Martin Luther King wasn’t the first person to have a significant dream (Big business is hijacking our radical past…, G2, 9 February). Nor the first to have it hijacked by commercial interests. The opening of the Puritan preacher John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, written during his years in prison for his dissenting religious views) is inscribed under his statue on the outside of the former Baptists’ headquarters in Southampton Row, near Holborn station in London: “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream.”
The building is now a boutique hotel. While it was being renovated the developers’ hoardings made proud play of Bunyan’s inspiration to conjure a dream of exclusive luxury.
Patricia Potts
London
