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Simon Jenkins

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33

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2025-01-19

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2025-01-19

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1. “Queen Anne Revival. And you go around San Francisco, that's wonderful. These old Victorian houses. And you ask the state agent in San Francisco, could you describe that house? Oh, it's Victorian Queen Anne Revival. Hold on, that's a foreign country. Anyway, it's wonderful.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “We're much better today than we were 20 years ago. We really are. A lot of work goes on now in converting mews houses, old warehouses, mills up north, into various forms of modern housing. There's a developer in Manchester, a documentary about him recently. He took over three mills and was allowed to build a fourth modern block. The three mills immediately sold out. The modern block he found it very hard to sell. People wanted an old building. And I think that's deep in us. We want some sort of security. It always fascinates me in Chicago, in San Francisco, after the Great Earthquake of 1906. The most modern city on Earth, San Francisco, absolutely booming. This was the future. After the earthquake, what did they do? They built every single house in Queen Anne Revival, and they called...”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Well, you're right up to a point. I'm afraid Persimmon and Barclay Holmes aren't fools. They do know what people want, and they do design accordingly. I mean, one thing that I would love about the early interwar suburbs around London, Gideon Park and places like that, they said, whatever you do, don't make the house look like the one next door. And yet, the very expensive houses are still Georgian. Per square foot, the most expensive place to live in Britain is in a Georgian house. So your up market clientele do want traditional houses. The more down market clientele, well, not that down market some of them. Also on traditional houses of a different sort. They want Tudor. And I delight in the fact they haven't actually changed. They still want what I regard as a pre-classy sort of house. Modern architects do try and do what you're suggesting. An awful lot of work.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Vertical streets or whatever it is about it, you know, it's complete nonsense. If you ask people what they want to buy, they point at Persimmon Holmes and Berkeley Holmes. And they're the ones you're describing. And it just fascinates me that ever since the turn of the 20th century, the marketplace of people who want to buy a house they want to live in themselves with their own money will not opt for modernism. They'll opt for Neo-Tudor.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Well, I'm glad you referred to it as the British style because, I mean, no architect would refer to it as that. To them, it's the fag end, if you like, of the suburban style that we've had in this country for a century and a half now. And it is, and I deal with this in my book in some length, it is actually what we've always done. We've always looked to the past and tried to build something that looks like the past, but behaves like the present. An interwar suburban estate was neo-Tudor or neo-Jordan, almost all neo-Tudor. People just loved a black and white timbered dormer window above their front door. I mean, it doesn't matter what else is going on. Give me the dormer window black and white timber. And I mean, millions of them were built, just millions. And they love them. And they still love them. And architects can't stand it. And so almost everything that you see designed by an architect is made of concrete.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Because of stamp duty houses are taxed very lowly. Our property taxes are small and inefficient. There's no sense of economy in how we use buildings. And this particularly applies to old buildings where you can now convert buildings very easily into various forms of residence. All I'm saying is that all the demand there is for houses, and it's largely in the southeast, I may say, can be met by properly using the housing we've got and using the tax system to promote the proper use of those houses.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Well, firstly, I think it would be nice if people worried about how buildings looked. In other words, the beauty of buildings. We worry about how pictures, films, books, we worry about all kinds of beauties. Curiously, the thing we've got around us all the time, 100% inescapable. Someone said it's a gallery you can never leave other buildings. It is completely ridiculous to the only way you can provide people with more space is by building in country. We have absolutely no need to build another house in another field ever. The number of house, in the first place, the figure of 300,000 is totally got out of the air. It doesn't mean anything at all. Everybody wants a better house, period. What we do know, however, is that we've used buildings very inefficiently in Britain, extremely inefficiently. A lot of houses have got two, three, four bedrooms they don't need. In most of Europe, people tend to fit into the house that they need. In Britain, it's so expensive to change houses.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Livingston wanted tall buildings, and they thought tall buildings looked important. And I'm afraid we're all the sufferers of that and the people have to live in them, people have to walk around their bases. A lot of work's been done on the happiness. People get out of the buildings. I mean, they can time people walking past new and old buildings. They walk more slowly past old buildings. It's really quite significant.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “I agree. I don't think modern architecture's failings are uniquely British. I don't really know the answers. I mean, engineering has lots of responsibility for it. The fact that you could build huge buildings and architects universally like building big, not small. The most beautiful architecture in Britain by modernists are the maggie centers of Charles Jenks. They're tiny buildings for terminally old cancer patients. And Charles asked all the architects, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, he said, will you please build me something very small? And they had to build small and they're beautiful. They're the most beautiful modern buildings of Britain at the Mike's Center. Now, I mean, going back to your question, I mean, the answer is very big buildings appeal to arrogant architects and, for that matter, developers, I have to say, and for that matter, civic leaders. I mean, Johnson and Boris Johnson and Kenya.”

   2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “And it's really that desperate and that expensive. And there's never been an inquiry into it. There's never been an apology for it. No one has asked, where do we go wrong? Architects just assumed that it was their right to do what they wanted.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “I think it's a very good question. I think probably, and I do sort of ponder. The Poles and the Germans and the French were in some sense defeated and they wanted to prove that they were capable of rebuilding themselves and being what they'd always been. The British had us of arrogance that we won the war and therefore we can start afresh. And we'll show the world how they should go forward. And it's this business of being futuristic and thinking that these new cities, these modernist cities, with no architectural style to them at all, they're just masses of concrete are the future. And that to me is the failure of the architectural profession. I think probably a hundred of the developments that took place after the war have already been demolished. They were so unsatisfactory. I mean, the great red road flats of Glasgow, I mean, those six or seven huge towers were demolished in the 1980s and 90s. They just had to come down. No one wanted to live in them. Thames Meade in London. No one knows about Thames Mead. It was the new town of London.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “It was incredible what was being done. And I mean, I don't think most Londoners know that probably, if not in their lifetime, their parents' lifetime, it was proposed and it was planned and it was going to happen that the whole of Whitehall would be demolished. Piccadilly Circus would be demolished. Covent Garden would be demolished. Carlton's terrace would be demolished. Fitz Rodeo would go. These places were going to be flattened and turned into the barbican. And it was very, very narrow battles in the 1970s that saved Covent Garden.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Began and the scars of it now. They're in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Coventry, Newcastle. London's got off fairly lightly. The city corporation, who we mentioned before, decided they were going to be terribly modern and built the barbigan. And the barbecum was the only bit of the original sort of Abercrombie design city that got off the ground really. The idea then was all traffic should be on the ground. The ground floor should be for traffic. And the first floor should be the podiums where people walked and had their being. The podium at the bargain, I think, is the most deserted spot in London. And I'm afraid this is what happened up and down the country. By 1960s, it had gone sour. People weren't enjoying it. They thought, I think 40, 50,000 houses in Liverpool were demolished, actually without being replaced.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Architectural cult had taken control of planning in Britain, and every city under Manculpatrick Albercrombie in the central government, every city was given its plan. The plans for the cities of Britain after the war were to demolish them. They were described in the plan as obsolete. These buildings are not fit for the car, the age of the car, they're not fit for the modern society. We've got to get rid of them and start all over again. And this is what we fought the war for. This is the psychology of it. And what then happened for about 10, 15, 20 years was an attempted desecration of the cities of Britain. It was not happening in Germany, in France. In Germany and France, they were trying to rebuild what the war damaged. But they were trying to rebuild it as a sign of their confidence. We can rebuild the Germany we loved, the France we loved. Britain, we didn't. Britain, we were told to hate by Abercrombie and Co. And it was a degree by Churchill and Attlee and all these people. And the demolition”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Well, it's the story of the second half of my book. And the answer is really, I don't think they were that intellectual, to be honest. They were members of a very arrogant profession. I love architects. Many of my best friends are architects. They do not do humility. They were completely taken in by Mankel Le Coubusier, a Frenchman between the wars. He became an absolute cult. They were obsessed with trying not to be revivalist. They were trying not to be neo-Tudor, which the dreaded suburb was. They hated suburbs. And they hated classical revival and Lutians of people like that. They genuinely wanted to be new. They also thought the war licensed them. And the war was very important. It licensed them to be radical. And by the end of the war, by 1947 of the Great Planning Act then, the modernists, and there really weren't that many of them. It was basically an”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “A very simple answer to that. It was run by a dictator. I mean, I was a dictator. No doubt about it. He was persuaded by Halzmann in a way that Charles II was not persuaded by Ren. The parallel is very close. The city of London is almost, it still is, almost an autonomous body. The very few rules of local government apply to the city. It's still run by Alderman and very weird structure. And the reason is that when William the Conqueror arrived in England, he smashed everything to the ground except the city of London, which he needed. And they said, keep us alone. And the city's been like that ever since. So there's a special governmental structure for the City of London. And I think that's the reason why it is as it is. And certainly their respect for historic buildings is almost zero.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “The reason for that is money, I mean, simply money. I don't think the city authorities since the 17th century have had any sense of architecture or feel for architecture. But they built wonderful buildings with a mansion house, guild hall, the churches, of course. Particularly since the war. I mean, Victoria and London, the city of London was quite handsome, but since the war, I'm afraid, rampant grease broken out. The worst of it all was Canary Wharf. When Canary Wharf was built by Thatcher, the city suddenly panicked. And they said, we've just got to build skyscrapers. And the competition between Canary Wharf and the City of London has produced, I mean, some of the ugliest buildings in London are now in the city, I'm afraid.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “or that the street pattern of the city is still the medieval street pattern. Its tiny alleyways is still there and there were thoroughfares there right away so they couldn't be blocked off and filled in by a comprehensive development and today the weird skyscrapers you've got in the city their one virtue is they're weird They've all got to respect the medieval street pattern So almost none of them are square. They're sort of fitted in as if in a jigsaw puzzle and that's the saving grace of the city of London is street pattern.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “The strength of it is where the original building survive. There's a wonderful handsomeness about St. James's Square, even though quite a lot of the buildings have been changed. But it's a handsome language of architecture, the London Georgian streets. And although the Victorians, interestingly, he thought it was terribly boring. I mean, almost everybody talking about a Georgian street in the 19th century said, I mean, Gower Street was regarded as the most boring street in London. Disraeli said it was like an unattractive child in an unattractive family. And a lot of feeling went into this business of taste. And it's a matter of opinion, clearly. But what I have to say, finishing up on Ren in many ways, the result of Wren's plan for London not being successful, the result of the Alderman of London saying anyone can come back to where they were before, rebuild your bank as soon as you can, and get back into business.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “A lot of people simply moved west, and that is when Covent Garden, St James's Square, all these areas of West London, on land previously owned by aristocrats, were developed, but as quite high density terraced housing.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “But the end result of this was very interesting because Christopher Wren failed to get his city built. All he could do was rebuild the churches, which were tiny plots of land in the medieval city. So a Wren church in the city has no outside almost. It's really just an interior plus a tower. And the towers were the feature of Wren's London. And the Canaletto painting of Wren's London, which is absolutely majestic, is of St. Paul's Cathedral and about fifty or forty towers looming over it. And I just think to myself, that's his towers. Now look what we've got. But that went on. The only other thing that happened after the Great Fire was a lot of people didn't go back.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “Wood and plaster, no thatch roofs, you believe it, but tiled roofs, and it had to look reasonably handsome. And it was quite interesting. They had two things. One is if they took up, and the streets had to be wider. If they took up someone's property by widening the street, they were paid compensation, which is a quite extraordinary thing. If anyone disobeyed the rule, they were whipped on the site by the local constables, which as a way of enforcing planning information, I think is absolutely excellent.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Of diagonals and round points and grids. And it looked like a very formal, in many cases you'd say 18th century city, in place of the existing of London. And the aldermen of the city, and Charles II said, I like it, let's go with it. The alderman said, you must be joking. This is going to take 10 years and cost a fortune. We've got to get back to Vena. We're a business. We've got to get back to business next week. And all our people are pouring back in. They're bringing bricks. They're bringing plaster. They're bringing wood. They want to start rebuilding right now. We just cannot do something crazy like Sixths' Rome. And it was interesting. Charles II immediately said, oh, I'm terribly sorry. I wasn't worried. I mean, the city was a very powerful place. And so they rebuilt the city. The one thing the government insisted on was that he rebuilt a brick.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Well, the Great Fire of London gutted. No one really knows how much damage it really did. The city of the old city of London, medieval city of London. And every building was more or less ruined. It's believed that the walls were much more substantive than people at once at first supposed. So when people came back into the city weeks after the fire, they immediately started rebuilding. Well, that wasn't Christopher Wren's idea nor Charles II the king. Christopher Wren and John Albren, two or three other people, raced forward with plans for a new London. And there was a race to get the plan on the king's desk and Christopher Wren won it. I think he did it within a week. I mean, five or six days. That's planning. Anyway, but his plan, and this was the point, his plan was based on Sixers of the Fifth Rome. In other words, it was a plan of rather like Washington.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “Dobson's Royal Arcade. He was putting it down. I mean, London pleaded with him not to pull down. There's the Royal Anglo-Called the Royal Arcade, which was the most handsome arcade in Britain. And he said, no, don't worry. I'll number every stone and I'll put them all back somewhere else. Threw them in the river. I mean, I'm afraid English cities have suffered such fates as all Ang Zhang.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “He wasn't a developer. He was the mayor of the city. Dan Smith. He was a leading figure in Newcastle, and he was something who took an old rather battered city, and he was very dynamic, and he wanted to galvanize into him, galvanizing it meant bullying it down. Unfortunately, it was one of the handsomest cities in England.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “All these cities had really very handsome Georgian quarters, and some of them are still there just, clinging on by the skin of their teeth, but they are the finest things to see in London. I mean, I think the finest in Britain, I think the finest street in Britain is Grey Street in Newcastle, which is a wonderful curving street going up the hill. It's absolutely magnificent. Thank God it's...”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Apart from what we've been talking about, there are plenty of very nice places to go in Britain. There really are, and I suppose maybe someone would say I'm biased, but I do find two particular delights in British architecture. One is ecclesiastical churches and cathedrals. And these are the great buildings of England. Anne Wales and Scotland, particularly England and Scotland, and they are magnificent, and our churches are as good as any in Europe. They sit in cathedral cities, which are as handsome as any in Europe, and they are particularly lovely. The other, my other favourite is the Georgian city. It was in the 18th century that we evolved a style of terrorist architecture, terrace housing, handsome civic buildings, buildings that you'd want to live in or look at when you walked around a city. And we created primarily in London first, and then in Edinburgh, Bath, New York.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “And it's still going on. We just don't have the same standard of public culture, I'd say, as the French and the Italians undoubtedly do have.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “That's the second answer to your first question. It is actually, and I'm afraid it really does is true, they simply have a better standard of taste than we do. I probably know London well. I showed an old Italian friend of mine. We were walking across Waterloo Bridge and we looked, he lives in Rome, we looked at the city of London from Waterloo Bridge and he hadn't seen it for about 10 years. He absolutely gasped. He said, what on earth have you done to your city? And I said, well, I'm afraid that's the New London. He said, listen, I come from the most corrupt city on earth, Rome. You would never do that. What have you done? Who paid who? How much? He was completely aghast at it, and he assumed it was corrupt. Well, it was, much of it was, I have said it in a manner corrupt. But the fact is that I can only walk, when I walk around London, I sort of weep because I think some town planner approved that building.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “Well, in the first place, you're right. In the second place, I have to say that the slightly grim reason for the difference between Britain and them is that they were very poor for the period when the British were destroying their cities, as blunt as that. And we rebuilt our cities in the Victorian style when Siena and Mologna weren't thinking of doing anything of the sort. And then we rebuilt them again after the war, destroying much of the Victorian city. And the result is that our cities now are very not hardly worth going around. Whereas the French and Talibans to achieve our attention have always been, or since the 1718 century, have always been in the style of urban architecture, which I always think has been unsurpassed, which is the 17th and 18th centuries.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “Earth, as Greece suggested, and Regents Park got in common. And the answer is classical architecture, and classical architecture has dominated British architecture for 2,000 years. And it was that dominance of a completely puzzling style that intrigued me about architecture.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “I don't really know, except I've always lived in buildings. My eyes are open and I'm always interested in what covers buildings. When I'm living in now has got strange stripes up the front of the wall, which I never really noticed until I got interested in the buildings and discovered that they were actually what they called pilasters with Doric bases and tops on a working class Victorian old Terrace house. I'm just intrigued by them. I think I got genuine interest in architectural style, which is what my book's really about and the vagaries of style. When I visited Greece, then I visited Sicily. And in Sicily, I went to Segester, the Temple of Segester, which is one of the most sensational Greek temples. And I thought to myself, hold on a minute, that looks just like the terraces of regents park near where I was brought up in London.”

    2025-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT