It’s little surprise the fashion photographer Norman Parkinson’s favourite building was the outré, flamboyant Brighton Pavilion, pictured on the cover of the Observer Magazine of 16 April 1989, which teases us with his worst building, too (‘The beautiful and the damned’).
While Parkinson hymned the royal palace – ‘wonderful, a delight, giving an insight into the age of George IV and putting Brighton in its right context as a holiday resort’ – he decried a royal outbuilding, calling Basil Spence’s Household Cavalry in Hyde Park ‘that monstrous concrete mass… I hate it with a passion’. A description worse in its way than Prince Charles’s ‘monstrous carbuncle’.
Ann Morris asked other notables the same questions. The historian Roy Strong was very taken with ‘just beautiful’ Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire – ‘this wonderful crenellated building on the skyline’ – but detested Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s building]: ‘He hangs all the innards on the outside.’
So are old buildings better than new ones? The writer Malcolm Bradbury chose Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia. ‘It is a very witty building, with lots of light. The negative view is that it looks like an aircraft hangar.’ Well, Foster was a pilot, too. Bradbury loathed Centre Point in London: ‘It steals from everything around it, and offers nothing back, just takes light and landscape.’
The broadcaster Muriel Gray livened things up a bit, choosing Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ‘absolutely fantastic’ Glasgow School of Art (sadly since damaged by two devastating fires). ‘I live in Edinburgh, but prefer the architecture of Glasgow,’ she admitted. ‘If they hadn’t knocked down half of Glasgow to build the M8, it would have been the finest Victorian city in Britain.’
One hopes the Milton Motor Hotel at Fort William never hosted Gray. ‘It’s an ugly bastard,’ she said, ‘a temple to commerce – an insult to its surroundings… I would also like to bomb every single Barratt and Laing home in existence.’
