Build on the past
Sir: Simon Thurley (‘Britain is being demolished’, 17 November) calls us to think again before politicians, short-term financiers and architects repeat all the mistakes we made after the war. I well remember as a student in the 1950s being exhorted by duffle-coated and starry-eyed tutors to ‘change the face of Britain’. Sadly, we have. And still we have not learnt the lesson.
Simon Thurley asks ‘will we get anything better than we did in the 1960s and ’70s?’ and, ‘Will old and new be blended successfully to make beautiful places?’ It isn’t really a question of style or of consciously making a beautiful place. A Modernist building from its conception to its demise and beyond is an environmental disaster. Even before it leaves the drawing-board an inordinate amount of fossil fuel is consumed in the manufacture of its materials: steel, concrete, glass slabs and plastic. During its short life of 40 years or so it consumes further excessive quantities of energy in order to function — air-conditioning, lifts etc., and finally after its demise it cannot be recycled, so more landfill sites are needed for its burial. The whole process is then repeated to last another 40 years.
No, we will not get anything better until we admit that modern materials and methods of construction — though impressive like cars or fridges of the latest design — are not suitable for constructing buildings which last, which don’t use up the resources of the earth and which are not part of the throwaway mentality of our age.
There was a time before the discovery of coal, oil and gas when there was only one way to build well. Buildings had solid brick and stone walls and timber pitched roofs covered in slate or tile. They made up the entire fabric of Rome, Paris, 18th-century London, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, to name but a few. They remain as silent witnesses today.
Is it too late to call architects and builders to learn from the way these cities were constructed and have the humility to do likewise?
Quinlan Terry
Colchester
Powell was no racist
Sir: Randhir Singh Bains (Letters, 17 November) is being disingenuous when he argues that Enoch Powell was, indeed, a racist because the main thrust of his concern was against ‘coloured, not white, immigration’.
But Powell was concerned about culture — not race or colour ‘per se’. Powell was warning the indigenous British population about the dangers of uncontrolled large-scale immigration from countries whose religion and culture were wholly alien to that of the host nation, particularly where they chose to settle in large numbers in close proximity to each other.
He feared the consequences of allowing them to replace the host’s culture with their own and establish ghetto monocultures, created parallel to, but separate from, that of their host country. He believed (rightly as events have proved) that such immigrant cultures were, as they remain today, incapable of being integrated into mainstream Britain.
No one can deny that this has happened, and on a scale vaster than even Powell could have imagined. The fact that such immigrants were of a different colour was simply not an issue to him — but he did believe that he had a duty as a politician to warn the British people of the dangers to their society should their government continue to permit such immigration to continue.
Richard Longfield
Basingstoke, Hants
Old-fashioned murder
Sir: There’s not the slightest hint in George Orwell’s essay that the murders people liked to read about ‘were the consequence of a hypocritical society’ (Roy Liddle, ‘The Foxy Knoxy case’, 17 November). Of course there were hypocrites. But the hypocrisy that led to murder was that of the murderer: he valued his reputation as good family man so strongly that he protected his relapse into sexual sin by murder. Orwell wrote the essay when conscienceless killings of the Meredith Kercher type had begun to appear for the first time. That’s why he called the essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ — murder with a moral dimension at its heart was being replaced by murder in the no man’s land of selfish sexual nihilism.
Norman Dennis
Director of Community Studies, Civitas, London SW1
Library’s silent majority
Sir: In his letter disputing Paul Barker’s account of the London Library’s recent AGM (17 November), Richard Davenport-Hines repeats the slur he made at the meeting, that members who object to the near-doubling of fees are a bunch of middle-class scroungers who have been abusing the library’s generosity for years. This doesn’t add up. The average member takes out ten books a year, most of which could be bought more cheaply on Amazon. The truth is that the London Library is itself supported by a silent, sizeable minority, some of whom go for years without taking out any books but keep up their subscriptions out of a desire to support a wonderful institution.
If the library is a charity, who are its beneficiaries? Davenport-Hines suggests that only the rich deserve to belong. Meanwhile, like the Trustees, he scrupulously ignores the elephant in the corner of the reading room, the library’s overambitious expansion into Mason’s Yard which has already swallowed several million pounds’ worth of endowment, and for which architects Haworth Tompkins have commissioned toilet blocks from Turner Prize-winner Martin Creed — apparently a worthier recipient of the library’s charity than the shabby literati for whom it was created.
Laura Gascoigne
London NW3
Voices off
Sir: It was good to find Bryan Forbes a television-shouting supporter (‘Shouting at my telly’, 17 November). I join with him, especially in vocally denouncing background music. It is difficult enough for one of my advanced years watching crime thrillers to fathom why on earth who has killed whom. It is doubly difficult when totally irrelevant music drowns the dialogue. Another phenomenon which causes my hackles — and voice — to rise is mispronunciation. Am I alone in shouting ‘kilometre’ when a speaker (who would never dream of saying centimetre) stresses the second syllable?
Eric Dehn
Bristol
I raised a 3 A.M. Girl
Sir: Unlike Rachel Johnson, I was delighted to introduce a daughter as a 3 A.M. Girl (‘Can anyone be a writer now?’, 17 November). Jessica was one of the three ‘founding sisters’ of the Daily Mirror column, stayed on it for five years, and then produced Wicked Whispers, an hilarious account of celebrity-bashing recently published by Michael Joseph.
I would have been far less enthusiastic in introducing her as a Guardian headbanger whingeing about the environment or, worse, wasting her time writing mind-numbing features for the Independent that would be read by three people in Notting Hill.
Paul Callan
London, SW1
Sir: If Melanie Phillips had checked her facts – or checked with the subject of her article – she would have avoided making assertions about Mr. Khalid Bin Mahfouz which are wrong (‘The Lights go out in Britain’, 20 November).
Mr. Bin Mahfouz — who has publicly condemned terrorism– has not used English libel laws “to suppress evidence about the alleged links between Saudi financing and terrorism,” but to shed much-needed light on this topic. By openly confronting stories that had linked him to funding of terrorism through his role as head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Bin Mahfouz has demonstrated convincingly that there is no factual basis for these claims. He has not sued 30 publications, as Ms Phillips suggests, but 4. In dozens of other instances, publications that have repeated these allegations have promptly and publicly apologized, usually without any threat of litigation, because it was evident from material publicly available that there was no evidence to support these sensational and extremely defamatory claims.
Much of this material is summarized by Mr. Justice Eady in his Judgment against Rachel Ehrenfeld (posted at http://www.binmahfouz.info/news_20050503_full.html). As the Court made clear, Ms. Ehrenfeld is indeed “fighting a lonely battle” –not against “libel tourism,” as Phillips suggests, but against the truth. Rather than check her facts, defend her statements in open court, or acknowledge her mistakes, Ehrenfeld hides behind a claim to free speech. Thank goodness, the legal lights remain on in Britain to expose such harmful journalism.
Yours faithfully
Laurence Harris
Kendall Freeman
Solicitors for Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz
London
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