Last week the government decided to refuse planning permission for a solar farm in Northamptonshire. This is the same government that last month, possibly encouraged by a letter from the developers Mitsubishi to Rishi Sunak, approved 72 Upper Ground, a prominent, lumpen office block on the South Bank in London.
In the first case they decided that “visual harm” outweighed economic benefits; in the second it was the other way round. The takeaway seems to be this: the carbon-belching construction of 79,000 sq metres of office space, the demand for which is unproven, matters more to them than the production of sustainable energy with estimated carbon savings of 11,000 tonnes a year.
The Daily Doom
“London may not survive another four years of Sadiq,” yelled the Daily Telegraph last week. This followed other recent warnings that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”, that cyclists have turned Paris into “hell on earth”, that western economies have been “destroyed”, that Britain is irrevocably on a “road to serfdom”, that Nato cannot be fixed, that horse racing faces an existential threat from gambling controls. Its catastrophism is at least even handed: heat pumps, which the Telegraph doesn’t like, are “dead”; the Conservative party, which it mostly supports, faces an “extinction-level event”.
To use a reference its readers would get, it is the Private Frazer of British newspapers – “We’re doomed – doomed!” as the Hebridean soldier-undertaker from Dad’s Army used to say. This might possibly be true, but not in the ways the Telegraph imagines.
Mushroomgate
In other media snowflake news, the Daily Mail has accused the National Trust of banning mushrooms. “The fungi is [sic] boycotted,” it said. It isn’t – just the mushrooms grown with peat, to protect plover and dragonfly habitats. (And the Trust’s tearooms have sourced alternatives grown in other ways.) This tells you all you need to know about the obsessive campaigns against the Trust run by opaquely funded rightwing thinktanks and their allies in the press – in particular, how much they are rooted in reality.
So it was good to hear the historian and national treasure Mary Beard, while giving the Trust’s Octavia Hill lecture last week, take apart some of the moaners’ pet peeves. A derided 2020 report into links between National Trust properties and colonisation and slavery was, she said, “stating the bleeding obvious”. The installation of a disco ball in Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire is a harmless, and easily reversible, way of engaging children, while also highlighting that its revered interiors were originally party spaces. “The pomposity and self-righteousness” of the attackers, she said, “is best responded to by a bit of a giggle”. We should be grateful to mushroomgate for giving us that.
No architectural joke
It’s almost possible to admire the brass neck of the developers who, frustrated by the presence of a listed former hospital on a site in Birmingham, propose to perch a 440ft tower over it.
Might it, conceivably, become a beloved piece of David-and-Goliath urbanism, like the former Wickhams department store in the East End of London, where the two-storey premises of Spiegelhalters jewellers, its owners having refused to sell up, pops up incongruously in the giant Ionic colonnade of what was hoping to be a cockney Selfridges?
Conceivably, it might, but probably not. To judge by the way that towers like this are almost always built, it would lack the grace and joy to pull off a giant architectural joke, which would leave it looking like nothing but a cynical ploy.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
