Here is why. Q: When I post a comment, it says that my comments are being pre-moderated – what does that mean? Does that apply to everyone in the conversation?   A: There is a further exception to the overall reactive-moderation approach adopted by the Guardian website: in isolated situations, a particular user may be identified as a risk, based on a pattern of behaviour (e.g. spam, trolling, repeated/frequent borderline abuse), so a temporary filter can be applied to anything they post, which means that their comments will need to be pre-moderated before appearing on the site. This is a temporary measure applied by moderators to a very small handful of people based entirely on patterns of actual behaviour, and should result relatively quickly in either their posting ability being suspended completely if no improvement is shown, or the filter being removed...

Paedophilia has been in the news for about the past ten years. First it was the Catholic clergy, who were alleged to be paedophiles to a man, when in fact it turned out that 98% of them had not been involved in paedophilia. There were some places where the incidence was higher, and the cover-ups by the hierarchy were reprehensible, but on the whole this was not a major issue. Then we have had scandals in care homes, and last year there was the case of Jimmy Saville case, and other well-known and popular entertainers. But the really big scandals are only just emerging - those of predatory gangs of Muslim men. This is a widespread problem across Europe. If the authorities do not deal with it, then people will take matters into their own hands.

Why is so much of the strict end of Islam so ugly? Arabic script can be beautiful but the lettering on the ISIS flag looks as if it was done by someone sticking their finger in a bottle of ink. Then there is that rough white circle. Don't they have compasses to draw a proper circle? This is the sort of "artwork" that would be expected from Orcs. This is part of a wider picture. Beyond abstract patterning, Islam has produced little in the way of art. Its architecture has been formulaic and has not evolved qualitatively in a millennium. What is there in Islamic architecture comparable to the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic and the classical revival of the Renaissance? The Islamic world has produced no music comparable either to that of Renaissance composers, or the nineteenth century symphonists. Where is the Islamic equivalent of a Palestrina or a Mozart? Who were the Islamic world's Albertis, Michaelangelos, Berninis, Rembrandts and Vermeers? Nor has the ...

The report was that children playing on the beach were shelled by an Israeli vessel and killed. What really happened? If you do a search on the incident, you will find conflicting reports. One account says that the boys were playing football, another that they were collecting scraps of metal. The photograph of the alleged site of the incident shows a beach but not the kind of beach where people would relax in deckchairs and play games. There was a container which was reportedly targetted by the Israeli gunners, and there seem to be various other bits of industrial debris lying around. There was a report that the Israelis would carry out an investigation but no report of the results of an investigation seems to turn up if you search for it. The worst is indeed possible: that the boys were shot and killed for fun. Other possibilities are that they were in front of the actual target and the shells fell short - which happens constantly when firing from a vessel at sea. What else was on...

Life at the receiving end of the Hamas firework show... Just to let you know......= the hamas broke the sease fire for the 7 time- just 1 Hour ago, and fire rockets at israely cities...!!!!!!!!! what would you do if it was on your home ????? at your family ??? for 14 years ????? no time to take a shower..(15 seconds to hit) , cant go to schol, cant sleep at night? can live regulary...??? and above all they are bilding yunnels to get inside people houses and kill children' and kidnapped some more....? what wold you do??? help humanity stop terror....!!!! ( 24:00 NOW, CANT SLEEP..!)

The Palestinian owners of the land are mostly long dead, so any possible rights would belong to their heirs, who will be the children or grandchildren. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Israel were to evacuate the entire country. The putative rights of the successors to the original owners would have to be established. Documents would have to be provided, which would include not only land titles, but papers relating to the intended disposal of the estates of the deceased, all properly dated, witnessed and signed. Disputes over claims would take decades for the courts to deal with. Some people would resort to extra-legal means to make their claims. It should also be remembered that large areas of agricultural land were owned by absentee landlords who rack-rented their tenants. Their successors would also lose no time in asserting their claims; thus the majority of the descendants of those who departed in 1947 would end up as impoverished tenant peasants scratching a bare livelih...

A Jewish state west of the Jordan was part of the deal for helping to get rid of the Ottomans. The Arabs got Transjordan as part of the same deal. Nobody would have been forced to move. Arabs who did not move but stayed in Israel have a better life than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, with democratic rights limited only because of their potential as a security threat, so we are not talking about some evil, oppressive alien regime. Whether there ever would be enough Jews to constitute a Jewish state was in doubt until the rise of the Nazis. The Balfour Declaration was only part of the picture. The British did not give away the same land to two different people.

An Israeli perspective on the action in Gaza "I appreciate how it might have been better from a public perspective point-of-view to have waited, although I have my doubts. It seems no matter how clear-cut the case, no matter how Israel tries to act ethically, no matter that other areas in the region and the world have far more deaths and the like, the world condemns Israel and spends an inordinate amount of time on it. "Be it because of oil, Jew-hatred, anti-this or that, it just seems to be the case. In any event, we could not wait. The people in the South had been living with missile fire for years, as I am sure you know. It kept increasing and increasing. People demand that their government protect them. Otherwise, they will lose hope and abandon the area. Then, once the tunnels were discovered, we had to act. "The government and the people have a social contract: we will live there, build it up, but the government must take action to protect us. For years peopl...

In all the discussion about the business in Gaza, it is almost never pointed out that this dispute has a very long tail. You can call it karma. Israel has not always fought as clean as Zionists would have us believe, but when Zionism was little more than an idealistic fantasy, there were attacks by Muslim Arabs on the handful of Jews in the area that became Palestine after WW1. These include anti Jewish riots in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924, 1929, 1933 and 1936. At that time Zionism had no traction at all amongst the majority of Jews - it was considered a cranky minority interest, so the Arabs had no reason to fear a mass immigration of Jews. This did not occur until after the Holocaust, when Jews moved into Israel for lack of any other options. Most Jews in Israel are descendants of refugees. When most of these people arrived, it was a place where nobody in their right mind would go if they had any better options. It is not generally realised that the Palestinian leader...

The new Christian symbol, courtesy of ISIS. It is the Arabic letter "N" for Nazarene. It has been painted on the doors of Christian houses in areas they have occupied. Christians are being given the options "pay", "convert" or "be killed". So far the Christians have been leaving quietly but I don't think this passivity will continue for much longer. Then the Jihadi thugs will get a nasty shock.

This comment appeared as a response in the Guardian's Comment is Free section. It puts the thing into perspective. Much has been written about the citizens of Sderot who were captured on camera "celebrating" the shelling of Gaza by the IDF forces from the hillside. It was inevitable that these images would be picked like ripe fruit by the media of all kinds and used to villify Israel, as if it could be more vilified and demonized that it is already. However, for some reason there are many who have found the need, Comment is Free posters included, to embellish their descriptions of this event to include descriptions of barbeques and discos, and even referring the the Sderot residents as "settlers" although Sderot is located well within the 1967 borders. I suppose that there are enough people out there who consider the entire State of Israel to be a settlement. So much righteous indignation. Compare Sderot and nearby villages and towns to a C...

Soaring land costs add 25% to HS2 bill. Article in Property Week

What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist. The quip seems to be used as a means of putting down people who prefer traditional liturgy, but it raises an important question. What is a liturgist? Who are liturgists? I would suggest that those who favour a vernacular Mass with hymns drawn from the Protestant repertoire are no less deserving of the term than those who would rather attend Mass in Latin with Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. In one way or another, every one has preferences. That feelings often run so strongly in either direction only confirms the truth of the quip. It was not always so. The liturgy was a given, and one just got on with reading what was in the books using the music that went with the texts. There was not much to discuss or argue about and preferences did not come into it. In this respect, going to Mass was much like travelling by public transport. You took it as it came, and you knew exactly...

Yet again the Israelis are the baddies. It is easy to condemn from the security of Sevenoaks. However, if rockets were regularly fired in their direction, the residents of Sevenoaks would quickly demand that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. That said, there still enough Israelis who would be happy to see a deal done, if they were convinced that it would stick. If the Israelis were confident that the deal would hold, there is no reason why the militarily indefensible 1948 Armistice border would not be acceptable. And there's the rub. The trouble is that the Palestinians have mishandled the situation since 1947. The state of Israel was declared on the basis of the 1947 UN award, which was territory that had mostly been purchased from landowners. It was then attacked by five of the neighbouring countries and when the armistice was agreed, that settled the border until 1967, with Jerusalem divided and no access by Jews to the traditional holy sites. In the meantime, the Gaza strip was occupi...

People have stolen WHOLE CONTINENTS from the previous inhabitants, but the Jews try to get their country back out of necessity, because of 2000 years of persecution, and then they get demonised when they are terrorised by their neighbours and don't take it quietly on the chin.

Reports are that Chancellor George Osborne is pushing a proposal for a high speed line, "HS3", between Manchester and Leeds. This is conclusive proof that the man is clueless. This is a typical politician's response. There is no advantage in running faster than 100 mph between destinations less than 50 miles apart. There are no further useful time savings to be made. Frequent trains and good local connections are needed. That means a programme of platform-lengthening, junction improvements, and possibly, new routes, but high speed does not come into this. Loading-gauge enhancements to take double-deck trains would be nice to have but the trouble is that the routes on which they could operate would be badly restricted. Equally important in this context is the need to improve local connections through the development of bus and light rail services, as well as park-and-ride facilities.

EXTRA BITTER LIGHT ALE A classic English pale ale with a heavy hop content. Quantities are for 10 litres thus this has 2.5 times the normal hops. If you have brewed beer before these instructions give you enough information to give you a drinkable beer at the first attempt. If not, then research the subject more deeply if you do not want to be disappointed. If you want an even more bitter flavour then you might replace hops (A) with a high-alpha type such as Galaxy.          1500 g    crushed malt grain   200 g    crystal malt grain     50 g    hops (Goldings A)     25 g    hops (Goldings B)     10 g    hops (Goldings C)     10 g    hops (Goldings D)       5 g    hops (Goldings E) 2 tsp gypsum Copper finings (Irish moss) PREPARE YEAST STARTER Mix yeast with dilute...

Govia's award of the Thameslink franchise and the introduction of a new fleet of rolling stock will not solve the problems that have affected this service since it was introduced in 1988. Thameslink reinstated a service which had last run in 1916. British Rail had been reluctant to re-open the route, arguing that there was no demand. When, in 1986, Chris Green took over what was then the London and South East Sector and re-christened it Network South East, he pursued the re-opening of the route. The trains were packed from day one, showing that it satisfied a long-standing suppressed demand. However, it has always been a problematic route.The difficulties are inherent in running a long distance service through the middle of London. It is consequently vulnerable to disruptions on both of the main lines over which it runs ie a points failure at Haywards Heath will cause delays in the Bedford area a couple of hours later. A further difficulty is that the rolling stock has to be d...

I watch with some dismay the hostile attitudes that are hardening in the relationship between Russia and the EU and USA. What is being ignored here is that there are genuine issues which ought to be conceded. The borders following the break-up of the Soviet Union do not correspond to linguistic and national borders. Adjustments and exchanges of territory (this goes in both directions), subject to referendum, could reduce dissatisfactions. There is also a better need for economic development and collaboration. The Russian populations in the Baltic countries seem to have missed out quite badly. The EU could play a role here, in particular in relation to parts of Latvia and the Russian enclave which was formerly East Prussia, with joint infrastructure projects and other investments. The economic dependencies are closer than is generally appreciated. For example, coal from the eastern Ukraine goes by train to Riga where it is shipped to.... Tilbury. Carrot as well as stic...

"Train bosses have come under fire for not prosecuting a wealthy hedge fund manager who was described as the “biggest fare dodger in railway history”, evading more than £42,000 in train tickets. The City executive is believed to have dodged the fare for the 82-minute commute between the Sussex village of Stonegate and central London for five years. He exploited a flaw that allowed him to go through barriers at Cannon Street station in London by “tapping out” with an Oyster travelcard. After finally being caught by a ticket inspector, the executive was able to pay £42,550 in dodged fares and £450 in legal costs within three days of being asked to pay up as part of an out-of-court settlement. " Daily Telegraph article One has to admire the guy's ingenuity. One also has to question the competence of the people who set up the system, for not spotting the flaw. Perhaps they should employ him as a consultant to check the security of their systems in future.

One of the hidden costs of Scottish independence has never even been mentioned yet - haggis-proof fencing along the border. The vicious little beasts are both excellent climbers and burrowers. They can dig down a metre deep, which means that hundreds of miles of expensive fencing will have to be erected along the border. All vehicles will have to be carefully checked at crossing points to make sure that none of them escape, or are smuggled into England.

Following a "yes" vote, the Loch Ness monster will awake from his slumber, opening a fiery fissure from Fort William to Inverness. A vast subterranean magma chamber will spew forth its contents and create a molten lava field which will eventually bury the whole of Great Britain in a layer six metres thick. Clouds of poison gas will spread all round the globe. A decade of summerless years will cause mass starvation and will be followed by an ice age which will go on for 100,000 years.

Expectations of an imminent start on a new north-south rail line across London have been damped, with the former chief executive of Network Rail warning that no work on “Crossrail 2” will happen in the next decade. (FT article) The route, on a south-west to north-east axis from Chelsea to Hackney, was first proposed as a tube line in 1901 and has popped up regularly ever since. Now Crossrail was also originally intended to relieve the congested Central Line and the northern part of the Circle Line. This could have been satisfied by building another tube line on roughly the present alignment from Paddington to Stratford. In an easterly direction, it might have continued to, perhaps, Woolwich, and at the westerly end, it might have run to Hammersmith, and possibly, eventually, Heathrow. The London tube uses small 3.5 metre diameter tunnels and electrification by conductor rail. Crossrail, by contrast, is a full-sized railway with overhead electrification, requiring 6 metre tunnels. Th...

The Government should examine the option of the maximum speed being reduced from 225 mph to 185 mph to cut carbon emissions, says the House of Commons Environmental Audit Select Committee. The report calls for full environmental surveys along the length of the route and ringfencing of cash to preserve habitats. Guardian article.

Google maps Carlanda Hospital plans to build 7,000 square metres of additional space , to enable it to expand its services, and also to provide accommodation suitable for modern medical technology. Unfortunately, it is not a good scheme and will practically destroy a valuable local amenity. A better solution is needed. Existing building and park The present hospital is a building of distinction and historic interest in an attractive landscape setting with mature trees. The park and building are important both for the immediate neighbourhood and in the wider context of the city. The hospital building itself, with its distinctive outline, is a conspicuous landmark visible from a distance, for example when travelling northwards from Mölndal. The park and hospital provides a fitting climax to the formal classical red-brick buildings on the two sides of Eklandagatan, with the group of trees at the north end of the park being visible from Korsvägen. The park is both...