Back at my house in London and discover that the end of Fitzroy Street is disfigured by a huge blown up photograph of “cricketing legend” Shane Warne sporting a wavy, parti-coloured yellow wig. In a daze at its presumption, I venture towards this hideous excrescence. It isn’t a wig! It is indeed a hair transplant. The poor sap has been persuaded to publicize the fact. It is an advertisement on behalf of the new clinic on the corner of Fitzroy Square which has moved into a conservation area to pursue its dread trade. I suppose if you are bald and vain it affects your mental capacities. I would have expected that you would want to disguise the fact in some way, with a sporty hat or, at the least, a minimum of discretion, but Shane is clearly so enamoured of his golden tuft, no doubt extracted from some privy part of his anatomy, that he is seeking to encourage others to do the same.
I don’t personally care about the preening moron. I care, though, that the clinic which has moved into a fine eighteenth century building has decided to use one of its blocked windows as a billboard. It has two, facing down Grafton Way. One is already used as the frame for a life sized statue of Generalissimo Miranda the liberator of Argentina who struts powerfully in bronze above the railings. Perhaps the clinic equates the achievement of drilling flaps of follicled skin with the achievement of dying for one’s cause. I am glad that Miranda advertises his prowess. He does so in the name of Liberty. It is not a good statue, but he lived hereabouts. The embassy of the country he helped found is further down the road opposite the green grocers. It is a well restored building with interesting authentic drab paint work. We have several embassies in the square. In Fitzrovia Croatia has a border with Zambia. They advertise too. All of them like to fly flags. I see nothing untoward there. I wanted to fly my own flag. I discovered two massive poles in my mews when I moved in. I thought some Welsh blazon could flap above the trees but was told that though they had clearly once adorned y property they were no longer permitted. I saw the point. But the vanity doctor clearly does not.
The slap head clinic occupies a building vacated by the London Foot hospital. The other end of the terrace, a remodelled Adam front destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War, was once the right foot of the hospital. Both ends survived the bomb. They have crumbling cartouches. The right foot has been beautifully restored. The left foot has been pretty well attended to as well, until this hideous modern poster was stuck on the side. This is a conservation area. It is a quiet enclave that has avoided the worst of redevelopment. And now Shane Warne gurns at me in plastic majesty. Tonight I discovered that he lights up at night.
So what can we do? There is a residents committee. My wife is an active member of “the frontagers”, who have been meeting since 1807 to preserve the facades and appearances of this lovely square. They are an early example of civic pride. They have helped have the place listed as a conservation area.
Hero Granger Taylor who arrives to talk about the British Museum is surprised anyway. As an active member of the Camden Civic Society she sometimes thinks that the only effective action ever taken by the Camden conservation authorities is to control posters. They usually come down quickly. This is heartening. “Do you want me to bring it up at the Society?” she says. Marvellous. We must see what happens.
Hero has come for tea to discuss the extension to the British Museum which lies well within her society’s purlieu. There is considerable concern. There is concern that the museum in order to justify its existence feels obliged to get bigger and bigger, but that is mine. The Society is concerned that the extension, which runs out to the East and slots into a vacant section, will overwhelm the fine research room wing, blocking the light and licensing alterations to the building. It is also clearly too big. The Museum may well need a temporary exhibition space but it is taking the opportunity to add a few unspecified extra space on top. Once again the issue becomes one of scale. Nothing modest or unassuming or complementary can be planned. Here is something that seeks to dominate.
I have no objection as some do to the notion of glass and steel and modern lines next to Victorian architecture. Personally I think that extensions and additions should be designed with the spirit of the age that makes them. But they have to respect the design they adjoin. They cannot ruin its space.
I think it irks that the local consultation has been so peremptory. The whole society is against it and has published a well argued booklet, but despite a lot of objections there has been no real consultation. Consultation increasingly means “come and have a look at what we are intending to do, that’s OK isn’t it?” Hero is upset that the Victorian Society and English Heritage have so complacently rolled over.
Down to Wales to interview the Prince at his farm house. It’s called Llanwormwood something and I could see that I was getting dangerously near to actually having to pronounce it, so I settled for “near Llandovery”, which is probably better for security reasons, hugely better for pronunciation reasons, and totally better for identification reasons. Nobody should feel the itch to burn down the country cottage of the heir to the throne. It’s let most of the time to holiday tenants. It is modest though. A stone range around an enclosed courtyard. We sat in the great hall made out of a barn and marvelled at the weather. It’s always sunny when I venture close to mid Wales. The sky was blue. The hills were brilliant green. His Royal Highness was rosy pink.
I had a range of arresting questions. It’s what you need. A sleepless night and a head buzzing with important topics for the heir to the throne but he popped in sat down I asked him about planning and off he went. I had to signal wildly from my chair that I intended to make a pretence of being there to ask the odd question.
The contest is billed as fifteen rounds with the architects but the issue has very little to do with architects. Most developments oozing over our country are not the prerogative of Knights of the realm with big offices. They are slung up with an eye to a quick profit. They are faceless ‘cookie cutter’ closes and cul de sacs of vaguely Californian ranchero design slapped about with no sense of place or destination, no sense of belonging.
So we discussed the road engineers and the difficulty of getting services to agree to put all their tubes and wires into one tunnel. Coed Darcy will be built on a massive oil infected poisonous site near Port Talbot which was once the home of BP’s largest oil refinery. It is an admirable development. Unlike Lord Rogers get rich quick scheme it is not a show piece intrusion in an already well developed area, the central city region that architects too often bleat about being banished from, but a useless, dead and difficult area, where the usual option is cheap housing and uncongenial proto slums.
There is enormous pressure to build houses at present. Some very small proportion will be built by architects. The majority will be ordered up by the yard by developers and will be blank and unimaginative dormitory housing. Why there should be so much opposition to a relatively small area of genuine experiment I have no idea. The worst enemy of the architectural profession is their own sensitivity. They are mired in orthodoxy, over-defensive of their clubbish practices and unschooled in principles of either science or aesthetics. So “fake” is derided and rigorous is upheld. There is no proper absolute moral value in this. It is matter of personal taste. The notion that “truth to materials” or “honesty” is holy writ should be treated with the same searching enquiry as any other mystical pronouncement. What is important is what works, what meets human approval. There has been an era of experiment without the slightest understanding of what experiment really means. If you try a process and the result is Cumbernauld you need to try again, and blame the experiment not the result. What Prince Charles is engaged in is a true experiment. It should be seen as part of the overall move to discover what can work in any age. And it should be recognized that the pattern of building for an age is partly created out of individuality not orthodoxy. I don’t particularly like Poundbury but I like it a lot more than the vast majority of the greenfield developments that you might visit. And I recognize that my objections are based on personal taste. I find the mad mullah, heretic-burning hysteria that breaks out from architects at its mention absurd and truly dangerous to their profession.
I went on to my own restoration project in Wales, which seems to be taking somewhat longer to complete than His Royal Highness’s farm. We are at the debilitating, decisionary stage when Gill our builder is patiently explaining that we finally have to make up our mind about light fittings, colour finishes, switches and floor mixes. Architecture, building, decoration is wracking. I want to make final fixes on a balustrade across a crog loft in a barn. There are several ways of achieving it. All of them have to satisfy building regulations, which make the assumption that twenty people may all go aloft and hurl themselves at the balcony at the same time. So the delicate grille is out, then. But the fat fixing of several lateral newel posts to hold the hold structure seems wrong too. And each of these decisions will affect the look for many years to come. Thirty years on, I will walk in there and go, “no, not that. We should have gone for the wire mesh on cross frames.” But I guess if we cudgel our brains then the detail will emerge. This interest is what the Prince shares with the architect. And they really should both recognize it. What is unforgivable is laziness, and sloppy rubbish. Our ancestors evolved practical building skills that they handed down in a vernacular tradition that became second nature to the way they built. All old builders have it. I have now restored and repaired and altered five or six houses and each time I have felt secure when I have done it with experienced builders, because they simply know that some processes require detailed attention. Stone walls are a good example. The farm yard at Trehylin is built in stone. It was a model farm in the early nineteenth century. The buildings are now largely redundant. Farming legislation has changed so much in the last twenty years that none of these buildings would meet the hygiene requirements. But the builders who made the stables and the barn built solidly enough to create structures that are still perfectly sound. It could well be perfectly sound for a further millennium. The remains of similar walls are around that are a thousand years old. Why? Why did they anticipate such permanence? How did they accommodate the idea of such an extraordinary continuity? We generally accept that most things we make today will be obsolescent in a decade, if not quicker. Tractors or mowers made in the thirties can still be viable machines today, but ride on mowers conk out in three years. They have to or you would never buy another one. But there is some sort of miraculous notion of permanence involved in building a cow shed so well that it would last for a thousand years. Alas, no more. My breeze block potato barn was thrown up and will soon throw itself down. Today’s tin shed recognise that it has no permanent place in the landscape. The most difficult buildings to preserve are recent ones because they are usually shoddily built. It is another reason why we have to respect the fabric of the past. It’s tough.
Victory. In fact two victories. Camden Council has turned down the proposals for the British Museum. Hero and her gang from the Camden Civic Society have put a spanner in their works. David Watkin wrote a letter, Councillor Hossack and many others spoke eloquently against and the plans have been sent back. I know this will stiffen the resolve of the architectural establishment. I fear it will strengthen the arguments of those who want more centralization of the planning processes, but it means that everybody needs to look again and there will be time to consider all the arguments. Camden Civic Society has been tireless in marshalling argument and debate. It is a triumph for local action.
I was in Italy. I got a number of plaintive e-mails, asking for my support, made even more frustrating by the fact that to reply to them I had to sit on the stairs of my hotel trying to reach a signal. This was in the north western suburbs, in a part of the eternal City that I sincerely hope has a limited life. Post war unlicensed development, the extra-mura Roma, a chaotic mess of apartment blocks and badly finished roads dotted with flowers stalls and decorated by fifteen year old vandals, sprawls around Rome like a stained collar. But then Ancient Rome was a grungy labyrinth and the first jokes about getting lost in were a feature of the plays of Plautus. Central Rome still trades on that romantic disarray. We were there to film for three weeks in a blistering heat that rose above forty degrees by three in the afternoon. Waves of heat gusted around the alleyways like a fan assisted oven. Raining here, then?
The “Centro Storico” seems like an inexhaustible resource. The crumbling palaces are more intriguing than the recently restored, but grandeur is perfectly balanced by secrecy. Mussolini was the last impatient reformer. Seeking to open it all out a bit and expose the glories of the Imperial past he cleared “slums” and drove an avenue through the forum and the Borgo. What a colossal error. How wonderful it must have been to come upon St Peter’s as it was meant and designed to be: as a startling coup de theatre, a sudden surprise after cramped streets. The square in front of St Ignatius still is just that, so is the Trevi. The Pantheon just manages it. And of course with hindsight Rome is becoming a twenty first century city. Cars have no place in it. Plenty of people get permits to overcome the pedestrianisation, but they have to crawl to their absurd parking spaces and, apart from the overblown State Mercedes lolloping about, they are generally miniscule vehicles, increasingly electric. Within years, I trust even more will give up and get on Vespas. I also hope the plans to tarmac over the cobbles are also permanently held back. There are complaints that they slow traffic. Well great. Let the cars shake themselves to pieces. We could do the same if we brought back our setts. What is the point of tarmacing them over and then putting in speed bumps when they slow the traffic by themselves? I watched them take up all the tarmac in Warren Street a few years ago, reveal a perfect expanse of granite setts and then smother the lot with new black goo. Road Engineers are the enemies of proper cities. Time wins if it is allowed to. Walking down the Via Guilia, one of the most important thoroughfares in Medieval Rome, through the pulsating heat of the afternoon there is no traffic at all, no people either. They were sensibly hiding. The great, mysterious courtyards were stalked by cats and shadows. Rome is hardly an “Open City” as Mussolini’s mayor made it in the Second World War in order to protect its treasures. It is clearly a secret city, of glimpsed interiors and soaring staircases in Palazzos that have already changed their uses many times but still retain their essential power. Two embassies from each country (because of the Vatican) the multifarious offices of the church, the departments of state, new museums, residential apartments and, in some cases, ancient aristocratic families all vie for control of these monsters. We plebs merely tramp the alleys, peer up and in, and seek respite in the cool vaulted space of numberless Churches.
The other victory for me in the last month is over Shane. Shane is shorn. The illuminated hair transplant advertisement on the end of my street has been removed, leaving a smear of plaster. I have to congratulate everybody, including my trichologist neighbours for their great good sense and intelligence.
Thanks!