This is it, then. The shape of things to come. With a Tory mayor of London offering no modernist counter-voice, and a central government soon to go the same way, the architectural conservatives are going to win. They will wheel out all their old lies. People don't like modern architecture. Skyscrapers are always ugly. Modern architects are frauds ... and now, they will be listened to. Goodbye, swinging London. Sayonara, British cool.
The Prince of Wales has just been allowed to impose his dreary architectural beliefs on London. He has got a Richard Rogers building in Chelsea aborted. What a miserable end to the years when London was envied and admired as a capital of the new.
At least, let's nail one lie before the grey years set in. Yes, modern – or to be accurate, dogmatically modernIST architecture was unpopular in the later 20th century. There was, I believe, quite a reaction against it among architects themselves. They came up with alternatives and invented a wacky proliferation of architectural styles. One of the buildings that announced the birth of a new, more subversive architecture was the popular 1970s masterpiece the Pompidou Centre in Paris, co-designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.
People hate drab tower blocks. But if critics of new architecture, from Prince Charles to Simon Jenkins, had peered out past the net curtains since 1969 they might notice that architects such as Rogers don't build those. Architecture today is imaginative in the extreme. It has more in common with Bernini than it does with Ernö Goldfinger. Many of us laypeople love it. We are excited to see a creative, unexpected new building in a city centre. All over the world, architecture attracts visitors to cities – and London has become one such place. Tate Modern is not exactly unpopular.
Prince Charles does not speak for the people. The people find modern architecture interesting, spectacular, even liberating. If it is banned from London they will go to see it elsewhere. Oh, well done, Sir. Just what Britain needs in a recession, Sir.
