DIARY
CHARLES MOORE Whenever I am tempted to question the wisdom of anything the Prince of Wales says about architecture, I correct myself by the simple device of turning to the words of Mr Maxwell Hutchinson. Mr Hutchinson is President of the RIBA and as such seems to be considered the chief spokesman of architects. (I suspect that this is rather like the general secretary of the NUJ being taken as the chief spokesman of journal- ists, but if this is the case, I wish some architects would get up and say so.) One got a sense of Mr Hutchinson's powers of argument in a long article ('Why Prince Charles is Wrong') which he contributed to the latest Sunday Telegraph. At the begin- ning of the piece, he says that Prince Charles's views are 'popular'. In the mid- dle, apparently on the strength of a con- versation with a taxi driver in Leeds, he says that the 'vast majority' of people are in favour of all new buildings. At the end, he says that the Prince is not popular: `. . . the mandate for his views on architecture was deduced before it was proven'. And here is Mr Hutchinson on the past: 'The past has gone. We should let it go, but we should also let it stay.' Perhaps the sub-editors cut out the passage in which he told us that the future was yet to come.
But so far as one can extract an argument from Mr Hutchinson, it is that buildings must inevitably progress, and that they are no good if they reflect values of which one does not approve. Of new housing in Skipton which he admits is 'well built and nicely detailed', he asks, 'What on earth has it got to do with the 1980s?' Nothing, I should have thought, except that people alive in the 1980s appear to like living there. 'Are we really saying that a Georgian town house is the apex of urban living?' Well, we might be saying that. It is certainly not an intrinsically absurd pro- position. Some developments in the arts do appear to reach unsurpassable heights: religious painting in the early Renaissance, the realistic novel in the 19th century and SO on. But Mr Hutchinson thinks you cannot like the architecture of the past when it reminds you of something bad. He IS pleased that Victorian and Edwardian civic buildings are being removed because they are 'utterly totalitarian in concep- tion . . . They glorified the hierarchy of a Paternalistic world. These municipal giants Spoke of empire.' Even if one pretends that Mr Hutchinson is right about what these buildings spoke of, would that be a reason for destroying them? The Arch of Titus 'Speaks of empire'. The Great Pyramid Speaks of incest, ancestor worship and Slavery. I would still prefer Mr Hutchinson not to knock them down. Mr Hutchinson is at his most savage on the subject of 'repro': 'Real architecture is real history, not repro.' Of Skipton shopping centre, he writes: 'Ironwork shows the detailing of railway stations and would never have been used in conjunction with granite on so small a scale. Fake London Georgian doors have been grafted on.' I sympathise with his complaint, but I cannot help inspecting Mr Hutchinson's person in the light of it. I saw him at the opening of the Vision of Britain exhibition last week where he wore a dinner jacket with a wing collar. He made this the sartorial equivalent of the fake Georgian door by surmounting it with his thoroughly 1980s haircut (in which a woolly, mop is tightly sculpted). In the picture accom- panying his article in the Sunday Tele- graph, Mr Hutchinson is wearing a stiff turn-down collar with a blue striped shirt. This is 'used in conjunction' with intricate leather braces of a sort that no original wearer of such a collar and shirt would ever have contemplated (let alone allowed to be photographed). I'm afraid Mr Hutchinson is as repro as they come.
0 ur loutish ways are now a national obsession. Last Thursday every British newspaper was full of headlines of the 'England's night of shame', 'Scum!', 'Animals!' variety. Even the Times said '500 England fans held in riot round-up', although it was not clear what the word 'held' meant, given that only 100 fans were arrested. When one reads the details of the reports, however, one finds that nothing much happened and that what did happen was often instigated by Swedes. The chief of police in Solna was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying, 'The English fans were fine . . . . I have nothing negative to say about them. Our problems have been with Swedish fans.' Nevertheless, the Con- servative MP, Mr John Carlisle, half- wittedly demanded the recall of Parliament to rush through the Football Spectators Bill. The Prime Minister gave it out that she thought the events in Stockholm `de- plorable, shameful and bad news for Bri- tain'. Were they really so terrible? People seem to want to attribute almost super- natural powers for evil to a fairly small number of boring yobs.
Last week I attended a dinner given by our proprietor, Mr Conrad Black, with the board of his company, Hollinger, which owns the Telegraph Group and also The Spectator. At this glittering occasion were several very rich businessmen and when we were drinking beforehand I fell into heated argument with a distinguished novelist about their kind. She said that she wasn't prepared to speak to such people because they were interested in a basically boring thing — making money — and anyway as far as women went they only wanted to talk to 18-year-old girls with huge breasts. I didn't feel I could refute the breasts point, but I did try to argue against the idea that the way money works and is made is uninteresting (although I admit this is not the same as saying that all the people who make it are fascinating or admirable). I put it rather incoherently at the time, but worked out afterwards that what I had been trying to say was that contempt for money (though not the foreswearing of money) is a form of philistinism. The existence and operation of money is one of the most amazing cultural achievements. The fact that people agree to attribute value to bits of metal and pieces of paper and to promises of more bits and pieces is a mark of a sophisticated civilisation and therefore very interesting.
nother form of philistinism, one of which I am guilty, is an ignorance of science. The Spectator shares this guilt, and now is trying to do something about it. What better bridge than one constructed by a novelist? William Cooper is well known, though not the household word that he should be, for his sequence of works which began in 1950 with Scenes from Provincial Life. He is also, by educa- tion, a scientist, and I am very pleased that he has been persuaded to return to the subject and contribute a short weekly column for us about it. His first column appears on p.18. Next week's Diarist is Alan Rusbridger.
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