The 1964 Shakespeare exhibition

This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s first folio. This was prepared by two of the late bard’s colleagues, and includes the text for 36 of his plays. This anniversary has been celebrated by programmes on television but is not the first or most important commemoration of Shakespeare’s life that I remember. In 1964, the 400th anniversary of his birth was marked by an exhibition in Stratford-upon-Avon, located on the meadows in front of the Memorial Theatre. This was an easy journey from my home at that time, and I visited the exhibition several times. ‘Several times’ because I found it an overwhelming experience.

The exhibition followed the life of the great man describing his life in the first person. Attendance meant walking through a series of rooms, each prepared by a different set of artists. Two rooms in particular stay in the memory. The first was a long gallery, decorated in Elizabethan-style wood-panelling with portraits on one side and a view through windows of the City of London across the Thames. The second was a reproduction of the Globe Theatre, with the voices of famous actors reading select speeches from the plays.

A modern version of this exhibition would no doubt use CGI and other technologies to impress its audience. But the exhibition in 1964, like theatre itself, reaches us through our imagination and through the power of words. Many years later, I went to a performance of The Tempest in Vancouver. This may have been Shakespeare’s last play, and there is speculation that he himself acted the role of Prospero. Near the end of the play, this character reviews life and art thus:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And — like the baseless fabric of this vision -
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…”

I found this speech, like the exhibition all those years ago, emotionally overwhelming. Our little lives pass into history, but some words live forever.

The Commonwealth Games experience

 

On the 6th August, I went to the Commonwealth Games with my wife Marion, son Andrew, and Andrew’s partner Kate. We saw the rhythmic gymnastic competition in the Indoor Arena in the centre of Birmingham. Here are some random observations.

1.    Sport is a form of entertainment, but a key part of that entertainment is the skill displayed by the competitors. Most athletic events are derived from the earliest form of martial arts, based on fighting, running, throwing and jumping, supported by horsemanship and various regulated forms of group conflict such as football. Gymnastics owes more to circus arts: the female gymnasts wore sparkly leotards and were marked for artistry as well as dexterity. But it was impossible not to admire their great skill nor to feel the disappointment with every small error in their routines. The venue enhanced the entertainment of the event, by providing a disco during intervals, and issuing spectators with wristbands which glowed in unison at certain points in the show.

2.    The Games were a model of efficiency. The Commonwealth Games involved over 5000 athletes from 72 countries, taking part in multiple venues in different cities and towns across the West Midlands (including a velodrome in London). Despite having limited notice after Durban withdrew from organising the Games, the venues in Birmingham were all ready on time, the athletes and officials were all housed, the media operated without a hitch, and there was a constant supply of entertainment for the crowds in the City Centre. There were thousands of very helpful volunteers, and public transport to events was free.

3.    There was great pride in the City among local people. UK media is dominated by London, and shows limited interest in the distinctive history and culture of each of the other great cities in this country. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games was a celebration of Birmingham’s industrial past and its significant contribution to popular music. The City centre looked splendid in the sunshine, and local people expressed pride in their city, albeit in the usual downbeat Brummie way.

4.    Crowds are fun. When we left the Arena, a vast host passed over the canal bridges, through Centenary Square, Chamberlain Square and Victoria Square. There was no jostling, and everyone looked happy. This was my first experience of going to a large public event for some years, and I had forgotten the exhilaration felt by people who are part of a large purposeful crowd. I realise that this must be a common experience among people who go to football matches or festivals. 

5.    The best art is that acclaimed by the public. The highlight of the opening and closing ceremonies was the huge mechanical Raging Bull, which moved and appeared to breathe fire and smoke. During the games, this was placed in Centenary Square, and was immensely popular - so much so that the City Council agreed to find a permanent indoor venue to house it after the Games. The public acclaim for this artwork contrasts with the annual awards of the Turner Prize for art, which are usually known to few and approved by even less. Turner prize-winners do, however, seem to enhance the fortunes of a small number of London art galleries and their patrons who purchase artworks as a form of ‘wealth-protection’. The public have a more refined taste in art because they value it for its appearance and the emotional impact it has, and not for what it does for their personal bank-balance. 

Educating for the arts

I have been very fortunate in life. The greatest benefit of all was to have been born to two parents who loved each other and loved their children, and who were able to support their family to a decent and reliable standard of living. When I was a child, my mother worked as a shop assistant and later in a (pre-computer) clerical job. My father was a welder with Land Rover, first in Solihull and later at Garrison Street in Birmingham. Both were emphatic about the need for their two sons to be educated to the greatest extent of our ability. Many working-class families shared this drive for education and saw it as a way of ensuring that their children had a better life and more fulfilling work than they had experienced themselves. In my father’s case, an additional motive may have been his failure (at the final interview stage) to gain a scholarship for his local grammar school. He must have been keenly aware of how different his life would have been had the interview panel decided he was the ‘right kind of chap’.

This view of higher education as a means to a more prosperous life still predominates in England, both popularly and in government policy. The expansion in the number of university places is often presented as a means of improving the long-term productivity of the labour-force, while, at an individual level, enhancing the earning power of graduates. Neither argument is totally convincing. Productivity in the UK has been near-stagnant since 2008, despite the increase in the proportion of school-leavers going to university. Graduates do indeed earn about £100,000 more across their lifetime than non-graduates. However, this benefit varies greatly according to which course and which university people attend. There is also the possibility that some graduates would have boosted their earnings by a similar amount if they had chosen to take an apprenticeship or learn a trade rather than go to university.

Those actually doing the educating often have different ideas of what higher education is for. They usually love the subject they teach and have pleasure in seeing their students come to appreciate it. Students themselves often see going to university as the key stage in attaining adulthood, leaving home and often being based near the centre of a big city with all its cultural attractions. That was certainly my experience, moving from a dull suburb of Birmingham to a university in the very centre of London. For the first time, I saw a live ballet performance and attended a concert of classical music. I had already spent many hours in Birmingham Art Gallery on my way back home from school, but now I was able to visit the great art galleries and museums of London. In place of endless rows of detached and semi-detached houses, I could view the great sweep of Regents Street, and visit the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the surviving alleys of the City of London and the Temple. I had often gone to the local cinema with my parents, but now I could join the British Film Institute as a student member and see classic films from around the world.

You do not of course need to go to university to appreciate the arts. My father had a friend who worked with him on the Land Rover assembly line, who had a beautiful counter-tenor voice and performed in concerts. Another of my parents’ friend was an ardent follower of the Russian composer Scriabin. My wife’s father worked as a toolmaker and her mother as a hospital cleaner, but both had a deep love of music and ballet. Her father played the organ and attended the organ recitals by George Thalben-Ball in Birmingham Town Hall. Her mother took my wife to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see ballet performances. There is also widespread active participation in the arts. All round the country, there are many brass bands and other groups of amateur musicians, amateur choirs and amateur theatre groups. Most of these, however, are now in temporary abeyance because of coronavirus restrictions. People have been forced to drop participation in the arts for the passive receipt of mass culture via television and home computer. 

How church buildings learn

From where I am sitting in my house, I can see through the winter trees to our parish church. St. Peter’s Church in Martley was built in the 12th Century, from red sandstone, quarried nearby. The church was extended in phases over the next 200 years, with a fine tower added in the mid-15th Century. The latter contains a ring of six great bells, cast on the site in 1673. It is claimed that these are the oldest complete set of bells in England. At some time after the Reformation, pews and an West gallery were added to the church, but these were removed when the church was restored in 1909. What remains after all these changes is a standard medieval English village church, made of local stone, shaped like a long box with a tower at the West end. From a stroll round the building, between the ancient gravestones, it is easy to see how parts have been added and taken away over the centuries.

The church at present is warm and welcoming. More important than that, it exudes a sense of holiness, accrued from generations who have prayed and voiced the liturgy. Despite the nine centuries of its existence and the many changes in the styles of worship over that time, the parish church serves its purpose well.

Eight miles away, the Church of England is demolishing a much younger building. Holy Trinity and St Matthew’s in Worcester was built in 1965, in what was then a fashionable circular form. Problems accumulated with the building. There were boiler failures, condensation and leaks. The church closed for worship in 2012 after part of the roof collapsed. The Parochial Church Council found that it would have cost half a million pounds to fix the building, and decided on demolition and replacement.

A faulty round church built in the 1960s is a minor example of crapitecture, but it also illustrates the wisdom of Stewart Brand, set out in his great book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built . Brand proposed that buildings should be made from low-cost, standard designs that people are familiar with, and which can easily be modified. People are then able to gradually change their buildings to meet their changing needs. Martley parish church is an example of a simple design (a stone box with a wooden roof) that was a widely-understood standard design for a small church in the Middle Ages. Bits were added over the centuries. If Martley had grown into a town instead of remaining a village, aisles would have been added and the roof raised. Perhaps the nave would have been lengthened. All of this would have been carried out by skilled stonemasons who occasionally experimented, but usually employed tried-and-tested methods.

Brand contrasted his preferred approach with that used in much of architecture today. The modernist idea that ‘form follows function’ (ie buildings should be designed according to how they should be used) is wrong because the functions of all buildings change (often before construction is completed). Designing a building for a specific set of functions can thus impede necessary adaptation. The use of exciting new materials and techniques may win architectural prizes, but it makes the building an experiment in which its occupants become the guinea-pigs. The round drum-like building of Holy Trinity and St Matthew’s was designed for a specific purpose and could not easily be adapted. It used new techniques which failed to keep the building dry. Let us hope those who design its replacement learn from church buildings which have stood for 900 years.

See also: A guide to crapitecture

A self-educated Shakespeare

Behind every event in history, behind every human achievement, there lurks a conspiracy theory. There are those who propose that the twin towers in New York were destroyed by a vast conspiracy of the CIA, Israel and/or George Bush, that John Kennedy was assassinated by another vast conspiracy comprising Lyndon Johnson, the Mafia and the Cuban Government, that all the Apollo moon landings were faked, and that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him by those who knew him well.

Bill Bryson has reviewed the Shakespeare conspiracy theories in his excellent book Shakespeare: the World as a Stage. He notes that no-one ever dreamt of suggesting an alternative author until the middle of the 19th Century, when an American writer proposed that the Shakespeare’s plays and poems had really been written by Sir Francis Bacon (later Viscount St Albans). Candidates put forward by later conspiracy theorists have included The 17th Earl of Oxford (who died several years before many of the plays were first performed) and the 3rd Earl of Southampton. No direct evidence has ever been proposed to support these bizarre theories, but they usually rest on two assumptions, which say rather more about the conspiracy theorists than about Shakespeare himself.

The first assumption is that Shakespeare could not have been the author because he was not an aristocrat (and therefore could not have been clever enough). However, it is rather hard to think of any of members of the English aristocracy, now or in the past, who have written a decent play or poem. In Shakespeare’s time, members of the aristocracy certainly supported, funded and protected artists, but they would no more have thought of writing plays than of polishing their own brasses or mucking out their own stables. Writing plays at that time was an artisan activity, comparable to writing modern television soap operas. I have speculated in an earlier blog that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to order as a financial transaction. The idea that only an aristocrat could possibly have written such superb works of imagination tells us that the proponents of this conspiracy theory are appalling snobs.

The second assumption is that Shakespeare could not have written his works because he did not go to university, and therefore could not learnt about the classics. However, he almost certainly did go to Stratford Grammar School where (in common with other such schools of that time), ‘grammar’ meant Latin grammar. Pupils studied the classics in Latin from dawn to dusk in at atmosphere of compulsory and relentless learning backed by harsh punishment. Although these educational methods are no longer in favour, they were probably effective in inculcating knowledge. Shakespeare may have emerged with a better grasp of the classic dramas and poetry than all but a few present-day university graduates specialising in these subjects.

But of course, formal education is only a part of learning. People with active minds go on learning throughout their lives. They learn new skills and improve existing ones, travel to new places, and accumulate knowledge about new areas of interest. Such people, whatever they have learnt in formal schooling, are essentially self-educated. Self-education not only means that people develop new skills and knowledge, but it helps them maintain what they have already learnt. For knowledge is not like a sheaf of papers put in a filing cabinet, available to a person when required. Rather, it is like a channel, which will silt up unless water constantly flows through it.

People who do not have active minds can only absorb what they have been taught in schools or universities, and learn nothing subsequently. They therefore find it incomprehensible that a person can become educated through his or her own efforts - that a glover’s son from a small market town could learn the skills to become an actor, playwright and poet, or possess the imagination to describe the dramas of people in distant lands and far-off times.




See also: Yet another theory about Shakespeare's sonnets

My holiday home in Ruritania

I went earlier this month with my wife to see Coppélia, performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet. This was a great experience, and reminded me so much of our beloved holiday home in Ruritania. As I am sure you know, Ruritania is located in the heart of Mitteleuropa. We do not have a coastline, but there is a varied landscape of lakes, mountains, fields of golden wheat, and dark mysterious forests. Our holiday home is in a picturesque village (all the villages in Ruritania are picturesque), full of timber-framed houses with projecting eaves and crooked chimneys. Along the street, there is the village ale-house, outside which many of our jolly peasants sit drinking and laughing. From time to time, they jump up and start dancing enthusiastically. Across the street from the ale-house lives a comical old inventor, who builds lifelike dolls with ingenious clockwork mechanisms to move their arms and legs.

There are few motor vehicles or trains in Ruritania, but many elegant horse-drawn carriages. Nor is Ruritania influenced by modern fashions: all our peasants wear elegant well-cut clothes, brightly-coloured, with cloaks, boots and hats. The local aristocracy are particularly well-dressed: the wife of the local prince is strikingly beautiful and is said to be violently jealous of any woman who is deemed more lovely.

Life in Ruritania is not all feasting and dancing, however. Few venture out into the forests at night. It is rumoured that young men who have been unfaithful and thereby caused the death of their lovers are haunted by their ghosts and forced to dance until they expire from exhaustion. Some say that at night the swans in the lake near our village turn into beautiful young women. Children who walk alone through the forests seem particularly at risk, and there are disturbing tales of them being chased by wolves or lured by evil old women promising gingerbread - a local delicacy.

When in Ruritania, my wife and I usually visit one or more of the local castles. One near our holiday home was abandoned about 20 years ago and is now completely overgrown with giant brambles. A more interesting castle just up the valley is the home of ancient line of counts, though these are rarely seen around the place during daytime. We have also visited the capital city Strelsau, which is of course the home of Ruritania’s royal family. Some people say the king looks a bit like me, but it would be a work of utter fiction if the two of us were ever confused.

The new modern and heritage motorways

A film critic noted many years ago that French films always seemed to include a scene of family meals around a garden table, while British films generally featured trains pulled by steam engines. The love of steam engines is now obsessional for many people. A thousand or so steam engines in Britain operate on about 150 standard gauge and narrow gauge ‘heritage railways’. All are maintained by amateurs, who spend years of their lives restoring and maintaining machinery that is over 50 years old. They would probably regard it as near-sacrilege to refer to a steam engine as a mere ‘machine’. It is a gleaming, living being, hissing and snorting, fed coal and water, and oiled and polished by its devoted attendants.

It was not always so. I remember as a child my excitement when I travelled on my first diesel-powered train. How much more modern than the dirty black tank engines used by British Railways. The modern world we imagined in the 1950s consisted of fast cars and motorways, concrete and glass skyscrapers, television and jet aircraft. Soon, it seemed, we would be able to fly all over the world and even to other planets. To be modern therefore meant scrapping steam engines, trams, and most of our railways altogether, demolishing smoky Victorian buildings, and clearing land in town centres to widen roads and create urban motorways. People would live in high-rise flats surrounded by parkland, and drive their cars to supermarkets. No town was exempt from this vision of modernity. Birmingham City Council demolished the town square (the Bullring) and replaced it by roads with tunnels underneath for people who persisted in walking rather than driving. Edinburgh commissioned Sir Colin Buchanan to design a would-be urban motorway cutting under Calton Hill, by bridge across to the Royal Mile, thereby cutting in half the most historic street in all Scotland. Edinburgh was lucky: no political party had a majority on the City Council and so there was no dynamic leader to enforce this insanity. Birmingham was less fortunate.

Since the 1960s, modernity has changed. It now means pedestrian-only city centres, efficient urban tram systems, old buildings restored and converted for new uses, and open-air cafes selling good coffee and Mediterranean food. The best new buildings either look like restored old ones or are shaped in strange round forms. Anything in fact, to escape from the square concrete blockhouses inflicted by modernist architects of the 1960s. High-rise blocks of flats are being demolished, usually to the cheers of their former residents. Supermarkets still survive, but may soon begin a long decline as people switch to home delivery. Cities compete for funding to build new urban tramways, often using the same routes as the ones torn up over 50 years earlier. Every country in Europe has, or plans to have, high-speed trains linking its major cities.

How far will this new modernity go? Perhaps motorways will one day seem quaint items of nostalgia. Old driving enthusiasts - possibly an elderly Jeremy Clarkson - will drive their ancient Ferraris up and down short stretches of heritage motorway kept in operation by dedicated preservation movements.

Costume nostalgia

On Friday January 4th, my wife and I went to a Viennese New Year concert, three days late and in Malvern rather than Vienna. Nevertheless, this was an excellent event. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was in fine form, and played not just the usual Strauss waltzes and polkas but also music by composers inspired by the Strauss family. These included Lehar’s Gold and Silver Waltz, which was composed in 1902 for a grand ball in Vienna organised by Princess von Metternich-Sándor. As the music played, I closed my eyes and imagined that ball. It would have been held in an ornate baroque palace. The women would have worn long flowing gowns in bright colours, with ostrich feathers in their hair. The men would have worn white ties and tails, although some would have been in the dress military uniforms of the Imperial Army, with golden epaulettes and shiny cavalry boots. I opened my eyes and looked around the audience in Malvern: all wearing the usual drab clothes of the English.

When did we stop wearing brightly-coloured clothes? In the 1960s and 70s, we walked around in bright colours. I once had some purple trousers and a red cheesecloth shirt. Now my wardrobe consists entirely on blues, dark browns and blacks, although I do occasionally wear a red tie. The idea of dressing up for special events is also in decline. Many people now turn up at funerals in their ordinary day clothes - the men without even a black tie. There are some exceptions. Weddings remain an occasion for dressing up, and young women will still spend hours getting ready to go out in the evening. But look at any picture of an African market for a different attitude to everyday clothing. The women have headscarfs and dresses printed in the brightest colours. The men might wear jeans, but they will top this with a red, blue or yellow shirt.

If clothes are a form of self-expression, then the clothes we wear in England express misery and tedium. More joyous self-expression is now vicarious, demonstrated in the popularity of the many ‘costume dramas’ on television and film. Watch an episode of Poirot or Downton Abbey, and you see wealthy people in the 1930s dressing up in their most formal clothes even to eat dinner in their own homes. The various adaptations of Jane Austen novels show women in flowing empire-line dresses, and men in stylish clothes that set off their figures.

Many of these costume dramas were not written as such. Jane Austen wrote books about moral dilemmas among her contemporaries. Although the television adaptations of Agatha Christie’s books are set in 1936 (Poirot) or 1952 (Miss Marple), the original texts were published over several decades and were set in the times they were written. But television producers know that the public are fascinated by the costumes and formal behaviour of an earlier time. Viewers are more interested in looking at the suits and dresses than in who exactly murdered who and why.  

It is possible that this vicarious enjoyment of costume on television is itself a cause of the universal drabness of our clothing. The young man who sits for hours in front of his computer watching pornography but is too timid to ask a woman out; or the person who watches television programmes in which cordon bleu cooks prepare wonderful meals but who then warms up a ready meal for his dinner - these are examples of the vicarious eliminating the actual. It is after all striking that the world of drab clothing began at about the same time that colour television began to dominate our waking hours.

See also:
What old men wear
The land of make believe

Living the cliché: I remember the sixties

Yes, I remember the 1960s, even though I was there. I had of course spent the late 1950s as a teenage soldier fighting with Fidel in the Sierra Madre. But now I was back in London smoking dope with Mick and Keith, going to mass protests in Grosvenor Square, and raving at the Isle of Wight Festival. I rode the hippie trail to Katmandu, and went to the summer of love in San Francisco, but most of the time I lived in a squat in Chelsea. I naturally had long hair and a beard and wore a flowery shirt and kaftan (bought in Carnaby Street). I had free love with so many girls, who wore (successively) miniskirts, hotpants, and maxi-skirts. I remember that they all had long straight blond hair and lots of black eye shadow (although it was hard to tell because of all the Pink Floyd strobe lights in the discos we went to).

What happy days they were - for someone else. Actually, I was only 13 at the start of the sixties. After a miserable time at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, I spent a year in Handsworth Technical College doing a new set of social science A-levels (which were not taught in King Edward’s School), and went to the London School of Economics. I left in 1968 and started a master’s degree at the University of Strathclyde. I lived in Streatham, Finsbury Park and Glasgow, and never in a squat. Nor did I ever take drugs, though I drank a fair quantity of beer. I did go out with one blonde, but she had shortish hair and was careful with the eye makeup. I am ashamed to admit that I had a flowery shirt and for a time did have a beard.

My experiences of living in the 1960s were probably quite similar to those of many other people of my age. But when I think back, my personal history has become infested with another set of memories: the tired collection of recycled clips and clichés that appear on television programmes about that decade. This raises an important question: at what point do people reject their own memories and start inserting fictional ones in their place? The only corrective to this tendency may be some kind of home-made reminiscence therapy: watch contemporary films made in Britain, which show what the streets looked like, how people dressed, and how they spoke to each other. I recommend you start with A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life, The Ipcress File, and Alfie.

The land of make-believe

You are watching the television programme Who do you think you are?, in which a famous person traces their family background. They start by visiting an aged relative. You see the famous person in their car talking about what they expect to learn from this visit and why this is important to them. You next see the car pulling up to the house of the aged relative and the famous person getting out and going to the front door. Inside the house, you see the aged relative go the front door, open it, and say “What a surprise”.

It is not a surprise, of course. There is a cameraman in the house, probably supported by a producer, a lighting engineer and a sound engineer. The scene will have been carefully set up. The scenes outside the house and in the car (perhaps filmed on a different day) will also have been rehearsed and then edited. The whole scene, in other words, is a skilful fraud. But it is fraud we are used to in factual programmes just as much as in film and television drama. This is the ‘naturalistic’ model, or the pretence that we watch people behaving spontaneously in the complete absence of all the cameras and the teams of people that make the pictures and sound happen. We are so used to this fraud that we no longer see it as such. When we see a lone presenter walking across the moors or up a mountain, we believe she is alone on the hills. Yet we see pictures of her taken from a helicopter, or pictures of her struggling up to some peak taken by a cameraman waiting for her on that peak. We are led to believe the commentator has walked the whole distance by themselves and found their own accommodation or pitched their own tent. The true surprise occurs when a commentator on television does mention his cameraman or production crew.

The frauds can go further. Wildlife programmes intersperse shots of animals in the wild (usually taken by highly-skilled camera team after weeks of careful work) with pictures of similar animals in zoos. This is all to give the impression that when we see an animal such as a polar bear go into its lair in the wild, we are then seeing the same polar bear in its lair feeding its cubs even though these later shots are actually of a different polar bear filmed in a zoo. ‘Reality’ television programmes involve set piece arguments provoked by a presenter, all to give the impression that the performers before us present a shocking insight into the raw side of life. More shamefully, contests on children’s television programmes have been fixed to produce the most entertaining outcome. 

This does not occur because the people who produce television are any more dishonest than the rest of us. Rather, they would probably justify these deceptions on the grounds that they help viewers comprehend an underlying truth (what family history tells us of the past, what a particular long walk is like, how polar bears feed their young, and so on). But they also do so to conform with the public’s expectations of television, derived in turn from films and other drama which, with very few exceptions, obey the ‘naturalistic’ model. This is so well-established that a whole genre of comic television programmes exists in which a presenter points out examples where the mechanics of film-making have accidentally been made evident (a visible sound boom or a shot of a camera crew in a mirror). These programmes are supposed to be funny because they show a breach of a sacrosanct social convention.

This is very different from drama on stage, in which it is more evident that we are watching actors portraying characters and following a script written for them. A good actor can make the audience forget this, provided the audience are engaged. Television, by contrast, requires less engagement by its audience and less suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the naturalistic model and the lack of apparent difference between factual and fictional programmes is a cause of morbid confusion for some television viewers, who send flowers when a character (not an actor) in a soap opera dies. Others have interpreted science fiction films and television programmes as the truth and truly believe that a race of intelligent reptiles have taken on the appearance of world leaders, or that the moon landings were an elaborate fake. For them, television (whatever they are watching) is the true reality, while their daily lives are but flickering images on the walls of the cave.

A guide to crapitecture

Two years ago on a cold November day, I visited the Nottingham Contemporary - a new centre for the arts resembling a square black box, built on the side of a hill next to the splendid High Pavement area of the City. When we had eventually found the entrance, we discovered that there were no exhibitions at all that day, although the staff did tell us that we were free to use the (over-priced) café and buy things in the large museum shop.

Nottingham Contemporary is a archetype of what should be called ‘crapitecture’, which can be recognised from these guidelines:

1.    It is difficult to find the entrance. Before the rise of crapitecture, all builders and architects strove to make the entrance as imposing as possible. This was achieved through porticos, archways, and gatehouses. Even humble dwellings had a front door, plainly visible, often painted in bright colours to indicate the pride of the inhabitant. But crapitects see their work as a personal statement of their artistic merit - a kind of very large sculpture, and there is no front door on a sculpture.

2.    It fails in the most basic sense to meet the requirements of its occupiers. Like the Nottingham Contemporary (an art gallery without any art), crapitectural buildings fail in the most basic way to fulfill their function. Roofs leak (it helps if they are flat), vast interior atriums waste most of the internal space of the building and are expensive to heat, libraries are over-heated and noisy, and so on. Of course, the lack of exhibits is not the fault of the architects who built the Nottingham Contemporary, but there is an increasing tendency for museum buildings to attract more attention and cost more than the items they supposedly exist to display.

3.    It is located with no reference to the surrounding townscape, except in the negative sense of destroying a previously attractive local view or dominating all nearby buildings. All of us have a favourite list of such crapitectural buildings. Like most British cities, much of Nottingham has been defaced by grotesque developments - the Broadmarsh Centre which blocks off a medieval street, or the utterly vile Maid Marian Way. Nottingham Contemporary does not quite deface one of the best remaining areas of townscape in the City, but it hardly adds to it. Did the architects even visit the site?

4.    It is widely praised in the architectural press. The website for the Nottingham Contemporary includes a long list of quotations extolling its virtues. Fortunately, there are rival voices in architecture, such as the annual Carbuncle Awards (website below).


All this might suggest that the people of Nottingham have neglectfully allowed their city to be defaced without protest. I suspect that is not the case, and, that like most people in this country, they are dispirited at what has been done to their beloved city, town or village. Bad architecture exists because people have limited power over what is built in their community. In the past, the aristocrats, merchants and bishops who had the power and resources to erect great buildings often had an eye for beauty, and so competed to build the most beautiful buildings. More importantly, they also erected buildings that they would themselves live, work or worship in. Monumental buildings now are often the product of corporations working with international design consultancies, and are built with an eye to the next customer in Dubai, Shanghai, and such places. Once built, they become a temporary entry in a marketing portfolio. The rest of us have to put with them for far longer.

Carbuncle awards