With dyspepsia gurgling through the room, the Prince recharged his guns. “Not only did they wreck the London skyline in general. They also did their best to lose the great dome in a jostling scrum of office buildings, so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce — like a basketball team standing shoulder-to-shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.” The French and Italians would never dishonour their finest buildings in this manner. Can you imagine office blocks imprisoning Paris’s cherished Notre Dame or Venice’s shimmering St Mark’s?

​​In a subsequent BBC interview, Owen Luder, the now-deceased former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, took issue with the Prince’s speech: “I think it was most unfortunate and embarrassing… I lived through the Blitz, no comparison at all. I really resent that.”

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Must we always demolish the past?

By Jonathan Glancey

Luder, designer of bold and controversial raw concrete Brutalist buildings that characterised the “comprehensive redevelopment” of many of Britain’s town and city centres in the Sixties and early Seventies, lived to see the most distinctive of his own buildings well and truly blitzed. The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth: opened in 1966, demolished in 2004. Trinity Square, Gateshead, whose multi-storey car park featured in the Michael Caine gangster film, Get Carter: completed in 1967, razed in 2010. Derwent Tower, the 30-storey concrete housing block in Gateshead, known locally as the “Dunston Rocket”, was forcibly brought down in 2012. The problem was, as Mick Henry, leader of Gateshead’s Labour council, articulated at the time, “people did not want to live here, and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone”.

As a result, ​brutalist buildings have often led dramatically foreshortened lives. As for the new buildings Prince Charles witnessed sprouting in and around the City of London, these continue to rise and fall and rise again, ever taller, and at increasingly breakneck speed. As they compete to scrape the London sky, gaggles of new City towers strip the streets they rise from of life and light and human scale. The tallest of all proposed to date, 1 Undershaft will, if given the final go-ahead by the Corporation of London this summer, reach the absolute height limit (1,016 ft) imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority.

The questionable architectural quality of the new City of London skyscrapers aside, it seems very odd indeed to witness earlier City office towers being demolished when they are no older and indeed even much younger than Luder’s Brutalist car parks and shopping centres. In its latest form, 1 Undershaft, designed by Eric Parry Architects, threatens to be not just uncomfortably high, but ugly and even silly with a roof garden sticking out over and above the street like some decolourised Rolling Stones’ tongue. What works, in vivid lipstick colour, for a rock band’s album covers and T-shirts fails in what should be a dignified, if spirited, city street.

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Assuming it does go ahead, 1 Undershaft will take at least four noisy, disruptive years to build. And it will demand the sacrifice of St Helen’s Tower, formerly the Commercial Union building, a deft 28-storey Mies van der Rohe-style curtain-wall tower, designed by Gollins Melvin and Ward (GMW) and dating from as long ago, in City terms, as 1969. At 387 ft, this building was the very first in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s. It formed part of a considered modern composition, in company with GMW’s 10-storey P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) building. The P&O building, in turn, was demolished at the grand old age of 39, its place taken by Richard Rogers’s 43-storey “Cheesegrater” office tower.

Meanwhile, the City of London has also approved plans for 55 Bishopsgate. This up-and-rising 935-ft skyscraper (given heights for the building vary), “inspired by nature” and promising “world-class sustainability performance”, will replace a post-modern office block designed by Fitzroy Robinson so venerable that it dates all the way back in the smog of time to 1992.

Given that buildings are currently responsible for approximately 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, it does seem odd that so much effort should be going into demolishing ever younger buildings to build ever taller ones in their place. It’s strongly reminiscent of the Eighties in Tokyo, when land values were so inflated that developers tore down brand-new buildings to erect even bigger ones on the same sites to make even more money. But an even more reckless model lies in Las Vegas: closed in 1990, the entertainingly space-age Landmark Tower rising from Paradise Street, and looking for all the world like an architectural escapee from The Jetsons, was blown to smithereens. It had taken eight years to build — from 1961 to 1969 — yet vanished in a trice in a spectacular cloud of smoke, dust, dynamite and debris. Tim Burton used footage of the demolition to comic effect in his 1996 sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks!

While the architecture of cities evolves and sudden events such as war, earthquakes, fires, IRA bombs and Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks prompt unwonted change, the wilful destruction of ever younger city buildings in pursuit of extreme financial gain is as unsettling as it is destructive, wasteful of energy and a snub to earlier generations who have designed and built for us. Buildings have become disposable commodities: a fact I think that most of us find hard to accept.

Was it ever thus? In The Face of London (1932) Harold Clunn, a London shipping agent and an indefatigable chronicler of the capital’s streets and buildings, describes how he stops to stare at the robustly challenging St Mary Woolnoth. It’s an early 18th-century Baroque bulldog of a church — from the outside; geometric serenity within — designed by an architect considered since to be one of the greatest these islands has yet produced, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

What Clunn couldn’t understand was why, when so many other churches had been demolished for the greater good of London, St Mary Woolnoth remained stubbornly in place. Particularly as it occupied “perhaps the most valuable site in the whole city”. “If every building with a claim to antiquity is to be suffered to exist for perpetuity,” he wrote, “where is the space to be found in the course of time to allow for any future progress in the world?”

Here was a man with faith in modernity. Shortly after the Second World War, Clunn wrote London Marches On (1947), in which he considers the Luftwaffe’s Blitz a blessing in disguise, allowing the city to replace slums with sanitary new blocks of flats while raising bravura new commercial buildings of which he was a devoted fan.

A short walk away from the ever less enchanting streets of the City of London, you can find the old Huguenot chapel, built in 1743, on the corner of Spitalfields’s Brick Lane. In response to social change, it became a Methodist chapel in 1819, a synagogue in 1897 and, in 1976, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). None of us, I think, expects London or any other city to be pickled in aspic. Life moves on. Yet who  can look to the City skyline and say with a Harold Clunn-like assurance that the relentless demolition of young buildings in favour of bigger, more demonstrative machines-for-making-money is a good thing?

It is a year today since the first recorded death from Covid in the UK took place at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Many thousands have died since then. How shall we publicly remember them? Over on the St Paul’s Cathedral website, the Prince of Wales now fronts a virtual Book of Remembrance for the victims of Covid-19. “Remember me,” it is called. And there are now many other websites just like it.

The contrasting grammar is not inconsequential. A century ago, it was “we will remember them”; today it is “remember me”. Back then, an anonymous “unknown warrior” was interred at Westminster Abbey, one nameless death representing the deaths of many; today it is the singularity of each individual death that is recorded. Then, a collective act of remembrance for a heroic collective effort. Today, the anguished cry of an individual for recognition. In so many areas of life, we are a culture that, over the last century, has reshaped our moral consciousness from the “we” to the “I”. And as in life, so too in death.

Despite the fact that it is now the NHS, not the military, that carries much of the weight of our collective national pride, it is still hard to imagine that we have anything like the same the cultural wherewithal to remember publicly those who have died in hospital wards, victims of Covid. Hard to imagine, perhaps, because memorialisation requires a sense that the self is absorbed into something greater than itself, some bearer of continuity – God, or even a sense of national collective effort – neither of which have quite the same purchase on our collective imaginations.

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Covid-19 is the nail in the coffin for traditional funerals

By Andrew Watts

We have never been particularly good at remembering those who succumb to disease. Over twice as many people perished of Spanish flu as died in the First World War. Yet while many thousands of memorials are scattered across country and continents for those lost in battle, we have no equivalent for those who coughed and spluttered to death in their beds.

Are we about to repeat this forgetfulness? Digital memorials aren’t the same as stone ones. Virtual memorials are not a part of a cultural commons like the village war memorial; they don’t have the same presence in our everyday lives. All those digital ones and zeroes, bitcoin souls, have an uncertain connection to either time or place. But, then, the way we deal with death has changed over the generations.

Previously, it was the eventual absorption into the divine life that constituted the essence of our hope of life after death. God alone is immortal and so it is only through some sort of participation in the divine life that we could partake in that eternity. But  what contiually astonishes me today — and I deal with the dead and the mourning on a daily basis — is how many people think that belief in God is superstitious nonsense, yet also think the idea of life-after-death is perfectly reasonable. That paradox doesn’t disturb them. They think that human beings contain within themselves the metaphysical resources to sustain themselves after death.

Perhaps one of the consequences of that shift away from God is that many are keen to personalise their memorials in ways that would have been unimaginable before – at least, unimaginable to all but the very wealthiest and most powerful. There is a heart-breaking argument currently going on in a Leeds graveyard where a mother has been told by the Diocesan authorities that she is not able to personalise the graves of her children with photographs and a collection of their teddies and toys.

This woman has my every sympathy, and there is indeed something heartless sounding about the Diocesan response. But it is also true that the aesthetics of graveyards once represented a sense of collective experience, where the modesty and uniformity of the stone spoke to a sense of the details of human life dropping away as one is absorbed into the infinite love of God, and into the earth. And the calmness of the space seemed to underpin a lack of anxiety about all this. That is why there is something gently re-assuring about church graveyards.

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By contrast, a collection of children’s toys represents — more than anything else one can imagine — the immediacy of trauma and pain. So should a headstone express the personality of the deceased, their individuality, or is this the point at which individuality is relinquished into something larger? Emotionally, I am with the mother. Intellectually, I am with the Diocese.

Because what this case represents is whether a memorial should primarily be all about those who are grieving their loss, or whether it is the site of passage from this word into — as Christians might put it — the loving arms of God. To express this at its starkest: are graveyards about the living or the dead? The fact that many people now believe that funerals and gravestones are for the living, not the dead, echoes that shift in our way of thinking about death itself.

My feeling is that – however much we may protest at this – we no longer have the cultural or theological resources to memorialise those who have died of Covid beyond the human memories of those who have loved them. If anything, we are even less able to imagine what a lasting memorial might look like than we were in the aftermath of the Spanish flu.

Atheists, of course, will insist that this has always been the case. And, of course, if they are right about God, then they are right about this too. If there is no God then — unless we are Wellington or Nelson, both of whom have grand tombs at St Paul’s — the impression we make upon this planet will not be sustained for more than a few generations after we become food for daffodils.

Modern memorialisation seems to accept this basic understanding of things. And so, in 50 years’ time, when we search for St Paul’s virtual Book of Remembrance, the Google result will probably read “Website not found” — the contemporary equivalent of “they fly, forgotten as a dream”. For without the kind of metaphysical scaffolding we have all but abandoned, only oblivion awaits for those of who us who one day will pass from mind.

So our rebellion, to the extent that it wasn’t just about smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, tended to be about class and class guilt. Like Malcolm McDowell in the 1968 public school revolution fantasy film if…., we were on the Left. We spoke with mockney accents; one of my friends became a skinhead and slipped away to Stamford Bridge every other Saturday.

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What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

Today’s elite public school radicalism is a very different animal. The schools no longer think of themselves as conservative institutions training a ruling class to preserve a national heritage — they are now academic forcing houses attracting and producing a global elite of the “brightest and best”. They think of themselves as academic meritocracies, albeit with a bias towards the affluent, and are often in the vanguard of the most fashionable pedagogical and social trends.

Contemporary race- and gender- based progressivism is therefore no threat at all to the people running the schools, indeed it is positively welcomed by them. One can observe this in the kerfuffle surrounding the Eton master who has been sacked for explaining, and at least partially defending, the concept of patriarchy — it was the Eton authorities who intervened, not an uprising of radical pupils, and some parents and pupils have actually been protesting against the sacking. But in my experience of speaking at London private day schools and knowing plenty of young people who have emerged from them in recent years, progressive groupthink is the norm.

I recently stumbled across an example of this in the alumni magazine of St Paul’s, another elite private school. It featured an interview with former pupil Jonah Freud, who has recently launched a petition to “Decolonise St Paul’s” that has been signed by more than 1,000 current and former students. The letter calls for “educating through a global, rather than eurocentric, curriculum” and “deconstructing the racist fabric of our society”. Jonah, who studied Race and Pop Music at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is the son of Matthew Freud, grandson of Clement, himself the grandson of Sigmund. Interviewer Tom Adeyoola writes of the moment Freud was awakened:

“For someone already ‘woke’ it was something closer to home that compelled him to action in writing to St Paul’s; the similarity between the names of George Floyd and his older brother George Freud. In his own words, ‘I have never experienced anything of the fear that George Floyd’s family would have feared and the only reason for that is that I am white.'”

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The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

I don’t want to sound cynical about this; it is obviously a welcome development that young men and women, many of whom will graduate to important jobs in our society, have egalitarian instincts and are aware of their privileges. But what about the most important privilege of all: their parents’ wealth? It is rather morally convenient for them to believe passionately in every kind of equality except economic equality.

Perhaps at some unconscious level the elite progressive public school authorities and pupils feel they will get a free pass for their huge financial advantages, if only they shout loudly enough about how they are challenging all other kinds. And as the conformist young progressives agonise about their white privilege it is rather handy that this places them in the same boat as lower income white people in struggling post-industrial towns. If both groups are primarily privileged by their race, the heads of Eton and St Paul’s can with a clear conscience complain about anti-public school bias when Oxford and Cambridge colleges try to raise their quota of people from such low income backgrounds.

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What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May in 2017. It was a clumsily expressed sentiment. But isn’t this exactly what she was talking about? A financial and educational elite, including significant sections of big business, who are increasingly disconnected from the feelings and interests of the rest of the country yet regard themselves as leading the struggle for human progress.

Shaun Bailey, the Tory London mayoral candidate, talks about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national “team”. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support; but a worrying aspect of the BLM protests earlier in the year was how it divided the country, between a big section of the white elite — who embraced it enthusiastically — and the white provincial majority who seemed to be looking on with some scepticism.

Surely, if elite public schools do have any justification in a modern liberal democracy, it is precisely that the people who run them are teaching their privileged pupils to think clearly, honestly and independently about social (and other) problems, not egging them on to embrace the latest fashionable cause. As the greatest of 20th century Etonians, George Orwell, put it: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”