Playstation Requiem

A couple of weekends ago I bought a Playstation 3. This act brought to a close my long relationship with my Playstation 2, and I feel moved to mark its passing with a tribute. I have owned my PS2 for more than 10 years - it is, without doubt, the single most reliable piece of electronics I have ever had in my possession. It still works as well today as it did when I bought it in 2000 or 2001, and I can't remember it experiencing a single major fault. And that's in spite of the fact that it - or rather, the controller attached to it - has taken some serious button-mashing punishment. And it may yet have more days in the sun, as it still works perfectly and I'm not planning to get rid of it just yet.

But part of my sadness in disconnecting the PS2 came from an unexpected source. I found myself thinking about the console's menus. When I fired up the brand new machine, I was rewarded with a calm grey screen, across which something like a wisp of smoke was blowing, and a sound of stringed instruments, a little like an orchestra warming up. The menu graphics emerged around this wisp. Which was all very nice, but it lacked something. It lacked depth.

By contrast, the PS2's menus had depth. They were all depth, on the surface at least. Switch on a Playstation 2 and it would chime pleasingly, and once the corporate introductions were out of the way you would be ushered into the blackness of space. Standing between you and the inky void were arcane signs: the words "browser" and "system configuration" and a constellation of orbiting points of light, dancing around themselves in a ring. (See image above.)

There's no need to understand what any of that means. Consoles, unlike multi-purpose desktop computers, are mostly designed for supreme simplicity - they just work. You don't have to poke through menus and dialogue boxes to fire up a game or play a DVD or whatever, you just feed it into the disc drive at the front and it starts automatically. So, on the PS2 at least, there's seldom any need to "use" the default machine menu unless you're doing some fairly involved tinkering. It is mostly just a default space, a view of the system at rest. It's accompanied by a calming ambient soundscape - barely even close to music, just gentle whooshing, like waves against a beach heard from a distance. Rather than just a static screen that eventually switches to a screensaver, like on a desktop PC, this is an interface that is part screensaver - it has a function, but it also has no function but to be, and to show that all is well and in a state of readiness. When you do insert a disc, or select a menu option, one of the orbiting lights separates itself from the circle and drifts away, apparently receding into the blackness, an emissary into the machine.

It is a really beautiful piece of interface design, suggesting a depth of possibility - almost ulimited possibility - without simply bombarding the user with complexity. And it suggests rest without simply being static or hiding behind a screensaver. This kind of screen-based user interface now dominates our lives, on our phones, on TVs, on computers, on cashpoints, on Tube ticket machines, everywhere. For obvious reasons, the discussion of the design of these interfaces has focused on clarity and usability. The PS2 was an example of a highly developed interface where the usability has perfected itself into invisibility, leaving an open space that could be inhabited by something that was, in my opinion, beautiful.

Downtown Scene

News from the world of print. I am in this week's New Statesman, on sale from today, reviewing Pioneers of the Downtown Scene at the Barbican Art Gallery. I try to put this really very good exhibition in the context of New York's 1970s' near-death experiences, something I feel the curators could have done a bit better.

And of course I continue to infest Icon, although the magazine's online archiving process ground to a halt in summer last year and is now proving difficult to restart. In the current issue I write about Voyager 1 and review the New City Reader and Beyond magazine. In the issue out next week, you can find me profiling the designer Philippe Malouin and reviewing Civil Unrest.

I'm planning a separate post wrapping up all the news related to the book when one or two things about it solidify.

Fox in the Yard

It's my birthday today, and I have the day off. I was off yesterday as well, so at 10.30 in the morning I was sitting in the living room drinking a cup of coffee. Looking out over the sunlight-filled courtyard of my building, I was amazed to see ... a fox. It was standing on the wall, looking straight at me; I ran to get my camera, and it was still there when I got back.


If you click on the photo to see it full size, you'll see the fox is looking right at the camera. It's a little eerie, but also a little magical.

Fox in the Shard

The Shard. Image taken from the Flickr stream of Michali_ and used under a Creative Commons licence.

This post contains a minor spoiler related to the book Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem - not enough to ruin anyone's enjoyment of it, I think, but still - you have been warned.

There is something magnificent, and melancholy, in the rumour that Southwark Council is scrambling to catch a fox that is somewhere on the 75th floor of the Shard, the Renzo Piano skyscraper currently under construction in London. It is, in fact, easy to attribute romantic, even heroic attributes to the (putative) animal. There's the dangerous charm of the fugitive, of course, still a potent presence in the British psyche as the bizarre Raoul Moat case demonstrates. And there's something else. The rise of the Shard is a PR endeavour as much as it is a feat of construction. "Shard" is an official name, not a popular nickname; it's right there on the jumpform rig. An image is going up at the same time as the building.

The fox - even as a rumour - is an unchoreographed intrusion into this careful brand-building. A rogue presence has installed itself in the highest reaches of the tower and insolently eludes the authorities. Higher than highest - the tower will only have 72 habitable floors, so if the animal really is on the "75th" floor, it is at the summit, the unbuilt point of the spike. Underdog, meet overfox. This wasn't part of the PR strategy.

So, true or not, the rumour suggests the first inklings of popular mythmaking around the new tower - the city accepting the building into its collective imagination. Phantasmic Mr Fox can be seen as a sliver of public affection for Shard. In that, it brings to mind the escaped tiger in Jonathan Lethem's 2009 novel Chronic City. Lethem's tiger continually evades the authorities; capable of demolishing whole buildings, its effects are excessive even for a big cat. Rumours, lies and conspiracy theories swirl around it - it is a symbol in a book filled with symbols. Chronic City's New York is a strange, troubled place, unnerved by its own gentrification and regeneration, marooned in introspection. The people feel they have lost something, that something is amiss, and their attention transfers to mysterious absences: the tiger and the buildings it conveniently clears out of the way, ready for regeneration; astronauts trapped aboard a space station with no hope of rescue; gigantic chasms carved by a monumental land artist called Laird Noteless (note: less); "war-free" editions of the newspaper.

Foxes have thrived in London in recent years - they and the super-rich seem to be the only things in the city that have no trouble finding new places to live. Their eerie calls can be heard earlier and earlier in the evening, and they appear bolder, less afraid around people. Of course it's please to think of a fox brazenly in residence in the nosebleed section of the aspiring spire, barking that three-part cry, a vulpine muezzin in the city's best minaret. The Shard is a magnificent building, and it's hugely exciting to see it rise; the fox's presence seems to say, yes, this belongs to us too. What a view it must have, if it's there. And even if it isn't there, someone has seen fit to imagine it there, and that's almost as good.

UPDATED 16:45 24 February: It was real, it was on the 72nd floor, and they caught it! You can read the story here at the Standard. Says the article: "It is thought to be the highest distance ever recorded to have been made by a fox." Carve that one into the annals of pest-control-at-height. And I like its defiant expression. It's seen things, man, things you wouldn't believe. It can go back, but it won't be the same.

Sirens, soot and strikes

This was written for Edge magazine's "Time Extend" slot, which looks at the lasting influence of a classic computer game. It first appeared in Edge 215 (June 2010) and is reproduced here with permission. It expresses some of the thoughts contained in this old blog post in a more cogent and convincing way.


Eagles soar in smokeless skies and whales glide through the clean oceans. Herds of horses (or perhaps giraffes) are the only inhabitants of the lush plains and old-growth forests. The simulated world of SimCity 4 is a peaceful place before you set about building your city. Boring, though. What it needs is urban sprawl, ribbon development along blacktop highways, strip malls and Dopplering sirens, chimneys belching soot, budget crises and strikes. What it needs, really, is problems – problems that you, the mayor, can solve.

That’s the paradox at the heart of the appeal of SimCity 4. Much of the fun that comes from playing the 2003 apogee of the SimCity series of city design and management games is solving problems: relieving traffic on this avenue, removing the polluting industries from that business centre, restoring a depressed neighbourhood to prosperity. But these problems have to come from somewhere. Next to the game’s peaceful, constructive, problem-solving side, it also nurtures the darker, more complex pleasure that comes from problem-creation. The tension between these two sides of its personality is written deep into SimCity 4; as we’ll see, it’s a reflection of the real-life systems and people that led to the creation of the game in the first place.

Key to SimCity 4’s enduring popularity is the fact that it can be enjoyed on a number of levels. Effective management can be satisfying in itself, given the game’s devilish complexity compared to previous versions and its dozens of competing variables. When things are going well it can be pleasant enough to simply sit back and watch the contented populace streaming along your ample boulevards while skyscrapers sprout around them – again, something that reached its peak with the gorgeous, hugely detailed, entirely 3D-modelled graphics of SC4. But those are passive pleasures, to be enjoyed once a city has been built. First you must play the game – and its split personality means two different styles of play. You can plan ahead and build with care, tending to your city like a bonsai tree, guiding every stage of growth and clipping and tweaking until it looks just right. This approach is deeply absorbing and can eat up tens of hours of dedicated play; the quality of the graphics has always made a beautiful city a highly desirable end. But that can be a bit boring. Often, a player will just want their city to get big quickly. So indulge in SimCity 4’s kinky secret: the joy of unplanned sprawl. The city is developed hurriedly, with only the loosest plan in mind. Vast zones are laid out without much thought, in artless but easy-to-build grids, and with services added (maybe) as an afterthought. Obviously, this manner of play creates problems – but in SC4, that’s a good thing. Pretty soon, your city is a snarling deathmaze of smog, crime, poverty, dereliction and gridlock. Bliss. These problems must be fixed to keep Gotham growing, but they can be ‘fixed’ in the same haphazard way that the city was thrown up in the first place: quickly, cheaply and dirtily. Roads and train tracks can be punched through run-down inner cities without protest; new business districts can be founded on the outskirts without caring too much about the chaos this will ultimately cause on the roads. Each solution brings a batch of fresh problems.

This approach, with its swift returns and constant challenges, can be the most rewarding and most addictive way to play. Imagine that you lay out a residential district and it immediately develops into Snooty Corners, a rich neighbourhood full of attractive high-wealth houses and well-kept lawns. That part of the game map is pretty much done with – barring vandalism, there’s nothing more you need do to it, so it’s finished, dead, game over. But if it develops into Crystal-Methington, a crime-ridden hellhole full of empty lots and burned-out cars, well, game on, you’ll be revisiting there pretty soon. The appeal of creating a ‘perfect’ city may be what draws players to the game in the first place, but actually perfecting a city is a losing approach. When it’s done – admittedly after what could be tens of hours of play – what else is there to do? You can look at it, but that’s more like owning a fish tank than playing a game. Almost every game is a struggle towards completion and perfection: SimCity gives you the opportunity to reject that goal, and to revel indefinitely in play. Its creator, Will Wright, called it more toy than game. It’s a rare game that can be at its most fun when it’s played ‘badly’.

The reckless style of play can also, oddly, lead to the best results. Cities built as sprawls, full of improvised solutions and gimcrack workarounds, can be very attractive – certainly Maxis put as much aesthetic effort into the low-wealth commercial units and tenement blocks as it did into the pretty-pretty mansions and sparkling skyscrapers. But they’re also appealing, and fun to play, because they most closely resemble real cities. And it’s worth remembering that this high-speed slapdash improvisation is how most real cities grew, and are still growing.

Plus there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? Pah, build it anyway. Sure, you could spend the money on a neat little bus system, but isn’t a glistening motorway just a bit more swanky? Similarly, a vast stadium complex is always going to be more appealing to the ambitious mayor in a hurry, even though a well-funded local library network could yield better results for a fraction of the cost. Huge engineering projects will always be more fun to put together, and more impressive onscreen, than microscopic local initiatives. A mayor should be building suspension bridges and airports – leave the rest to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

There are plenty of real-world examples of civic leaders’ weakness for expensive, grandiose white elephants. But one particular figure stands out: Robert Moses. Moses, an American planner and administrator, came closer to playing SimCity with a real city than anyone else in the free world. Never once holding elected office, he wielded unsurpassed power over the city of New York through mastery of its bureaucratic machinery, diabolical legal chicanery and an eerie knack for raising vast sums of money. Mayors, governors and even presidents were forced to let him have his way. He first used this power to build colossal parks and recreation beaches, making himself wildly popular, but his attention soon turned to highways. When Moses started his career in the 1920s, New York was just beginning to come to terms with automobile traffic. He shaped the way it responded, girdling the city in an elaborate web of freeways and neglecting public transport. These new superhighways often created as many problems as they solved, rapidly choking with cars. They drove suburban sprawl and were built with little regard for the residents who happened to be in the way. More than once, Moses demolished a thriving community to make way for a road, even though a perfectly good alternative route existed. When Moses was finally ousted in the 1960s, the city had an expensive freeway network, but was more jammed with traffic than ever. It was also teetering towards bankruptcy.

Moses did a lot, but he didn’t do his worst. He wanted to slice freeways right across Manhattan itself, through some of the most expensive and crowded urban land in the world. One of these plans, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, was only defeated after a desperate struggle by a small community group led by a writer called Jane Jacobs. In the course of the campaign Jacobs wrote a book, the Death And Life Of American Cities, which defended the dense, mixed neighbourhoods that Moses dismissed as slums and encouraged a view of the city as a complex organism which needed nurturing, not drastic surgery.

Death And Life became a classic, and is still widely read. Among those who were influenced by it was Wright. He built his city sim to resemble a living thing, with scores of interlinked processes and cycles interacting over time in a complex system that the player can adjust and mould – a vision palpably drawn from Jacobs’ work, and cultivated over time into the superbly complex and organic fourth game. Ultimately, then, Robert Moses could be seen as the wicked uncle of SimCity 4, indirectly inspiring it by causing Jacobs to mount her defence of city life. To enshrine Jacobs in a game, Moses had to go in there too – we can share his satisfaction in grand projects and wanton destruction. He’s the dark side of the Force, one half of the duality that makes SimCity 4 so seductive. Planning versus sprawl; micromanagement versus megaprojects; neighbourhoods and localism versus traffic, money and power. Those opposite poles keep the dynamo of SimCity spinning even after seven years; it is still rich and rewarding because it springs from the vital conflicts in our own world.

Learning What Surface Is

Le Corbusier's Weissenhof. This post is part of an effort to dispose of some longstanding draft posts that have been cluttering my Blogger dashboard.

Le Corbusier and other early modernists signposted the modernity of their buildings by photographing them with (then-)state-of-the-art automobiles in front. In the past 30 years that phenomenon has inverted, and for decades now modern buildings have been used to advertise cars. Is this evidence that car design is getting more conservative while architecture still maintained a reputation for high technology and high culture? Almost four years ago I interviewed Chris Bangle, then group design director for BMW, and asked him about the relationship between car design and building design; what he said didn't make it into the published transcript, but is pretty interesting. I came across it while doing a clear-out of old interview transcripts.

When we were doing the first cars in the 1920s, modernist architecture had already taken off. The first steel & glass skyscrapers were already done in the 1940s, and we were doing cars in the 1950s called Baroque [somethings] – so this whole baroque era which architecture had left behind a hundred years before, cars just discovered back then. We didn’t do cars which looked contemporary with a Mies van der Rohe building until let’s say the 1970s or 80s. If you look at the current 7 Series, it looks perfect against Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, which is about very classic surfaces but with very cantilevered forms – that’s were the current 7 Series is. They look perfect together. If you look at the Guggenheim from Bilbao and the C4, they look perfect together – there’s only six years between them. And now, I would say the Z4 is probably the first post-modernist car in the world today. Maybe the 5 Series E4. What will happen when cars become neo-deconstructivist? What will that be? Wow. At the same time the architectural world has switched to our technology - Frank Gehry can only do his buildings because he uses CATIA programs, which were the same programs which were developed for the car industry, and his approach to it is the same way we do cars.

However there are some real interesting differences. The scale difference alone meant that architecture never had to deal with surface before. The idea of a perfect surface for architecure is completely unknown, it doesn’t exist. I’ve had lots of talks with architects about this. It’s wonderful to talk about. You can show them a building and tell them the surface is terrible, and they [react]: “Huh? What surface?”. They don’t even see it because they’re concerned with scale and the impression of space. Cars are about surface. But slowly, slowly, architects are learning surface. I can feel quite proud now that we are having a reverse affect on architects. They will still lead because they are the social moulders of our culture, architects are. We are a component that reflects the culture, but they are the moulders of that culture. I think that’s an important distinction. We hold architects holy in that sense. But at the same time, every piece of architecture is perfect, whereas what we do is mass. And it will be interesting to see what happens when architecture becomes more and more responsive to the exigencies that cars have established and they finally learn what surface is.

Lost

Detail of a photograph from Britain's Lost Cities.

This post has been sitting in Drafts, half-finished, for some months, occasionally pricking me with guilt. The book in question has been out for ages. The post also suffers from a focus problem; ostensibly reviewing the book, I often broaden focus to talk about the heritage brigade (Jenkins, Scruton, Charles, etc) in general, and unpicking the two strands of thought in this rambling post was too horrible to contemplate.

"Encase your legs with nylons*, / Bestride your hills with pylons / O age without a soul" wrote John Betjeman in the poem Inexpensive Progress. It continues, in a later stanza: "And if there is some scenery, / Some unpretentious greenery, / Surviving anywhere, / It does not need protecting / For soon we'll be erecting / A Power Station there." Betjeman's arch sarcasm set the tone for a whole generation of sneering critics of modernisation, sending it down a path towards a prose style now hopelessly mired in cliche and I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Betjeman pastiche (much like their preferred manner of architecture). But Betjeman's view of architecture was a lot more sophisticated than the narrowly dogmatic approach taken by, say, Simon Jenkins or the Prince of Wales. He had opinions that would make Roger Scruton's head spin - for instance writing to Denys Lasdun to praise his design for the National Theatre on the South Bank, that particular bugbear of the trads.

Gavin Stamp is similarly sophisticated. He's among the most articulate and forceful critics of modernist redevelopment and advocates of conservation and traditional "townscape"; these positions are usually expressed through his permanently disappointed "Nooks and Corners" column in Private Eye. But Britain's Lost Cities, his blistering assault on the path of 20th-century British urbanism (now in paperback), is full of nuance and surprises. Stamp's praise for Festival Hall perhaps isn't all that much of a shock; it is now hard to find critics of it. But Stamp is generous to other unlikely buildings: Basil Spence's university library in Edinburgh and John Madin's central library in Birmingham to give just two examples. And he ranges far off the usual rhetorical template, blaming the 1930s as much as the 1960s, and patricians and developers as much as modernist central planners.

Blaming for what? For the destruction of British cities, of course - 20 of them, from London to Glasgow via less familiar places as Worcester and Exeter. Lost Cities is larded with photographs of these cities in their former glory, like the graduation photographs of murder victims that are shown on the news. It's a grim read and appeals strongly to that odd pleasure: tombside melancholy. To look at photographs of places we cannot, can never, see for real is to feel a prisoner in one's time, locked in the bow of a ship while loved ones are thrown off the stern. The photograph keeps grief fresher longer than any other form of image. This is because it was (and is) a vast advance in the technology of memory - and as such it is probably the photograph, not modernism or the Blitz, that gave us the building conservation movement. Without the camera, the heritage movement would never have risen to its present ascendance, and would have remained the fringe pursuit of antiquarianism. It is the product of essentially modern information technology**.

Back to the Lost Cities. I should make it clear that I have nothing against conservation of existing buildings in principle, as a matter of economy and ecology if nothing else. But Britain's Lost Cities isn't intended as a collection of curiosities, it's polemical; it has a point to make, and the point is to horrify us at this wanton destruction (in the hands of SAVE et al, destruction is nearly always "wanton", the two words have been shacked up together since the 1970s and look inseparable now) and to warn us to change our ways, shake our heads at the follies of the past, treat the older parts of towns and cities with renewed respect and treat the no-longer-new-but-not-quite-so-old bits that replaced them with fresh contempt. Central to this heritage-militancy is a national loss of nerve about the New. In the minds of the likes of Jenkins, the New was a modernist invention, but in fact centuries of British architects and city-builders had faith in the New over the Old. The Georgians swept away medieval cities and the Victorians swept away Georgian cities, and hundreds of good and tens of thousands of indifferent buildings were destroyed and places changed their character for better and worse long before the modernists appeared on the scene. The idea - often repeated by the Prince of Wales and others - that previous generations tended their cities bonsai-like, with nailclippers and tweezers, is a myth. And because there aren't photographs of those pre-existing eras, just unfamiliar paintings and drawings, we don't grieve all that much. And Stamp, to his credit, sees this, acknowledging in his introduction that the railways (for instance) were terrifically destructive.

(In other places, he's less sensitive. The laziest and ugliest line that gets trotted out by the heritage tendency and trad architects is that planners and modern architects "did more damage than the Luftwaffe", and variants on this slur do make an appearance; beyond the conflation of well-meaning public policy with area bombing inflicted by a hostile power, this line whitewashes the desperate state that British cities were in before the war. And they get annoyed when the vernacular tastes of the Nazis are brought into the frame.)

But what makes the losses of the 20th century too much for Stamp to bear is the guiding idea that what replaced the eradicated buildings was inferior. Not always - I've already cited where Stamp finds room in his heart for the modernists. But throughout the book the basic assumption that the replacement townscape was inferior is so deeply ingrained that it literally goes without saying. Stamp is a hugely valuable historian and critic, and a good writer, but Britain's Lost Cities sadly falls into line with a general effort to comprehensively malign post-War urban planning. This is to forget the nightmarish challenge that Britain's cities faced in the 20th century: the urgent need to modernise housing, offices, factories, hospitals, schools, everything in fact that the pre-War laissez-faire Big Society had neglected for decades. The militant heritage tendency has made a concerted effort to make modernisation a dirty word (a work that the Blair government colluded in, by applying it to neoliberal "reform" of public services). Since the 1940s some terrible mistakes have been made in British towns and cities, particularly in the name of traffic planning, but it seems at times as if the heritage tendency wants all British post-War planning, whether well-intentioned or dim-witted, to look like a kind of baffling tantrum. Its concerns, the social woes it sought to correct (with much success - the dramatic improvement in public health after the War is down to the council house as well as the NHS), the crises is sought to forestall - these are all to be forgotten. The supposed guardians of the British past really want a dramatic fit of amnesia.

And what are we conserving? The built stock of British cities cannot be completely separated from its use. In those marvellous pictures in Britian's Lost Cities, we see town-centre foundries, Don Cossack Temperance Hotels, socialist debating halls, small factories, family grocers. The visual apparatus, signs and ads, of those places makes for much of what is charming and lively about the street scene. Bringing back those buildings would not bring back those uses. The places that have been "saved" by the heritage movement - Covent Garden and Spitalfields, for instance - have been lost in other ways, taken over by chains and corporations and reduced to prissy, security-patrolled shopping plazas. Why do we no longer have microindustry, small independent shops, public-subscription reading rooms and debating halls? How can we foster those things, and should we? These are vital economic and social questions, and the heritage industry has no answer to them; it is only concerned with artificially preserving remains. And what should we do about server farms and distribution sheds? Pre-1939 townscape could not just carry on; even Pevsner saw that, pointing to the Alton Estate as the way of the future in his recently published "lost" book on visual planning. The idea, peddled by Leon Krier in particular, that modernist planning was a sudden disastrous abandonment of a secure evolutionary path is absurd. The severity of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s to 1970s was largely the result of the fact that they had been held back for decades by the forces of stasis masquerading as "gentle evolution".

So a polemical fixation on heritage alone does not help us understand and nurture the cityscape. Take, for instance, painted advertisements. Painted advertisements and signage on buildings is a crucial element of the lost streetscapes that Stamp mourns. There are repeated calls from the heritage movement to take more care to preserve those examples of painted advertisement that survive. But the reason these paintings are so old, and dwindling, is that advertising and signage were targeted by planners and conservationists in previous decades. If we changed planning law, we could probably restart the production of painted advertisements and incite a festive riot of new neon while we're at it. The ads would be for Toshiba and Viagra rather than Marconi and Beechams pills, for the unignorable economic and social reasons that I mentioned earlier, but they would be painted and perhaps subject to Royal Fine Arts Commission approval. That way, the dwindling supply of older adverts would be less of a pressing concern.

What I'm saying is this: The best way to ensure a steady supply of the Past is to continue to manufacture the Present and the Future. The wholesale rejection of the New has completely failed, giving us only amnesia and routine philistinism. In distrusting development we have, as a country, not stopped development but ceded our ability to shape it and even plan it. In the same month that Stamp accused me of "card-carrying neophilia", my then-boss, former Icon editor Justin McGuirk, was called a neophile by Roger Scruton - and Scruton, like Stamp, believed he was pointing out a character flaw rather than drawing attention to an admirable trait, a telling fact in itself. Commenting on the coincidence on Icon's Scene page, we wrote: "[We] wonderered how [we] could be neophiliacs when so many of the new buildings [we] see are crap." The most vital question in British urban policy is how to build, and what to build; get that right and the question of heritage will be far less important, because it will no longer be a question of preserving a dwindling supply of good buildings, the supply will be kept healthy. The heritage movement has performed many good deeds, preserving some superb buildings that might have been unnecessarily destroyed. But its only contribution to a broader debate about what cities should look like is to foster the attitude that if it's Old, it's Good, if it looks Old, it's Good, and if it has to be New, then it has to look Old. That is a dead end; it is aesthetic decadence, and the stance of a deeply unhealthy, perhaps dying, culture.

Stamp's book is a visual treat and a treasury of interest, though, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.


* Betjeman has a curious kink about female beauty aids, and an even stranger suspicion of life becoming easier. From the famous Slough: "In labour-saving homes, with care / Their wives frizz out peroxide hair / And dry it in synthetic air / And paint their nails."

** SAVE Britain's Heritage grew out of an exhibition of photography.