What the Victorians did for us... the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photograph: Graham Turner
In Johannesburg last year I visited the new cultural quarter being created around the Market Theatre. It has museums, shops, cafes, a famous jazz club. But can it genuinely help solve problems on the scale of those suffered by the South African city?
There is a widespread belief in what might be called cultural healing. We have faith that cities can be lightened and ventilated by a couple of museums and galleries, a theatre, an opera house.
It can be done, I think - if you emulate the Victorians. Anyone who has visited London with children this summer will probably have experienced what is, surely, the most inspiring example anywhere of a museum and arts quarter that enriches city life: South Kensington.
The complex was built on specially purchased land in the wake of the success of the Great Exhibition and includes the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Royal Albert Hall.
The reason that this place has never stopped feeling modern is because the original brief was so imaginative. The V&A was conceived as a museum of design that juxtaposes technology and the "fine arts". The Natural History Museum is equally bold in conception, reflecting the ambition of its first director Richard Owen, a populist who invented the name "dinosaurs".
Yet what really distinguishes them both is, in a word, charm. There's an eccentricity to the Natural History Museum's medieval appearance that reflects Owen's intellectual conservatism - he rejected Darwin - yet fits wonderfully with animatronic dinosaurs and ecological exhibits. Similarly the V&A has a heritage of quirky architecture and collections - it is currently restoring Victorian mosaic pavements unaccountably sealed in lino in the 1960s.
Sentimentality about Victorian Britain can go too far, and we don't need a revival of the fogeydom of the 1980s - it's a scandal that so much money was spent restoring the hideous Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. But when the Victorians got it right, they got it very right. Quirkiness and personality can make a museum quarter into a living part of a city for centuries to come.
