The Windsor Castle of 1850 almost one and three quarters of a century later in April 2020. The former public house on Harrow Road, Maida Vale, London, was a significant rock venue in the 1960s and 1970s, with early performances from The Rolling Stones, The Who and U2 (Iron Maiden were banned from the venue after an argument with the management). The building is a designated heritage asset but that does not seem to have saved anything but the façade. There was even an application to demolish but at least that was rejected in 2011. The rock band The 101ers may have taken their name from an address nearby 101 Walterton Road, a Victorian house demolished in the 1970s and superior to its inferior replacement.
As if it was not bad enough that fine old architecture is destroyed, it adds insult to injury to list such monstrosities as the Hallfield Estate in Bayswater and the Trellick Tower in North Kensington, the Soviet tower slums. These buildings look better the darker it is and the further away they are seen.
Even some modern or contemporary churches, like Our Lady of Lourdes and Saint Vincent de Paul on Harrow Road, Maida Hill, are so hideously ugly that they are best described as sacrilege. It looks more like an immigration detention centre than a church (incidentally most churchgoers seem to be migrants nowadays). No wonder numbers of churchgoers have been declining as the aesthetic quality of religious buildings has deteriorated from heavenly highs of beauty to the lows of infernal ugliness. Some of these devils of buildings are so diabolically ugly that the only salvation is to pull them down to the depths of hell. Maybe the idea is to prepare the sinful for their final descent to hell so that they should not be too shocked at least aesthetically. Or is the Harrow Road area thought to be such a God-forsaken dump to merit such ugliness? Maybe a conservation area should be set up from the heights of Trellick to the lows of Harrow Road to preserve this ugliest of British and global architecture?
Hounslow may not have been the most elegant quartier of London, but the gabled Victorian terraces of Lampton Road with spacious front gardens were a beautiful street until a vulgar developer pulled them down over a decade ago with permission from the local planning authorities. The spacious leafy street has been overcrowded by a Travelodge that looks as cheap as one would expect and spacious front gardens have been replaced by a hard concrete front wall, the face of the hard nosed developer profiteers, trespassing right up to the street, right up the street of the unsophisticated philistine tasteless developer block head flat face [br]ick head! Similarly the elegant brick station at Hounslow East was replaced by some cheap box that looks as if it was made of plastic or aluminium or cheap inflammatory cladding (the only way to make it look good would be to set it on fire in the darkness of the night when the station is closed and that should be done only by those responsible for building it).
The Hounslow Hussar (public house) has been pushed off his galant horse with his face flattened on the ground and the horse slaughtered and sold for meat to the profit of the block head developer while the Hounslow Cavalry Barracks are crumbling due to government neglect and vandalism. Although the once fine Edwardian terraces of Bulstrode Avenue have not been bulldozed they are now neglected and spoilt in almost every other way conceivable, whipped into misshape.
North Kensington in June 2020
Even worse, many fine old church buildings have been neglected or even demolished in the UK and other European countries – like the recent demolition of the fine historic 19th century Neo-Byzantine Saint-Joseph Chapel in Lille, France – République laïque, diabolique et laide.
As Sir Dirk Bogarde lamented in an interview in 1986 about his home in Provence, "[t]he view has changed. Alas, yes - not topographically because you cannot at least alter the mountains and they cannot destroy the pattern of the skyline. When I came here I could not see anything... now... the industrial town... They shoved the peasants into blocks of flats. It is so wicked and cruel. Ladies jump off the roof out of sheer despair... They are selling up because they cannot work the land... It is easier to be in the checkout at Monoprix. The hours are not so long and the pay is better and so they sell off their plots of land to rich German industrialists or the Dutch or Americans or English people... So we got a rash now for Disneyland... villas ... wire fences... When I came it was all green fields here... of jasmin... of Rose de Mai..."
The local authorities idea of respect and maintenance at Kensal Green Cemetery although even this bin is arguably less tacky and tasteless as some of the new plastic-looking graves
Also, other fine religious buildings such as vicarages seem to be neglected while in the possession of the church even. When selling such a property the diocese seems to be concerned about clawing back any profit the purchaser might benefit from up to decades ahead and prohibit any use offensive to the church, but the diocese seems to have absolutely no interest whatsoever in preserving the fine architecture, happily boarding it up and auctioning off in the end. The Devil is well represented in diocese administration. The church nowadays condemns much religious fine architecture to hell, the modern inquisition. On the other hand, in many Spanish towns the nearly only decent building left is the church.
Trellick Tower, the world's maybe ugliest listed building, the sky would be so much more beautiful without this skyscraper, pictured is only the less ugly side of it. Inside it even smells like a Soviet slum block, hardly surprising that the Bond villain Goldfinger was named after its architect. If only Trellick could be reduced to a small relic...! An "emperor's new building" or rather a president's new building! Not only was a superior elegant Victorian terrace lost for this grotesque monstrosity of an eyesore but the well-established communities were also evicted in totalitarian authoritarian soviet style. It even interferes with natural wind!
While the Trellick Tower remains the persistent offender of the eye, the elegant Victorian public house on Tavistock Crescent nearby in Westbourne Park was demolished in 2011. This building featured in the 1987 cult film Withnail and I as the fictional pub The Mother Black Cap. It has been suggested that it would be ‘nice’ to commemorate the demolished building with a plaque on the usual contemporary block of flats on the site now. Hopefully, the plaque will name the developer and architect and mention that they did not even know of the cultural significance of the building until after demolition. Maybe the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (or the Republican Dump of Con-sin-ton and Shell... ) planning authorities deserve a special mention on the plaque also on this wall of fame to celebrate how contemporary developers, architects and planning authorities pull together and down to preserve culturally and cinematically interesting places. The people behind this demolition should have their names on the plaque prominently to take their rightful place in preserving architectural heritage. The colour of the new building is white maybe for innocence, or ignorance, or to celebrate the rich, thick and unhealthy crème de la crème or les crétins des crétins of British property developers sensitive to heritage. Why waste profits on preserving a fine old Victorian building when a cheap plaque is so much more profitable!
The Falcon, Public House in Queen's Park, London, in July 2019, bought by Brent Council to demolish apparently. One can see what is left of a fine stained-glass door upstairs still, looks like a little vandal has had a go at it before the big vandals. Local planners seem to lack the imagination to include this fine architecture in their future plans. Yet The Falcon is virtually the only building of architectural merit on site, trust the perverse and irrational planners to pick it for demolition, almost everything else being of minimal merit, including a sacrilegiously ugly modern church and boxes of flats which even the newest one will be built of so poor quality, feebly erected (the usual fraudulent profiteering) that it will be crumbling within a few years and might as well be pulled down already.
Interiors of fine old buildings seem to be particularly vulnerable to being spoilt with fine original features stripped and cheap cement slapped around - slapstrip. Façades seem more likely to survive but the most awful new windows and doors are put even in fine old buildings. It can be painful to watch property programmes with so many fine old houses atrociously spoilt by tasteless loss of original elegance with horrendous new cheapness which seems to be again motivated by profits from unnecessary and environmentally wasteful redecoration encouraged by property programmes. It is truly shocking how many people have so little taste. It is not helped by the appalling poor quality of new environmentally poisonous chemical fake-wood doors and windows on sale that even look faux, their only genuine quality, and they often replace fine solid original wood doors that often at most would benefit from a little clean-up or fresh paint, (linseed oil) polish or lacquer. Old doors are also made of better-quality wood from times when trees grew more naturally than now in our increasingly polluted industrial world. Common sense seems extinct or highly unfashionable. Totalitarian uniformity seems to be the most lasting (architectural) fashion.
In the past even hospitals were as elegant or even more stylish than country houses and palaces. If developers do not pull them down, former mental asylums can be divided into blocks of flats, sometimes in the most insane ways of dividing even windows between floors, for contemporary mad people to buy such a flat to enrich a variety of profiteers. Anything left from the mortgage lender can go to ground rent, service charges for poor maintenance, etc.
London Soho in September 2019, only the façade left here
Kensington High Street seems to have become a cheap demolition site in November 2020. Not even the façade of the Kensington Market where Freddie Mercury once worked survives but a cheap plastic box in its place.
One of the losses on Kensington High Street in recent times was the Odeon Cinema with its fine marble staircase and other fine Art Deco interiors and even façade gone. Historic England refused to list it.
Matters of taste can however be debatable or vice versa as each to their own as long as they do not destroy heritage. Some people's taste may only start where other people's taste ends.
There seems to be a common, simple-minded, and unsophisticated belief of tout nouveau, tout beau. The state of repair of a building should not be confused with its architectural style (if any). What may be perceived as new at this moment may have been old and out of fashion before and come and go again from time to time. Newness per se is almost meaningless and people should see past it for real aesthetic timeless quality and craftsmanship. An older building is usually more solidly built to a higher quality than anything cheap and contemporary and therefore restoring or repairing an older building tends to be a far better thing to do then to build the cheap new one of poor standards serving nothing but profit and ignorance.
Old houses that were built a century ago or earlier were built by fine craftsmen. There were little nuances in the fixtures contributing to overall character. Meanwhile modern or contemporary buildings are often of industrialised box standard uniformity devoid of individual character – the uglification and cheapification of architecture and the built environment. While some older prisons look like castles or fortresses and look impressive and beautiful especially from outside (some residents of castles would be better placed in prisons and vice versa), modern buildings are like modern cars, one has to read what is written on them to know what they are, a church or a prison, a Mercedes or a Volkswagen, as they otherwise look the same (Lexus hardly even needs to imitate Mercedes any longer), not to mention contemporary political parties which seem all the same apart from the name, making soviet style one party systems of government almost unnecessary for dictators (if only the more thick among dictators would at least understand that like western politicians do for all their stupidity)...
Even worse, the new builds are often of poor quality, crumbling soon after construction, during which it can be difficult to tell whether a building is being built or demolished, not the Empire State Building but the emperor's new buildings, which insanely replace solidly built fine older architecture in an act of aggravated daylight burglary and corruption, fraudulent developer profiteering, towering over and overshadowing any corruption in developing countries. If this is the best that contemporary humanity can achieve in terms of progress, then what hope does the world have?
That new buildings are built to crumble so quickly is kind of good in the sense that we would not need to see the ugliness for too long but it is very wasteful of resources with an ever more flattening carbon footprint. The architect (if any) here is Clement Cement. Older fine architecture was of course built to a higher lasting standard but the most solid brick wall is the ignorant human bigot's head.
The world is polluted by worthless little property owners, rent boys and sluts, who for example may have misappropriated large amounts of taxpayers money from fraudulent legal practice as soliciting common little solicitors from a former colony building their own little property empire by means far worse than the former colonisers - the triumph of hypocrisy. They have no civilisation or gentility whatsoever, spoiling fine old properties by splitting them up clumsily and cheaply, destroying the finest original features and replacing them by cheaper than cheap ugliness. They supplement their income by scamming vulnerable people in the comfort of the knowledge that no state authorities in any country will do anything to ever stop them because the politicians in power are as worthless as their many worthless voters polluting the world with their mere existence, their lives serving absolutely no good purpose whatsoever - they are but pollution - they are so worthless that they do not even know how to spend their money in any worthwhile way - to make simple observations of fact.
At best, it is said that modern or contemporary (UPVC) windows are 92 per cent energy efficient. Even that claim is suspicious as sitting near such a window the only efficiency is being saved the need to open the window as enough cold air already comes through. In any event, the designers of these modern windows seem to be at least 92 per cent aesthetically blind whatever the merits of its energy efficiency may be. On the other hand, while solid original wood-framed windows support the house structure, cheap feeble UPVC windows do not, resulting in cracks and worse structural damage to the building. The designers, producers and sellers of these horrible new windows and doors, dumb as doornails, should be on a wall of shame.
Even London's Ambassadorial Residences are not safe from replacement windows inferior to the originals, one of the less well-known if more transparent crimes of the corrupt regime in question.One would have thought that the regime would have stolen enough money to afford decent windows or maybe it is just another gang of tasteless nouveau riche in power.
Architectural fashions, if one can call them that, can be as strange as any fashions. While genuine original features tend to be destroyed, fake wear and tear seems fashionable. For example, finely lacquered or painted wooden doors and floors tend to be scraped to a rough and worn-out looking state, not to mention fake beams in places they do not belong, from belle époque to fausse époque.
The wonderful aesthetic visionary thoughtfulness of contemporary station planners in bringing fine original Victorian features for passengers to admire en passant in the heart of London
One does wonder what is wrong with property developers, whose main skill seems to be to unnecessarily spoil old buildings. People tear out the sole of the property, sterilising, vasectomising, hysterectomising, castrating, dismembering, mutilating, disfiguring, deforming, leaving but a skeleton of a building, dead and devoid of its original rich character or any character. Even parts of the interiors of the Louvre have not been spared of this sterilisation. If you like modern architecture, do not live in an old house!
The usual suspects
If you do not like the original features of your house then rather than removing the original features remove yourself from the house. Get a modern house that would have been built to such poor standards that it is simply impossible to spoil anything original about it, but do not spoil an old house by making it modern! "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" It almost seems that the best thing that can happen to an old house is to be abandoned. At least all the awful 'modernisation' and 'updating' is spared. The worst fate for a fine old building seems to be to fall in the hands of a property developer or public body.
While on the one hand it is pleasant to see the enthusiasm and doubtless genuine appreciation for their French country house, it is nevertheless painful to see the nouveau châtelain and châtelaine mutilate their possession, for example, by cement slapped on instead of lime, accelerating the demise of surrounding masonry, with seemingly little understanding for the character and original features of the fine building. Also, it is painful to see a beautifully bound old book have the interiors of its pages knifed out to make it a Christmas cracker. Maybe if the culprit read more books, she would know why not to do such a thing.
In the destruction of fine architecture, Britain has virtually succeeded in creating a classless society as people of nearly all classes have carried out extensive destruction including the nouveau riche and the common as dirt. While the aristocrats have maintained great houses, they have also for centuries sometimes spoilt earlier architectural styles to follow passing fashions and the 1930s and the 1950s were dark decades of demolitions en masse not helped by taxation and other government policy, red lights to heritage preservation. The post-war Labour government did not do much to preserve country house architecture, quite the contrary, while being credited for creating the welfare state (or creating a new idle class of parasites...). Fortunately, there are also many people who value fine architecture and look after it for future generations.
'Basher Baring', the 7th Lord Ashburton, seems to have proven that common vulgarity and lack of taste can survive or reproduce even after many generations in an ennobled family, as he demolished the old Norman Shaw designed headquarters of Barings Bank and his country house Stratton Park in Hampshire. Then again they only ever were a family of mere profiteering bankers, the sort of people Jesus drove out to the temple with a whip, not even that good at profiteering in the end.
Even in Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Hôtel Arturo López is rather closely surrounded by bland modern disproportionately high blocks of flats – like a group of British immigration officers intimidating a vulnerable and traumatised torture victim by gathering threateningly around him to interrogate him – seemingly invading much of the former gardens of the fine hôtel particulier, to the profit of whoever built those flats and the loss of everyone else. Indeed, despite rightly priding itself for its considerable civilisation, modern or contemporary France seems to be looking after its older fine architecture as well as child refugees in the 'jungle' and streets of Dunkerque and Calais.
Italy seems to be one of the countries that has better than most preserved much of its older fine architecture although Giuseppe Principe di Lampedusa wrote that Sicily 'from poverty and neglect' was 'the most destructive of countries', neither understood nor attempted to preserve its monuments (The Last Leopard by David Gilmour, 2007, p. 191). Even the eternal city of Rome does not seem entirely safe. Looking around Luchino Visconti’s house in Rome, many ugly bland modern blocks of flats seem to have been built there, one fears with superior older buildings demolished. Already the fascists built the Via dei Fori Imperiali by clearing many medieval and renaissance structures off its way. At least Venice still survives but the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido is boarded up and closed. The Kingdom of Italy only had beautiful architecture while many ugly buildings were built during the Italian republic. The best preserved antiquity in Italy and other Latin Republics is the antiquated electric wiring, making ugly otherwise beautiful streets with old architecture.
 |
| Grand Hôtel des Bains, Lido, Venice, September 2020, in a state representing the Stalinissima Repubblica long after the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia - While there seems to be no money to look after this fine building, there seems to be plenty of money to bring grotesquely oversized tourist cattle ships to overshadow the Laguna - the modern grand tour. Meanwhile Pompeii is now facing greater threat from being buried in mass tourism than lava from the volcanic Vesuvius |
 |
| Surviving much better than its namesake in Venice, the Grand Hôtel Cascade d'Imatra of 1903, an elegant destination for tourists during the Belle Époque from Saint Petersburg with Empress Catherine The Great being the first to visit the nearby Rapids in 1772. |
Meanwhile, the Venice of the North, Saint Petersburg seems to have enjoyed a renaissance (at least the oligarchs and other corrupt upstarts in power in Russia did not steal quite everything to leave a little to fund heritage preservation). Everything stylish and beautiful in Russia is of course from before the "revolution" and everything ugly and grotesque from the "revolution" onwards.
Much of the fine old architecture in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, for example, seems to be neglected and atrociously bad taste in interior design, especially when modern decor intrudes a fine old house, does not seem to be by any means the preserve of northern Europe and the Soviets.
Venetian church ceiling
São Paulo, Brazil, January 2019: skyscrapers look better from as far away as possible and in the maximum possible darkness. One global pandemic of profiteering architectural vandalism is how entire city centres have been obliterated for profit. For example Avenida Paulista in São Paulo lost almost all of its elegant smaller architecture for skyscrapers. If only town planners had had the vision to create a new centre for the skyscrapers elsewhere and leave unspoilt what was already fine architecture.
Rare surviving older fine architeccure at the Casa das Rosas on Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil, January 2019
Other Latin countries have failed badly. For example, São Paulo was still decades ago as beautiful as Rome apparently but now looks like a Soviet slum mostly. The same seems to have happened all over the world in the last three quarters of a century, for example the late Maharani Gayatri Devi has described the sad decline of Jaipur in India after princely rule ended with highly corrupt politicians taking over – global world-beating vandalism.
The capitalists and communists seem to share the same hideous architectural taste, like the purportedly religious regime of a certain faux kingdom in the Middle East, after already over two centuries of vandalism destroying an estimated over 90 percent of Islamic heritage sites of the last thousand years in Mecca, building what strikingly resembles excessively large Soviet Stalinist architecture of the even technically atheist state, suggesting that ideology can be no less of an opium to the people as religion. One might have thought that there would have been enough desert sand to build on without needing to wipe out a millennium of civilisation – the totalitarian absolutist draught of civilisation. Or has the once nomadic regime become too lazy to move any further, needing maybe a good crack of the whip? While the nouveau inquisition regime seeks to impose its narrow absolutist religious dogma on others, comfortable to erase thousand years of heritage and equally comfortable in commercialising and mammonising religion. It makes credible the old joke of a British businessman presenting to a middle eastern sheikh a fine painting by George Stubbs, the Georgian painter famous for his equestrian paintings. The sheikh said apparently disapprovingly, 'you bring me a second-hand painting of a dead horse?!' - not to mention looking the gift horse in the mouth... common as desert sand, the sophistication of a camel racing robot jockey! Maybe this country will be appointed to chair a UN advisory committee on heritage?
Beauty and beasts which only become princes by kisses of a wrecking ball - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, January 2019: elegant old fine architecture replaced by high-rise favela or con dominium or con demolirium
Modern or contemporary architecture is largely the processed, industrialised, mass-produced, unindividual, unnatural and cheap fast-food equivalent in architecture - the box standard building boxes outside which the developer cannot think and see. The philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement is very much valid as it ever was, a voice of civilisation advocating the good old traditions of crafts of fine architecture which were the norm until oppressed by the evils of standardised processed building. William Morris would still have much work to do.
It was sad to see the iconic twin towers in Wembley demolished, giving the impression of Britain being a country that does not value its history (and with Brexit not valuing its future either). The nouveau Wembley Stadium looks like a randomly dumped piece of scrap metal. Similarly, the Royal Garden Hotel near Kensington Palace looks like a cheap warehouse, contender for the crowning glory of architectural lèse-majesté. It looks like it is built of plastic. Republican Scrap Yard Hotel or Republican Industrial Estate Hotel or Republican Abattoir Yard Hotel would be a more appropriate name for it. This is a result of a Labour government grant in the 1960s for the demolition of the older superior Victorian Queen Anne style Royal Palace Hotel on the site.
Contemporary property developers, property owners, local councillors, and planning authorities lack in civilisation. Planning authorities are deep in the pockets of the mammon gammon upstarts in charge.
Common property owners in London for example have much to answer for the neglected state of even the façades of fine old properties. Is it so prohibitively unprofitable to even slap just a fresh coat of paint on the outside or put just one low-maintenance plant in a small front yard all of which for fairly little effort would considerably improve the sight?
Typical appreciation of fine architectural features and aesthetics by contemporary London shop owners
Maybe London’s upstart property owners have something to learn from General Alexander Amatus Thesleff. Once about two centuries ago an orderly arrived at the General’s country house near Wiborg. As he arrived there was a man repairing the roof. The orderly asked to see the General. The man from the roof went away and asked the orderly to wait. A little later the same man from the roof arrived in General’s uniform. So, repairing the roof was not beneath the noble general, despite even as (acting) Governor-General of Finland in the local hierarchy ranking below only the Heavenly Lord and His Imperial Majesty The Emperor and Grand Duke.
Whatever plonker put this cable on the fine plastering of this London school building clearly has much missing from their top storey, including common sense and vision. This 'builder' or other 'professional' with an empty attic seems to need to go back to school, not to mention the school management. What kind of an example does this give to the school children? What kind of education is this?
Yet even such fine institutions as the London School of Economics (LSE) and All Souls College Oxford are among the culprits of architectural vandalism. The LSE could be renamed the London School of Vandalism (LSV) for demolishing the fine Edwardian St Philip’s Hospital despite even objections from the Victorian Society. One of England's most venerable and exalted institutions is said to be the 15th century foundation, All Souls College Oxford (equivalent of the Collège de France), or No Souls College Oxford, as it is responsible as the landowner for the demolition of the elegant red-brick Out-Patients Department of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital on the eastern side of Bolsover Street in Fitzrovia. One would have thought that universities would be the foundation stones of high learning and sacred temples of civilisation but seem to be now little more than common commercial enterprises, enslaved to mere materialist mammon.
Civilisation seems to have no place or value in the present extremist form of capitalism other than a means of seeking materialist profit for the unsophisticated capitalists who have no sense of real values in this world. This is also illustrated by the current government's intention to evict the learned societies from Burlington House in Piccadilly or make them pay full commercial rents that they cannot afford. There is plenty of public money for extensive sleaze and large-scale corporate tax evasion however.
At least Oxford University has not pulled down its Bridge of Sighs (above) - sigh as one does for Oxford's demolition of part of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital - The Venetian twin in September 2020 (below)
Fine British hospital architecture continues to be extensively wiped out by sickeningly poorly cultured NHS management. The Samaritan Hospital for Women on Marylebone Road in London has been a flagship eyesore of the NHS management of destroying architecture (eyesore next to the Western Eye Hospital). The foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales in 1889, since 1997 it has been closed and made derelict knowingly or by neglect.
A nauseating example was the demolition of the Royal Ear Hospital which stood at 21 Capper Street, WC1E 2QG until April 2016. Apparently, Camden Council had in deafening breach of its own policies given planning permission to demolish the building. Previously Camden Council had accepted that the north tower was worthy of protection within the Fitzrovia Area Action Plan and the Camden Local List. It was questionable whether Camden Council gave proper due consideration to this when deciding to grant the planning application to destroy the entire site. Camden Council should be renamed maybe Candem or Condem(n), joining many other deaf and dumb British public authorities breaking the law light-heartedly and routinely – the overrule of law. The Tories hardly even need to abolish planning law as its existence has not prevented its breach.
The Crown Estate committed the most shocking vandalism in a location as prominent as Piccadilly a few years ago, demolishing eight historic buildings despite objections from the Victorian Society but with approval from Westminster Council with the then Mayor Boris Johnson declining to overrule the council’s decision. It would seem particularly appropriate to rename the Crown Estate now as the Republican Estate or the Cheap Estate or the Clown Estate.
At least everything has not been completely flattened yet
Even one of London’s gentlemen’s clubs demolished its fine club building in St James. The Army and Navy Club, maybe also because of this aptly called The Rag, demolished in 1957 the fine 1840s clubhouse of Venetian Renaissance style, and replaced it with a bland cheap 1950s box standard construction. Maybe soldiers are so used to blowing up everything that destroying their fine club building came naturally, not to mention Knightsbridge Barracks being once one of the most beautiful army barracks in the world but then transformed into one of the ugliest in the universe by 1970 to the design by Sir Basil Spence (who must have made a few pence out of it), more like Basil's Fawlty Towers!
It is strange that even such a beautiful place as Lincoln's Inn seems to feel a need for modernisation by putting a hideous modern staircase into its Great Hall and building an ugly concrete lecture hall underground more suitable for a KGB torture dungeon or Vladimir Putin's bunker than learned friends. The Ashworth Centre is Lincoln's Inn arsoning itself. At least it's hidden underground but if one has the misfortune of descending into its infernal ugliness one would find it more bearable blind folded as a torture victim. Meanwhile better has been the bringing out of the full potential of the Victorian kitchens as the current Members Common Room. Still it seems now obligatory for at least every second Inn of Court to have an ugly modern staircase trespassing the interior of its fine old buildings as Inner Temple has also such a monstrosity in it. Just because the original was blitzed is no excuse for such ugliness.
Another shocking example was the demolition in February 2009 of a fine Victorian public baths by A Saxon Snell, completed in 1897, on Marylebone Road, London, along with all but the front rooms of the former Marylebone County Court to make way for the current cheap rubbish box of a building of the Westminster Magistrates Court, much worse vandalism than graffiti (which might even improve the look of at least the present ugly court building), tainting the credibility of courts to enforce the law when the court itself is so entangled with severe architectural vandalism and crimes against civilisation. Indeed, many fine court buildings have been lost, for example, Epsom County Court, a fine Art Deco building from the 1930s, sadly demolished in 2011 to make way for a block of flats.
Piccadilly, August 2020, façade only left on the right, prime crime location - the former In and Out Club is very much out now!
The famous London Astoria was demolished by 2009 along with an entire quartier of fine old buildings at Tottenham Court Road Station (also causing a loss of some good Asian restaurants that moved out of Soho). The list goes on and on. Many fine old schools and public houses continue to disappear. Even the nationalists seem to be far too intoxicated by their hatred of the enemy that does not exist to notice that fine English public houses are wiped out of existence, barking up the wrong tree or climbing the walls, faux bulldogs bulldozing national heritage.
If it was not bad enough that an old English public house with an elegant name like The Prince and Princess of Wales might be reduced to The Old Trout and Sauerkraut, if not outright pounded flat into flats, it may have become diluted into a pharmacy selling far more dangerous drugs than alcohol or a supermarket selling anything but fresh food or a pound shop with elegant original interiors replaced with cheap plastic shelves with little to buy on them post-Brexit and outdoor seating replaced by fruit cases and like even if the quality of vegetables placed outside may have improved at least!
In Great Yarmouth the Nelson Museum, opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 2002, closed in 2019 for lack of visitors, as the locals seem to be too busy stuffing their pale fat faces with chips - I see no chips in Great Chavmouth!
In the same town, a wood-paneled fine drawing room in a listed Georgian building split into flats can have a boiler in one corner, a cheap shoe rack in front of a beautiful fireplace, and a cat litter box on the shelf in the fitted original wall cabinet rather than Ching dynasty porcelain for the English market - to show the local occupant's appreciation for the fine architecture of his home area in which he or she seems unwittingly to be living in - the modern or contemporary neo-primitive white British and European native!
It can be a surreal feeling, sitting in the fine Georgian wood-panelled drawing room... but everywhere outside the fine drawing room is deprivation in one of the many declining areas of the UK, the country where natives do not appreciate their history any longer, the loud vulgar noises of the lack of even new money and hideous modern transport of cars and busses etc driving past. In the good old days the worst one would have heard was the cracking of the driver's whip when horse drawn carriages pass with an otherwise rather pleasant rhythm of the horses trotting by...
Yet another particularly shocking example was Conservative Medway Council demolishing the fine Edwardian Aveling & Porter Building in Strood in Kent in 2010 despite the building being in a good state of repair even. The so-called 'Conservative' Party seems to be anything but Conservative, certainly in terms of preserving superior older fine architecture to future generations, now doing away even with planning law! Maybe it should rename itself the Destructive Party or the Con Party. The only thing that the contemporary Conservatives seem to conserve is what one might call the national seaweed collection flourishing on Broadstairs beaches including the tidal pool, thanks to the Conservative-dominated Thanet Council.
Once a star of the northern English Riviera fine Scarborough has suffered many a scar from contemporary property "development". Nomen est omen!
Part of the extensive seaweed collection
preserved by the local Tory council in Broadstairs in September 2020
Canterbury landmark, 'a fine example of a mid-Victorian school, largely unaltered and in good condition', St Mary Bredin School, in March 2019, since then demolished in what has been described by the Council's former planning director as a 'shameful piece of civic vandalism' - not to mention the hideous ring road visible here, strangling the beautiful old town centre, not the finest hour of British town planning
Meanwhile one might say that the Labour Party’s major contribution to architectural vandalism in the UK was through the Pathfinders programme. This was a controversial scheme of demolition, refurbishment and new building which ran in the UK between 2002 and 2011. Fine Victorian terraces were obliterated for slum creation which apart from the aesthetic deterioration of the built environment was highly wasteful, ugly boxes of flats with flattening carbon footprint – the Pathfinders Concerto Grosso in B♭ [flat] major, New Labour working-class capitalism, proletarian profiteering, destroying working-class architecture among other destruction. Northern England could have benefitted from proper investment rather than this wasteful destruction. Reductio ad absurdum! (Per exemplum, Tony Blair is the 'left-wing' profiteur who leaves behind right wing profeteurs by a million.)
Another appalling example was in Tulse Hill, South London, where fine large houses were replaced by ugly cheap council estates, slum creation again, to increase votes for the Labour Party with loss of older fine architecture through corruption once again with developers and councillors some of whom at least rightly ended up having an extended period to discover the (maybe not even so original) interiors of prison architecture. It just shows how many politicians and their parties will inflict any damage to their country and its people and civilisation for the sake of their own material profit.
Despite the architectural vandalism in Tulse Hill flowers have seemingly survived from woodland predating both the past and present architecture
The demolition of Sir John Soane's Georgian Bank of England was one of the worst acts of architectural vandalism as early as the first half of the 20th century.
Competing to maintain its position as one of the two major UK political parties destroying fine architecture, current Conservative government policy seems to reduce the little protection that there has been for fine architecture, for example, largely reducing the amount of conservation officers, part of the big scheme of British national self-destruction in as many areas of life and society as possible, the world-beating country-beating of one's own country. The Tory view seems to be that there is plenty of money for sleaze but not for preserving heritage and nature. Developers run free like a pack of blood hounds, needing whipping in, while the so called Conservative Party is incapable of doing anything right despite being a right wing party.
Striking the right balance between the carrot and the stick, developers should be hit like a ton of bricks with demolition tax, environmental and heritage damage tax and such and the revenue should be used to employ conservation officers and other heritage-preserving action, and responsible activity by developers and property owners preserving architectural heritage should be rewarded by tax reductions and otherwise. That governments have done extraordinarily little to preserve architectural heritage simply demonstrates the persisting scandalous incompetence and stupidity.
Contemporary UK laws seem to do little to protect architectural heritage, almost the contrary by requiring purported safety standards to virtually obliterate older buildings or their original fine features. Such law seems to have been designed narrow mindedly with no consideration whatsoever to architectural heritage. 'The law is a ass', as Dickens wrote. Laws seem to be legislated for profiteering at the expense of heritage in an act of world-beating 'democratic' modern-day corruption.
As the Prince of Wales said in 1987: "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe – when it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that." Lord Lloyd-Webber similarly said that town planners 'did much more damage to English heritage in the 1950s and 1960s than Hitler's Second World War bombs'. Much heritage architecture was destroyed by the Blitz or the little sh*ts involved in planning and property. (Similarly, Brexit causes much more damage than any foreign hostility or exploitation (if any).)
Modern or contemporary shopping centres are the death and concentration camps of vibrant high streets. If one must have a shopping centre, did nobody think of making a shopping centre from a fine existing high street by pedestrianising it and adding a glass roof with the fine existing buildings remaining the shop fronts. English high streets could have been as elegant as the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, not to mention a less flattening carbon footprint. Thinking outside the building box even as short a distance as the adjoining street, seeing the street, quartier and city from the buildings, does not seem to be part of the habits of the cement-brain developers and drawing board brain planners.
Even the surroundings of fine buildings are not safe. It was particularly horrifying a few decades ago when the Finnish authorities decided to straighten the centuries old historic country road in front of one of the finest country houses of the parish, Karlvik in Mäntyharju. Before the road works vandalism, the surrounding roads impressively approached the front of the main building of the manor from about 1820. After the straightening of the road, it passed by the mansion, completely ignoring it. Part of the Gustavian stone wall that went along the old road was demolished and what was left is running on its own with no road next to it any longer like the one staircase 'leading nowhere' in If I Were Rich Man in the Fiddler on the Roof. As if that was not bad enough the road workers came across an old graveyard bringing the new fast road to the benefit of past generations even. The ‘road planners’ did not even have respect for the dead and clearly had absolutely no regard whatsoever for the historical environment and no ability to think outside the little boxes they have as a head. In a country that otherwise maybe even rightly prides itself with its generally high level of education, there has certainly been a serious training need for those responsible for road planning in historically significant areas.
What is the hurry to have such fast roads anyway? What do we achieve with such high speed? Surely the speed of galloping on horseback is the best speed sensation rather than more pollution and superficial material wealth in this nouveau riche tasteless age obsessed with industrialisation and 'economic growth' that costs the world and lives. If we were not in such a hurry, we might even appreciate the beauty of nature and human sophistication.
Should it not be the presumption and default position that every street should be tree-lined and with as much green as possible or are we more worried about someone slipping on a leaf rather than destroying the entire planet?
Another characteristic example is when Wood Green Crown Court in London was going through repairs, the workers cut down a tulip tree near the court building. That was just one tree – comparatively idyllic compared to much fine architecture and entire ancient woodlands through chainsaw massacres disappearing for High Speed HS2 for the sole benefit of profiteering, the worst gravy train, high treason. What is the hurry to destroy our world? Surely it is high time to slow down or stop and think very seriously what really is important in this world.
Walt Whitman may have the answer not only to life but the world more broadly, not least to our present environmental crisis, a point similar to that of Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, a renaissance of the enlightenment and return to nature, time to search, find and rediscover the lost real world and its values of nature and real civilisation:
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.
Typically, many professionals of our age seem to be only capable of dealing with their own narrow expertise (if anything) and fail to engage with anything else – see the wood from the trees, or the environment from the road or track, or true values from profits, or think outside the box, barking up the wrong tree – better a barking mad tree hugger than an insanely irresponsible polluting bloodsucking profiteur or really barking mad tree hogger. Old wisdom is that fire is a good servant but a bad master, same for industrialisation, money, technology, mobile phones, etc., and not least profit. These sinister-handed people seem to have as narrow a vision as a carriage horse with blinkers. It is then left to the visionary drivers of this world to rein in and whip for direction. Indeed, Plato compared the soul to a charioteer driving a two-horse-drawn chariot.
Rather than fine original architectural features, it is high time to throw into the skip common-as-dirt ‘developers’ and their accomplices, the assassins of architecture, accompanied by the music of The March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie Fantastique, or the Damnation of Fausts of building with their souls sold to the Devil... and bring back real fine craftsmen. Bulldozing vandals, parasites of building sites, like the ones who destroyed the Bullring of Birmingham deserve, so to speak, a 'bull's dose of the whip' (from which expression bulldozer comes from). As Machiavelli said, extreme situations call for ‘strong medicines’. All those responsible for architectural vandalism however long ago should be held responsible – no stopping the clock and the crop. Further vandalism, annihilation of architecture, and extensive and systematic crimes against civilisation should be blocked. Not only does this world have an environmental emergency but also an architectural emergency.
After capitalist destruction beating the world blue with bruises and left-wing class warrior red lights to heritage preservation it is time for green lights to preserve our architectural and natural environment, rather than sinking to the lows of demolition and vandalism, haute future (if any).
The world now needs politicians who would do to property developers and big business what Baroness Thatcher did to trade unions. There is a need for a heritage czar with absolute powers.
One can only hope for progress from the dark contemporary age to a more enlightened future renaissance.
Brussels façadism, June 2011
London Leicester Square façadism, c. 2015
6 Palace Court, Bayswater Road, London W2 4HP,
next door nothing in August 2020:
with only the façade left,
a façade lift
as good as any cheap plastic surgery face lift
