At the same time, the Royal Navy was developing the Leander, Arethusa, and later 6-inch cruiser families. An Arethusa does not look like a Leander with a quarter of the ship removed. Its proportions and arrangement read as a design conceived for its own smaller requirement. British designers therefore knew how to reduce cruiser size coherently. The cut-price County approach was a choice rather than an unavoidable technical limitation.
Notable Point · 6:48-7:43
Arethusa showed that a smaller cruiser could be coherent
The purpose-designed Arethusa class provides a British counterexample to simply cutting a quarter from an existing cruiser.