1. John Crowley, “‘Vile’ Buildings That Should Be Demolished,” Telegraph, August 16, 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1469502/Vile-buildings-that-should-be-demolished.html; Jim Pickard, “Vision That Will Send Eyesores Tumbling,” Financial Times, August 7, 2004, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a456f18-e80f-11d8-bae0-00000e2511c8.html?ft_site=falcon&desktop=true#axzz4hFlivP9g.
2. Zoë Blackler, “Scars, Blots and Eyesores,” BDOnline, October 5, 2007, http://www.bdonline.co.uk/readers-free-classifieds/scars-blots-and-eyesores/3096795.article. For the Carbuncle Cup, see http://www.bdonline.co.uk/buildings/carbuncle-cup.
3. Nathaniel Lloyd, Building Craftmanship in Brick and Tile and in Stone Slates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 1; Nicholas Salmon and Derek Baker, eds., The William Morris Chronology (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 6; Philological Society of London, The European Magazine, and London Review, vol. 23 (London: J Sewell, 1793), 183.
4. Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness, trans. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 25. This first English translation and critical edition includes a very useful introduction that situates Rosenkranz in a philosophical context. Though he was not widely influential, his surpassing contribution was to have articulated a systematic theory of ugliness accessible to various aesthetic fields. In many ways, Aesthetics of Ugliness serves as a prologue and preface to subsequent explorations of concepts of ugliness, even if they do not engage with Rosenkranz directly.
5. Ibid., 258.
6. Definitional or book-length studies of concepts of ugliness include Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, eds., Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Ugliness,” in Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 281–95; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Lesley Higgins, The Modernist Cult of Ugliness (New York: Palgrave, 2002). More focused in concern or more limited in scope, but also of interest, are Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness,” Contemporary Review 72 (1897): 544–69, 669–88; Robert Martin Adams, “Ideas of Ugly,” Hudson Review 27, no. 1 (1974): 55–68; Theodor Adorno, “The Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technology,” in Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984); and Mark Dorrian, “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” Word & Image 16, no. 3 (2000): 310–17. This list is neither extensive nor comprehensive, but suggests texts that illuminate disciplinary perspectives on ugliness and that served as key points of theorization in the development of ideas about ugliness in the modern period. The argument that follows in this book draws upon these sources, as well as others cited below, though the focus will remain on a historical elucidation of ugliness and its consequences rather than an abstracted philosophy of ugliness.
7. Gretchen E. Henderson, Ugliness: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015).
8. Mark Cousins, “The Ugly (Part One),” AA Files, no. 28 (1994): 61–64; “The Ugly (Part Two),” AA Files, no. 29 (1995): 3–6.
9. Cousins, “The Ugly (Part One),” 62.
10. Ibid., 63.
11. John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust, and Other Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2007), 91.
12. Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness, 49.
13. The term “civic aesthetics” will be clarified through its use in the chapters that follow, but I mean by this cognate an aesthetic whose intent or consequence is the articulation of a collective recognition of a civil sphere substantiated by behaviors and institutions. “Aesthetic” and “aesthetics” will be used throughout as general terms, not as technical terms or with narrow reference to a particular philosophical stance. They are to invoke the perception and evaluation of the appearance and sensory effects of objects, and also to encompass the concept of experience that precedes or is not immediately translated into causal origins, such that it has some independence from these objects as well as from modes of rationalization. I aim to take advantage of what Terry Eagleton describes as the “indeterminacy of definition which allows [the aesthetic] to figure in a varied span of preoccupations.” For useful views on the central problems of modern aesthetics in particular relation to politics, see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). (The preceding quotation is from page 3.) For a survey of the development of modern aesthetics, see Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. chaps. 1 and 2.
14. Debates on architectural ugliness can be found in other settings, of course, in Europe or North America across the same historical span as that covered here. But the contours of these debates, while they may have discursive similarities, arise from the very different circumstances of the public sphere in which they occur. Contrast the secular republicanism of France, for example, with the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain, with the additional distinction between Napoleonic Code and common law, and their incommensurability becomes clear. In comparison with the United States, the distribution of political and cultural influence across several cities in that nation obviously differs sharply from the consolidated metropolitan influence of London in the English context. Another important and defining dimension that would separate a study of civic aesthetics in England from any inquiry into civic aesthetics in other settings is the continuity in Great Britain of a philosophical and critical debate on aesthetics emphatically oriented by an empiricism that would more or less presume the social instrumentality of cultural artifacts and social technologies.
1. William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum; or, An Account of the Antiquities and Remarkable Curiosities in Nature or Art Observed in Travels through Great Britain, Itinerary VI (London: Baker and Leigh, 1776), 146. Because my argument presents the textual evidence of different disciplinary perspectives, in different historical periods, the original punctuation, spelling, grammar, and emphasis are maintained in all quotations throughout the book.
2. For the urban history of Bath, see Sylvia McIntyre, “Bath: The Rise of a Resort Town, 1660–1800,” in Country Towns in Pre-industrial England, ed. Peter Clark (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 198–249, and Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. See John Eglin, The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Georgian Bath (London: Profile Books, 2005) and Borsay, Image of Georgian Bath.
4. Quoted in McIntyre, “Bath,” 240.
5. John Wood the Elder was born in Bath in 1704, was working as a joiner in London by 1721, and returned to Bath permanently in 1727. He realized buildings in Bristol and in Liverpool, but the great majority of his work was in and around Bath. His own accounts of the city and of his career are unreliable, though quite detailed. A volume of his drawings is held by the Bath Reference Library, and the most comprehensive accounts of his career are Tim Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, John Wood: Architect of Obsession (Bath: Millstream Books, 1988) and Charles Edward Brownell, “John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger: Architects of Bath” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1976).
6. John Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath (London: W. Bathoe and T. Lownds, 1765), 232.
7. Ibid., 264.
8. Ibid., 264.
9. Ibid., 265.
10. Letter from the Duke of Chandos to John Wood, September 24, 1728, Duke of Chandos copy-books, Brydges Family Papers, Stowe Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. The letters from the Duke of Chandos to John Wood in these years show frequent strain in the relationship of architect and client. Also see Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood, chap. 2.
11. The first edition of Wood’s Essay was published in 1742, in two parts. A revised edition in four parts was published in 1749 and, in a sign of its relative success, reprinted by a London bookseller in 1765. Quotations here are from the 1765 edition. Although the frontispiece of the late edition used a shortened title, Description of Bath, it is variously catalogued with the shorter or the original edition title. For clarity and consistency, the title Essay towards a Description of Bath (or simply Essay) is used here in reference to all editions of the book.
12. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 225.
13. Ibid., preface.
14. Ibid., 216, 224.
15. Although Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica was not published until 1750, the concepts that the term “aesthetics” would come to encompass were very much under discussion in Wood’s time. The Earl of Shaftsbury had written on sensation, experience, and moral sense in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times at the beginning of the century, and William Hogarth was undertaking his Analysis of Beauty (published in 1753) and Edmund Burke his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (published in 1756), both of them seeking to examine the properties of objects and images in relation to human emotion and judgment. The contributions of Hogarth and Burke were responses rather than sources for the inquiry into aesthetic matters. Wood was familiar with scientific knowledge that circulated from London to the provinces and would have been generally aware of contemporary arguments such as Shaftsbury’s. However, the extent of Wood’s personal knowledge is less important than the fact of a general formulation of ideas of aesthetics and society at this time in Great Britain.
16. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 586–87. See also Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133–54.
17. John Wood, The Origin of Building; or, The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected (Bath: J. Leake, 1741), 11. The Origin of Building is both fascinating and frustrating, combining as it does “Learning . . . Enthusiasm . . . and nonsense,” in the words of Sir William Chambers. Chambers’s note can be found in one of the copies owned by Sir John Soane. The Soane Museum also holds Wood’s first manuscript of the book; the second manuscript can be found in the Bath Reference Library. For interpretations of Wood’s notorious text, see Edward Eigen, “The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected: John Wood, the Elder (1704– 1754) on the Translation of Architecture and Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 3 (2009): 375–97; Eileen Harris, “John Wood’s System of Architecture,” Burlington Magazine 131, no. 1031 (1989): 101–7; and Christine Stevenson, “John Wood the Elder and The Origin of Building” (London: Courtauld Institute, 1981).
18. Wood, Origin of Building, 219.
19. Ibid., 219.
20. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 30, 36. See also Harris, “John Wood’s System of Architecture,” 106–7.
21. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 136, 158.
22. Ibid., 157.
23. Inigo Jones, The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly Called Stone-Heng, on Salisbury Plain, Restored (London: James Flesher for Daniel Pakeman, 1655); William Stukeley, Stonehenge a Temple Restor’d to the British Druids (London: W. Innys and R. Manby, 1740).
24. John Wood, Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, Described, Restored, and Explained (Oxford: J. Leake, 1747), 30.
25. Ibid., 49.
26. Ibid., 56–57.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 60.
29. Ibid., 60, 62.
30. Wood reasoned that given the immense difficulty of moving the stones, they would not have been removed intentionally. If they were not on the site as fallen, then they must never have been brought to the site at all. The monument was therefore incomplete in its original construction. Based on comparison of stones found on hills not far distant, Wood believed the source of the stones to be Marlborough Downs. Ibid., 77–83.
31. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 57–58. Wood referred to the theories presented to the Royal Society by John Strachey and published in Philosophical Transactions: Strachey, “A Curious Description of the Strata Observ’d in the Coal-Mines of Mendip in Somersetshire,” Philosophical Transactions 30 (1717): 968–73 and “An Account of the Strata in Coal-Mines,” Philosophical Transactions 33 (1724): 395–98.
32. See letters from the Duke of Chandos to John Wood in July 1728. Duke of Chandos copy-books.
33. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 426–27.
34. On Ralph Allen, see R.E.M. Peach, The Life and Times of Ralph Allen (London: D. Nutt, 1895) and Borsay, Image of Georgian Bath. On the architecture of Prior Park and the relationship of Wood and Allen, see chap. 7 of Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood. On Pope’s contribution to the garden of Prior Park, see Marion Harney, “Pope and Prior Park: A Study in Landscape and Literature,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 27, no. 3 (2007): 183–96. The English picturesque movement would become a crucial setting for the theoretical and formal elaboration of the aesthetic of ugliness. While beauty and sublimity were the aesthetic goals, the practitioners of the picturesque pursued explorations of qualities such as surprise, irregularity, changeability, and roughness, opening novel understandings of the subjective encounter with attributes more readily associated with ugliness than beauty. For the summary principles of the picturesque, see Sir Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: J. Robson, 1794). The standard account of the English picturesque is Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G.P. Putnam, 1927), while the authoritative theoretical account is Macarthur, Picturesque, in which see especially chaps. 3 and 4.
35. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 339. Also see Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood, 42–43. Wood can be seen grappling with the logistics of valuing and transporting building materials in letters he wrote to William Brydges, who commissioned Wood to design a new sanctuary and altar for the rural Tyberton church. See letters from John Wood to William Brydges in box 1, William Brydges Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
36. Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 242.
37. Ibid., 58–59.
38. John Wood, A Description of the Exchange of Bristol (Bath: J. Leake, 1745).
39. Edward Howell, ed., Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743–1753 (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1912), 26. This volume is a verbatim reprint of a manuscript containing the club’s bylaws and minutes and its record of membership. Also see Gretchen E. Henderson, “The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics of Deformity,” in Pop and Widrich, Ugliness, 17–33.
40. Howell, Ye Ugly Face Clubb, 26.
41. Spectator, March 20, 1711.
42. Spectator, May 30, 1711.
43. The Civil Club was founded in 1669. On the history of such associations and their effects, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
44. Howell, Ye Ugly Face Clubb, 42. John Wood the Younger, born in 1728, lived for a period of time in Liverpool to supervise the building of the Liverpool Exchange, which commenced in 1748. Since he would have been permitted to be a member of the club only while a bachelor, he must have resigned his membership by 1753.
1. The Assize of Buildings (or the Assisa de Edificiis in the Latin used for legal proceedings) was responsible for hearing complaints of nuisance, a legal charge or writ formulated in the medieval period. The institution, the writ, and the records of the proceedings were all referred to as the Assize of Nuisance. See London Assize of Nuisance, 1301–1431: A Calendar, ed. Helena M. Chew and William Kellaway (London: London Record Society, 1973), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol10.
2. “Misc. Roll DD: 19 Aug 1328–15 Oct 1339 (nos 299–348),” in Chew and Kellaway, London Assize of Nuisance, 69–85, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol10/pp69-85.
3. Ibid.
4. Such codifications did not have a systematic order and were most likely compilations of rules and strictures from other sources. See “Introduction,” in London Assize of Nuisance, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol10/ix-xxxiv. For a detailed study of the party wall and the legal constructions of public and private space in medieval London, see Vanessa Harding, “Space, Property, and Propriety in Urban England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 549–69.
5. Article V in “Charles II, 1666: An Act for Rebuilding the Citty of London,” in Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628–80, ed. John Raithby (Great Britain Record Commission, 1819), 603–12, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp603-612.
6. John Wood described the rating of residences in Bath according to their number and type of stories, suggesting his aim for regularity not only in the form but in the classifications of buildings in the city. See Wood, Essay towards a Description of Bath, 241–43.
7. John Gwynn, London and Westminster Improved, Illustrated by Plans. To Which Is Prefixed a Discourse on Publick Magnificence (London: Dalton, 1766), 3.
8. Ibid., 3, 5.
9. The events and debates that accompanied the process of rebuilding the Houses of Parliament are described in detail in M. H. Port, ed., The Houses of Parliament (London: Yale University Press, 1976). Also see Caroline Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Mr. Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament after the Great Fire of 1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The story of the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament has served architectural history by consolidating two strong narratives of the nineteenth century: the rise of historicism, read through debates on style, and the rise of functionalism, read through technological innovation. The design and realization of the building strengthened advocacies of the gothic revival, centering architectural discourse upon questions of style and civic representation, and of structure and ornamentation that persisted through the nineteenth century and formed a foundational undercurrent of subsequent modernisms. Its design and realization also solicited an attention to the building’s programmatic requirements that produced an explicit concern for organizational and technical function that was similarly drawn forward into the technological premises of later architectural modernism. Though the recognition of these dimensions as pivotal factors in the later unfolding of modernism may be retrospective, they were certainly acknowledged at the time as having great significance and were central to the public and professional discussions that surrounded the project.
10. “Report from Select Committee on Houses of Parliament” (1836), 4. Joseph Hume was a Radical MP, with associations to the Utilitarians, who had been involved in the planning of new accommodations for Parliament even prior to the 1834 fire that destroyed the existing buildings and made rebuilding imperative. See George H. Weitzman, “The Utilitarians and the Houses of Parliament,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 20, no. 3 (1961): 99–107.
11. “Report from Select Committee on Houses of Parliament,” 4.
12. Ibid., 4.
13. “Report of Commissioners Appointed to Consider the Plans for Building the New Houses of Parliament” (1836), 2.
14. “Report from Select Committee on Houses of Parliament,” 5.
15. Ibid., 13.
16. Ibid., 21. The commissioners gave evidence on March 10, and Charles Barry gave evidence on April 29.
17. Ibid., 21.
18. See Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2015).
19. John Evelyn, Fumifugium; or, The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissapated (London: W. Godbid, 1661), np. New editions of Fumifugium were printed in 1776 and in 1825, with the relevance of Evelyn’s criticisms still very much apparent in London.
20. Ibid., 5, np.
21. In an 1819 pamphlet addressing the problem of London’s air pollution, the actuary William Frend noted that though visitors were astonished by the “dirt and nastiness” of the city’s blackened air, many Londoners were resigned to this industrial atmosphere, convinced that this particular “evil” was an “incurable” symptom of the city. William Frend, “Is It Impossible to Free the Atmosphere of London, in a Very Considerable Degree, from the Smoke and Deleterious Vapours with Which It Is Hourly Impregnated?” (London: Charles Wood, 1819), 2.
22. For a survey of the history of air pollution in Great Britain, see Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London: Methuen, 1987); Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); and William M. Cavert, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). A growing literature on air and architecture now includes studies of episodes from early modernity to the contemporary period. See, for example, the contributions to the special issue on City Air: Journal of Architecture 19, no. 2 (2014) and Jorge Otero-Pailos, “The Ambivalence of Smoke: Pollution and Modern Architectural Historiography,” Grey Room, no. 44 (2011): 90–113.
23. Letter from Christopher Wren to Bishop Atterbury, 1713 in Christopher Wren, Parentalia; or, The Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (1750; Farnsborough: Gregg Press, 1965), 299.
24. The scientific and aesthetic attention paid to clouds—from Luke Howard and John Constable to John Ruskin—during the nineteenth century is another index of the developing perceptions of atmosphere.
25. Alfred Bartholomew, Hints Relative to the Construction of Fire-Proof Buildings (London: Library of Fine Arts, 1839), 17. Bartholomew’s impressive array of adjectives parallels the extensive taxonomy offered by Karl Rosenkranz as a catalog of symptoms of ugliness.
26. “Report from Select Committee on Houses of Parliament,” 13.
27. Ibid., 13.
28. Henry de la Beche was the first director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and William Smith was the creator of the revolutionary 1815 Geological Map of England and Wales. On William Smith and his map, see Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). On Charles Harriott Smith and his role in architectural discourse, see Edward John Gillen, “Stones of Science: Charles Harriot Smith and the Importance of Geology in Architecture, 1834–64,” Architectural History 59 (2016): 281–310.
29. See David G. Bate, “Sir Henry Thomas De La Beche and the Founding of the British Geological Survey,” Mercian Geologist 17, no. 3 (2010): 149–65.
30. “Stone for the New Houses of Parliament,” Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal (1839): 331.
31. Ibid., 332.
32. Ibid., 331.
33. Ibid., 332.
34. Ibid., 331.
35. Ibid., 333.
36. Robert Angus Smith, “On the Air and Rain of Manchester,” Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester 10 (1852): 207.
37. Ibid., 207.
38. Robert Angus Smith, “On the Air of Towns,” Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society of London 11, no. 3 (1859): 196–235. Smith published an even more comprehensive body of research in 1872. See Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872).
39. Smith, “On the Air of Towns,” 232.
40. “Report of the Committee on the Decay of Stone at the New Palace of Westminster” (1861), v.
41. For example, Smith was able to explain that when the stone beds in the initially selected Bolsolver quarry turned out to be insufficient in dimension, further inspection identified a neighboring quarry at Anston that became the source for most of the stone used in the construction.
42. See appendix 1 in “Report of the Committee on the Decay of Stone.”
43. Ibid., 98. Harriot Smith apparently did not agree with the chemists’ conclusion that atmospheric harm was the significant cause, emphasizing instead the use of deficient stone.
44. Ibid., 95.
45. Ibid., 96.
46. Ibid., ix.
47. Ibid., 17.
48. The Houses of Parliament were the setting for new techniques of interior ventilation, designed by the engineer David Boswell Reid. See Robert Bruegmann, “Central Heating and Forced Ventilation: Origins and Effects on Architectural Design,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 37, no. 3 (1978): 143–60.
49. Alfred Waterhouse, “Mr. Waterhouse on Architecture,” Building News 44 (1883): 246.
50. Ibid., 246.
51. On the evolution of nuisance law and its relation to the progression of smoke abatement, see Rebecca Jemima Adell, “Creating Parliamentary Smoke: The Quest for a National Smoke Pollution Law in Nineteenth-Century England” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2005); Joel Franklin Brenner, “Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Legal Studies 3, no. 2 (1974): 403–33; and John P. S. McLaren, “Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution—Some Lessons from Social History,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 3, no. 2 (1983): 155–221.
52. See Brimblecombe, Big Smoke, and Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution.
53. An Act for giving greater Facility in the Prosecution and Abatement of Nuisances arising from Furnaces used and in the working of Steam Engines (Smoke Prohibition Act), 1 & 2 Geo. IV, c. 41 (1821).
54. Adell argues that the 1821 law was motivated by the belief that existing common law would be capable of regulating the problem of industrial smoke, and that subsequent efforts turned toward the instruments of statutory law.
55. Report, Addressed to Viscount Canning, &c. By Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche and Dr. Lyon Playfair, upon the Means of Obviating the Evils Arising from the Smoke Occasioned by Factories and Other Works Situated in Large Towns, April 6, 1846. See British Sessional Papers 43 (1846): 331–44.
56. The 1853 Smoke Abatement Act was followed in 1863 by the Alkali Act, prompted by the inquiries of the parliamentary Committee on Injury from Noxious Vapours. In that committee, Playfair had described emissions from alkali manufacture as the “monster nuisance.” These statutory developments were accompanied consistently by an awareness that urban smoke was also a symptom of industrial and economic advancement, and the problem of smoke was therefore understood to be as ambiguous as the substance itself. See, for example, “The Blessings of Coal,” Illustrated London News, November 3, 1849; and Peter Reed, Acid Rain and the Rise of the Environmental Chemist in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2014).
57. Smith, “On the Air and Rain of Manchester,” 196.
58. London Metropolitan Archives, folder LCC/PC/GEN/01/033.
59. “The Decay of London’s Public Buildings,” British Architect, August 30, 1901.
60. On the broad relationship of processes of governance and visuality in the Victorian period, see Chris Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City,” Social History 27, no. 1 (2002): 1–15.
61. See Waterhouse, “Mr. Waterhouse on Architecture,” and Halsey Ricardo, “Of Colour in the Architecture of Cities,” in Art and Life in the Building and Decoration of Cities (London: Rivington, Percival, 1897), 211–60. Also see Michael Stratton, “Shining through the Smog: Terracotta and Faience,” in Good and Proper Materials: The Fabric of London since the Great Fire, ed. Hermione Hobhouse and Ann Saunders (London: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1989), 25–37. The architectural strategy employed by Waterhouse in the London context is exemplified in his design for the Natural History Museum in South Kensington and would have been evident as well in his design for the Royal Courts of Justice had he won the competition for that notable public building.
62. Lyon Playfair, in “Report on the State of Large Towns in Lancashire,” pointed out that this regime of painting and whitewash necessitated by industrial smoke had a significant financial cost. See Catherine Bowler and Peter Brimblecombe, “Environmental Pressures on Building Design and Manchester’s John Rylands Library,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 3 (2000): 175–91, n. 74.
1. Gavin Stamp, “Anti-Ugly Action: An Episode in the History of British Modernism,” AA Files 70 (2015): 80.
2. For details of Anti-Ugly Action, including its founding and members, see ibid.
3. Quoted in ibid., 80.
4. Ian Nairn, Modern Buildings in London (London: London Transport, 1964): 46. Rob Baker draws the association between Anti-Ugly Action and Nairn’s remark on Bowater House in Baker, Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics: A Sideways Look at Twentieth-Century London (Stroud: Amberley, 2015).
5. See Audrey Jaffe, The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010) and Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
6. Jaffe, Affective Life of the Average Man, 9.
7. Also phrased as the man on the street. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first published usage to 1770, and by the end of the nineteenth century the man in the street, or, with less frequency, the woman in the street, was a common designation of the ordinary person.
8. This in contrast to the simple farmer or the “salt of the earth,” the collective rural subject whose normality is legitimated by a very different set of concerns.
9. See Jaffe, Affective Life of the Average Man, for the significance of oscillation.
10. See Cullen’s illustrations in “Bankside Regained,” Architectural Review (January 1949): 15–24.
11. On the development of the South Bank Arts Centre, see “Proposed Scheme for South Bank Development,” Architects’ Journal (1953): 501–6; “South Bank Development,” Builder (1961): 601–5; “South Bank Development—the Next Stage,” Architects’ Journal (1961): 469–78; “South Bank Arts Centre,” Arup Journal 1, no. 5 (1967): 20–31; and “South Bank Arts Centre,” Architectural Review 144, no. 857 (1968): 15–26. Together with the Royal Festival Hall, the complex is now officially called Southbank Centre. The original name will be retained here to clarify that references are to the newer buildings only, with the Festival Hall named separately.
12. Charles Jencks, “Adhocism on the South Bank,” Architectural Review (July 1968): 27–30. This survey solicited the opinions of engineers.
13. Peter Moro in “Concert Halls,” Architects’ Journal 145 (April 26, 1967): 1003
14. Jencks, “Adhocism on the South Bank,” 27.
15. Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell were also members of the design team, and the engineer for the project was Ove Arup & Partners. Archigram included models and drawings of the South Bank Arts Centre project in a 1965 survey of their work: “Archigram Group, London: A Chronological Survey,” Architectural Design, November 1965, 559–74. Documentation of the project can be found in the Archigram Archive Project: http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/project.php?id=17.
16. Variants of brutalist architecture are now found across the globe, with each example belonging more to local (in spatial and temporal terms) circumstances than to any global aesthetic movement. The literature on brutalism, critical and complimentary, is equally expansive. In regard to the case outlined here, the important texts are two central statements—Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December 1955): 355–61 and The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic (London: Architectural Press, 1966). Brutalism is placed in the English historical context by Elain Harwood, Space, Hope, and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945–1975 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015) and a critical appreciation of the aims and consequences of British brutalist architecture can be found in Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (London: William Heinemann, 2016).
17. Quoted by Warren Chalk in the project description for the “South Bank Development, London” in the Archigram Archive Project, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/project.php?id=17.
18. Jencks, “Adhocism on the South Bank,” 27.
19. Warren Chalk, “Architecture as a Consumer Product,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 135.
20. Alexi Ferster Marmot, Julian Wells, and Kenneth Browne, “Proposals for Bringing Life to the South Bank,” Architectural Review, July 1979, 23–34.
21. Patty Hopkins, one of the founders of the firm now known as Hopkins Architects, had been active in Anti-Ugly Action, as had Sir Michael Hopkins, the other founding partner of the firm.
22. On the proposed redevelopment in its initial form, see Mark Brown, “Southbank Centre Unveils Ambitious £100m Redevelopment,” Guardian, March 6, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/06/southbankcentre-redevelopment. One proposed alteration, the enclosure of the undercroft, has been withdrawn in response to a vigorous campaign by the Long Live Southbank group to preserve the skateboard park that has been the customary use of the space since the late 1970s. On the cultural history of the use of the undercroft, see Long Live Southbank: The Book (London: Long Live Southbank, 2015). For the official conservation statement published in 2015, see “Looking after Our Heritage: A Conservation Plan for Southbank Centre” (London: Southbank Centre Heritage Lottery Fund, 2015).
23. Peter Moro in “Concert Halls,” 1002.
24. Cousins, “The Ugly (Part One),” 63.
25. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 358.
26. Though the Townscape movement attempted with some rigor to translate principles formed within eighteenth-century painting and landscape design into principles applicable to the city, less attention was paid to the social, economic, and environmental determinants that had motivated and given pertinence to the eighteenth-century picturesque. Consequently, the neo-picturesque, though attuned to consumerism, was less explicitly engaged with the social or political circumstances of the postwar city than the New Brutalism. New Brutalism, with its appreciation of irregularity and indeterminacy, as discussed above, also possessed a debt of its own to the eighteenth-century picturesque. On the neo-picturesque in England at this time, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, ed. Mathew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945–65,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 265–73; and Macarthur, Picturesque, 197–215.
27. Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Public Buildings of the South Bank,” in London 2 South (The Buildings of England), ed. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner (London: Penguin, 1982), 350.
28. Cousins, “The Ugly (Part One),” 62.
29. Peter Moro in “Concert Halls,” 1003.
30. The English translation of Quetelet’s A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties appeared in 1842. On the legal and philosophical history of the reasonable man, see Simon Stern, “R. v. Jones (1703): The Origins of the ‘Reasonable Person,’ ” in Landmark Cases in Criminal Law, ed. Ian Williams, Phil Handler, and Henry Mares (Oxford: Hart, 2017), 59–79; J. R. Lucas, “The Philosophy of the Reasonable Man,” Philosophical Quarterly 13, no. 51 (1963): 97–106; and R.K.L. Collins, “Language, History and the Legal Process: A Profile of the ‘Reasonable Man,’ ” Rutgers-Camden Law Journal, no. 8 (1977): 311–24. The reasonable man standard has in recent decades been subjected to critique due to its projection of normative standards that reinforce nonegalitarian standards. The explicit gendering of this legal fiction is the most obvious evidence of this tendency. For an overview of the critiques and the rethinking of the reasonable man standard, see Mayo Moran, Rethinking the Reasonable Person: An Egalitarian Reconstruction of the Objective Standard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
31. Jencks, “Adhocism on the South Bank,” 28.
32. For example, the 1967 performance of “Partita for an Unattended Computer” in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the first concert of electronic music; or Theo Crosby’s 1973 exhibition “How to Play the Environment Game” in the Hayward Gallery, his interactive imagining of a successor to the modernist city.
33. Antony Thorncroft, “The Pink Floyd,” Financial Times, May 13, 1967; “Floyd Play Games,” International Times 1, no. 13 (May 19–June 2, 1967): 14.
34. Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture (London: Hayward, 2008).
35. “Exhibition Guide” for Psycho Buildings.
36. Cedric Price, Report on South Bank, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/DG/AR/07/023.
37. Commons Act 2006, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/26/section/15.
38. Pet Shop Boys, “Red Letter Day” (video), dir. Howard Greenhalgh (1997).
1. John Summerson, “William Butterfield; or, The Glory of Ugliness,” in Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 176.
2. Ibid., 159. Though Summerson’s account was influential, later historians have disagreed with his depiction of Butterfield. More extensive accounts of Butterfield and his work can be found in Paul Thompson, William Butterfield (London: Routledge, 1971) and Peter Howell and Andrew Saint, eds., Butterfield Revisited (London: Victorian Society, 2017). In his contribution to the latter volume, Paul Thompson criticizes what he characterizes as Summerson’s “vitriolic attack” for creating a “negative myth” of Butterfield. Summerson’s view is indeed a polemic one, but it is, nevertheless, very much an appreciation of Butterfield, or of the difficulty of Butterfield. Its importance in the present argument, of course, lies in its willingness to try to explore and understand the category of ugliness rather than to simply refute it. Also useful for its argument that the attention to Butterfield on the part of Summerson and his contemporaries influenced the New Brutalism is Elain Harwood, “Butterfield and Brutalism,” AA Files 27 (1994): 39–46.
3. Summerson, “William Butterfield,” 167.
4. Ibid., 166, 167.
5. Ibid., 173–74.
6. Ibid., 176.
7. John Summerson, Georgian London (London: Pleiades Books, 1945).
8. Christopher Wren, “The Auditory Church,” letter reprinted as appendix 2 in G.W.O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 249. The Addleshaw and Etchells book explains the physical transformations to church interiors that resulted from the Reformation and subsequent theological changes. (Frederick Etchells was also responsible for the first English translation of Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture.)
9. Wren, “Auditory Church,” 250.
10. Chad Varah, paraphrased by Peter Palumbo in memo of June 4, 1970, meeting as cited in R v. St Stephen Walbrook, 2 All England Law Reports 705, 709 (1986).
11. Chad Varah evidence as quoted in ibid., 709.
12. Chad Varah paraphrased by Peter Palumbo in memo of June 4, 1970, meeting, as cited in ibid., 709.
13. Memorandum note dated September 18, 1970, author unknown, “Materials pertaining to St Stephen Walbrook Altar,” Henry Moore Archive, Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, Hertfordshire, UK.
14. In some cases, there is no opposition to the petition for the faculty, but if, as in this case, the change being proposed or the context is significant, the chancellor may then ask the archdeacon to enter appearance to put the petition to proof, in other words, to act as a formal opponent. For information on the faculty system, see Charles Mynors, Changing Churches: A Practical Guide to the Faculty System (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). For an overview of ecclesiastical law, see Mark Hill, Ecclesiastical Law, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
15. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1986), 711. The case was heard by Chancellor G. H. Newsom QC and argued by Peter Boydell QC and Charles George for the petitioners and Spencer G. Maurice for the archdeacon. A transcript of Newsom’s trial notebook can be found in the London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/MS 31588/71.
16. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1986), 711.
17. These are the words of Sir Roy Strong, director of the V&A Museum, presented at the Consistory Court hearing. See R v. St Stephen Walbrook, 2 All England Law Reports 578, 587 (1987).
18. From Downes’s caption for the drawing in Downes, Sir Christopher Wren (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), 65. The drawing, from 1674, is housed in the RIBA Drawings Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. See Christopher Wren, “Designs for St Stephen Walbrook, City of London: Transverse Section.”
19. See transcript of G. H. Newsom Trial Notebooks, London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/MS 31588/71.
20. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1986), 711.
21. This point was made most forcefully by the witness John Arthur Newman, architectural historian and senior lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a member of the Georgian Group. Newman was also the one witness willing to declare the altar itself to be a “second-rate work.” R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1987), 587.
22. Ibid., 586.
23. Ibid., 586.
24. Letter from Peter Palumbo to Henry Moore, dated April 16, 1971, “Materials pertaining to St Stephen Walbrook Altar,” Henry Moore Archive.
25. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1986), 712. Ashley Barker was referring here to a well-known assertion from Christopher Wren’s Tracts on Architecture—well known if not entirely well understood. Wren is sometimes cited as having argued that there are two kinds of beauty, natural and customary, with natural beauty being an absolute quality of an object and customary beauty being relative to the conventions and tastes of a given cultural context. Wren did indeed distinguish between the natural and the customary, but his argument was not that there are two “kinds” of beauty, but rather that there are two “causes” of beauty. Wren regarded beauty to be not so much a quality as a judgment. Natural beauty was not inherent in an object, but was a judgment formulated by the mind upon encountering the qualities of that object through the perceptions of the senses. Customary beauty was similarly a judgment of the mind, though one disoriented or deceived by social influence, as in an inordinate approbation of novelty, for example. Geometric perfection would indeed be a prompt of natural beauty, but would still have depended on the intercession of a faculty of judgment, and would also have required the overcoming of misleading judgments based upon fashion, habit, novelty, or other contingent influence. See J. A. Bennett, “Christopher Wren: The Natural Causes of Beauty,” Architectural History 15 (1972): 5–22. On Wren, also see J. A. Bennett, The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Lydia M. Soo, Wren’s “Tracts” on Architecture and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and John Summerson, “The Mind of Wren,” in Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 51–86.
26. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1986), 709. The theological distinction of altar and table had been put forward by the barrister in opposition as a possible point of law to be considered in the case, and his suggestion was taken up by the chancellor.
27. Ibid., 705.
28. John Henry Newman introduced the concept of development in a book published at the time of his conversion to Catholicism. See Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845).
29. Theoretical perspectives on postmodernism and postmodernity are extensive, but for the context of postmodernism as it is approached here, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992) and Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). For a survey of British postmodern buildings contemporaneous with the St. Stephen Walbrook case, see Elain Harwood and Geraint Franklin, Post-modern Buildings in Britain (London: Batsford, 2017).
30. See James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) and Christopher Webster and John Elliott, eds., “A Church as It Should Be”: The Cambridge Camden Society and Its Influence (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000). Also see Michael Hall, “What Do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, 1850– 1870,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 1 (2000): 78–95.
31. In an account of Butterfield’s design for All Saints’, Margaret Street published in the Ecclesiologist, the society journal, the reviewer observed, not disapprovingly, a “dread of beauty” in the architect’s work not far short of a “preference for ugliness.” “All Saints’, Margaret Street,” Ecclesiologist, no. 130 (February 1859): 185.
32. The viewpoint of the Cambridge Camden Society is given in Thomas Thorp (Chairman of the Restoration Committee), A Statement of Particulars Connected with the Restoration of the Round Church (Cambridge: Deightons, Stevenson, and Walters, 1845). Reverend Faulkner conveyed his position in the circular R. R. Faulkner, “An Appeal to the Protestant Public Respecting the Popish Abominations of a Stone Altar and Credence Table, in St. Sepulchre’s Church, Cambridge” (1844). For a historical account of the controversy, see Elliot Rose, “The Stone Table in the Round Church and the Crisis of the Cambridge Camden Society,” Victorian Studies 10, no. 2 (1966): 119–44.
33. Faulkner v. Litchfield and Stern, 163 English Reports 1007 (1845): 1020.
34. Ibid., 1021.
35. The installation in the Round Church included a bead of mortar and a base recessed into the tiles of the floor, details that were interpreted as confirming the immobility of the altar.
36. Faulkner v. Litchfield and Stern, 1019.
37. Ibid., 1030.
38. Ibid., 1012.
39. Ibid., 1013.
40. Ibid., 1015.
41. The Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved on its establishment was considered to be free of precedents set by the Privy Council. On the CECR, see Hill, Ecclesiastical Law.
42. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1987), 580. In the implicit acceptance of development as an aspect of legal method, there is a parallel to the endorsement of development by some Ecclesiologists and gothic revival architects in the nineteenth century. See Hall, “What Do Victorian Churches Mean?” The five judges of the CECR were Sir Anthony Lloyd, the Bishop of Rochester, the Bishop of Chichester, the Right Reverend Kenneth Woollcombe, and Sir Ralph Gibson.
43. See R v. St Mary’s, Banbury, 1 All England Law Reports 247 (1987).
44. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1987), 594.
45. Kerry Downes as quoted in ibid., 589.
46. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1986), 711, 710.
47. Ibid., 711.
48. R v. St Stephen Walbrook (1987), 581.
49. In Summerson’s words, “If the value of a work of art is, for you, inseparable from its position in time, the ugliness in Butterfield becomes an essential part of a situation which must be evaluated as a whole.” Summerson, “William Butterfield,” 176.
1. Quoted in European Magazine 62 (November 1812): 384.
2. Ibid., 385.
3. Building Act, 14 George III, cap. 78, 1774.
4. Sun, October 15, 1812.
5. Times, November 19, 1812. The presence of Lord Ellenborough was only the consequence of his position as chief justice presiding over the Court of the King’s Bench. But the account that follows will show his persistent involvement in the legal events that addressed questions of criticism and architecture. Lord Ellenborough was himself a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and evidently had concern for matters of art. He took advantage of the hearing regarding the facade of Soane’s House to quip that although the Building Act “might have benefited the construction of houses it was not itself a model of construction.”
6. Sun, October 15, 1812.
7. John Henry Barrow, ed., Mirror of Parliament (1st Session, 3 Will. IV), vol. 1 (1833): 773.
8. This discursive space is familiar as the public sphere theorized by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, (1962; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Habermas’s account privileges the nature of the public sphere at what he regards as its inception, in the late seventeenth century. By the time Soane began his career, the public condition was markedly different, as the invention of the word “publicity” demonstrates. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first usage of the word in 1791, suggesting the perception at that moment of a new experience of public observation and notice, which was undoubtedly related to the proliferation of print media. The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared in London in 1702, in editions of perhaps eight hundred copies; by 1821 there were several daily newspapers, and the leading daily, the Times, had a circulation of ten thousand. For the London press at the start of Soane’s career, see Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1772–1792 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). Habermas’s argument is taken up critically in Joad Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999) and Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
9. Sir John Soane’s Clippings Scrapbooks, Soane Museum, London. John Wood never “moved into the limelight of 18th-century gossip,” as John Summerson put it, and so did not attain anything like Soane’s rank of celebrity. But Soane knew of Wood and owned his treatise The Origin of Building and his account of Stonehenge, Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, Described, Restored, and Explained. Stonehenge was an artifact of considerable fascination for Soane.
10. Observer, October 16, 1796.
11. Arthur T. Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, R.A. (London: Butler & Tanner, 1927), 62. The text of the poem reprinted by Bolton, presumably a copy Soane possessed since Bolton was curator of the Soane Museum, differs slightly from that in the Observer, but the two versions are equally derisory.
12. Innuendo was the absence of any explicit referent, even if the imputation was obvious, as in the case of the elided “Sxxne.” Only a statement that named or portrayed an individual in a manner that excluded any other identification could be libel. See C. R. Kropf, “Libel and Satire in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 2 (Winter 1974–75): 153–68. Francis Ludlow Holt’s The Law of Libel (London: J. Butterworth, 1816) is an early nineteenth-century treatise on libel law, and an overview of English libel law is given in Peter Carter-Ruck, Libel and Slander (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973).
13. Holt, Law of Libel, 72.
14. On the national significance of the architecture of the Bank of England and Soane’s work for the bank, the authoritative study is Daniel M. Abramson, Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694–1942 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
15. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 76.
16. Holt, Law of Libel, 187–88.
17. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 76.
18. Sun, May 18, 1799 and Morning Chronicle, May 18, 1799. Reports also appeared in the Herald, the Times, and the True Briton on the same date.
19. Times, May 18, 1799.
20. The essays, signed only with initials, appeared in the Guardian of May 20, May 27, and June 3, 1821. They are excerpted in Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 340–43. Gillian Darley provides a compelling study of Soane’s personality, and the effects of these events upon him, in her biography of Soane: Darley, John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
21. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 341–42.
22. Ibid., 343–44. In theory, the criteria for “libels against a man in respect to his profession and calling” did support action for an individual “disgraced or injured in his profession” by a defamatory publication. See Holt, Law of Libel, 210.
23. Liberty of the Press! Sir John Carr against Hood and Sharpe. Report of the above Case, Vernon, Hood, and Sharpe (London, 1808), 28.
24. Ibid., 27.
25. Ibid., 28.
26. Sun, May 18, 1799
27. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 342–43.
28. Ibid., 343.
29. Ibid., 343.
30. Sun, June 5, 1821.
31. Sun, June 23, 1821.
32. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 374–78.
33. Times, June 13, 1827.
34. Times, June 13, 1827. Perhaps the only legal strategy remaining to Soane was to argue that the libel constituted a “breach of the peace,” meaning that it was deliberately calculated to cause deep offense and therefore likely to provoke a violent response. This interpretation of libel law was more common in the prosecution of criminal libels, which might be all the more antagonistic for being true. Soane’s counsel in Soane v. Knight considered that this condition would be the only circumstance in which a court took notice of “personal feeling.” Darley, John Soane, 279.
35. Times, June 13, 1827. The case of Soane v. Knight would be cited during the following decades, and into the twentieth century, as a precedent in the application of libel law to artistic works. See, for example, the Earl of Hansbury, The Laws of England: Being a Complete Statement of the Whole Law of England, vol. 18 (London: Butterworth, 1911), 704–5.
36. Times, June 13, 1827.
37. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 148–49.
38. Examiner, February 11, 1810.
39. Sidney Hutchinson, The History of the Royal Academy, 1768–1986 (1968; London: Robert Royce, 1986), 245. A nineteenth-century account of the Royal Academy is William Sandby, The History of the Royal Academy of Arts (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Greene, 1862).
40. David Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 490, 491–92.
41. Good reputation was the public attribute of an academician, but inside the Royal Academy a reputation was subject to the numerous intrigues and rivalries that consumed its members. One of the most powerful and partisan academicians, painter Joseph Farington, disliked Soane intensely. See Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre, et al., eds., The Diary of Joseph Farington (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
42. Watkin, Sir John Soane, 544.
43. Ibid., 544.
44. Bolton, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 148–49.
45. Illustrated newspapers did not appear until later in the nineteenth century; engravings were used sparingly in weekly journals. An interested reader could find architectural criticism in books like James Ralph’s A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in, and about London and Westminster of 1734, or James Elmes and Thomas Shepherd’s Metropolitan Improvements, an illustrated volume published in 1827, but their circulation was not as extensive as that of the press, particularly among the general public. Mark Hallet has studied the reception of the Exhibition in the press, and confirms the likelihood that many more people read reviews of the Exhibition than actually paid a shilling to see it. See Mark Hallett, “‘The Business of Criticism’: The Press and the Royal Academy Exhibition in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Art on the Line, ed. David Solkin (London: Yale University Press, 2001), 64–75.
46. Examiner, July 15, 1810. The letter is signed “A Humble Artist,” and Soane likely had some role in its publication. Bolton suggests that it may have been written by Soane’s friend, James Spiller. This adumbrates Soane’s actions in the later Guardian episode, when supportive letters appeared in the Sun. The Sun was a Tory publication, while the Examiner was among the most radical of the London newspapers. Although this suggests some degree of disengagement between political partisanship and artistic criticism at the time, more likely it should be attributed to the influence of personal relationships upon the publications themselves. In this instance, the Examiner’s support for Soane may well have been corollary to its politics, given the royal patronage of its target, the academy itself. Hallett addresses the relationship of “party-political” and “art-theoretical” criticism of the arts in “‘Business of Criticism.’ ”
47. Morning Chronicle, May 18, 1799.
48. In the 1808 case of Tabbert v. Tipper, Lord Ellenborough directed the jury that the defendant’s actions had deliberately brought harm to the plaintiff’s business as a bookseller, and the jury therefore found the defendant guilty of libel. Lord Ellenborough nevertheless stated his view that criticism played a necessary social role. Quoted in Holt, Law of Libel, 215–16.
49. Watkin, Sir John Soane, 544.
50. Ibid., 666.
51. Ibid., 544.
52. Times, June 13, 1827.
53. Times, March 31, 1824.
54. For a full account of the trial proceedings, see Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1992). Also see “The Trials of Beauty: Ruskin, Whistler, and a ‘New Series of Truths,’ ” in Higgins, Modernist Cult of Ugliness.
55. Botterill and Another v. Whytehead in The Law Times Reports, vol. 41 (London: Horace Cox, 1880), 588.
56. Reyner Banham, “On Criticizing Architecture,” Listener, January 4, 1962, 16.
57. J. M. Richards, “Architect, Critic and Public,” Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal 27 (November 1950): 373.
58. “Architectural Criticism,” Architectural Review (November 1950): 19.
59. Richards, “Architect, Critic and Public,” 373.
60. Martin Filler, “The Insolence of Architecture,” New York Review of Books, June 4, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/06/05/insolence-architecture/. The essay was edited after the lawsuit was settled, with the modified version published on August 25, 2014, accompanied by a letter of apology from its author.
61. Though US libel law has been influenced by common law in Great Britain, particularly during the nineteenth century, the standards of libel are now distinct in the two legal contexts. Because the case was filed in New York State, the relevant legal standards would have differed from those in Great Britain, though the broad categories of harm, as to professional reputation, for example, are the same.
62. “Complaint and Jury Demand,” Hadid v. NYREV d/b/a New York Review of Books, Martin Filler, New York State Supreme Court, August 21, 2014. On the prevalence of explicitly gendered approaches to criticism of Zaha Hadid and her work, see Katie Lloyd Thomas, “On the Media Coverage of Zaha Hadid’s Death,” arq 20, no. 2 (June 2016): 99–103.
1. Ouida, “The Streets of London,” in The Woman’s World, ed. Oscar Wilde (London: Cassell & Company, 1888), 483.
2. Ibid., 482.
3. William Morris, “Ugly London,” Pall Mall Gazette, September 4, 1888. Ouida’s critical description of London’s streets had also been published in the Pall Mall Gazette, and Morris was asked to give a response.
4. Ouida, “Streets of London,” 484; Morris, “Ugly London.”
5. Ouida, “Streets of London,” 484.
6. Morris, “Ugly London.”
7. RIBA Charter 1837, https://www.architecture.com/-/media/files/history-charter-and-byelaws/charterbyelaws2016.pdf.
8. The royal designation was granted by Queen Victoria in 1866. The more modern forms of legal incorporation followed in the middle of the century, with the Joint Stock Companies Acts passed in 1844 and 1856.
9. See R. Norman Shaw, “That an Artist Is Not Necessarily Impractical,” in Architecture: A Profession or an Art, ed. R. Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson (London: John Murray, 1892), 1–15, and John Wilton Ely, “The Rise of the Professional Architect in England,” in The Architect: Chapters in the History of a Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (Berkeley: University of California Press), 180–208. The 1931 act is the Architects (Registration) Act, 21 & 22 Geo. 5, Ch. 33.
10. British Architect and Northern Engineer, September 20, 1878, 115.
11. Ibid., 113.
12. John Summerson’s essay “William Butterfield” was one example of this process of acknowledgment and assessment of the Victorian architects within the exigencies of their historical period.
13. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, “Victorian Conservanda,” Journal of the London Society, no. 344 (1958): 40.
14. Ibid., 43.
15. Summerson, “William Butterfield,” 172; John Summerson, The Architecture of Victorian London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 15, 89, 85.
16. Summerson, Architecture of Victorian London, 89.
17. Ibid., 88, 54.
18. John Summerson, Victorian Architecture: Four Studies in Evaluation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2.
19. Ibid., 4.
20. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
21. See report by Inspector Stephen Marks, secs. 22.05–22.14, pp. 128–129, folder AT 41/411, National Archives, Kew, Surrey, UK. For the general history and current disposition of London conservation areas, see “Conservation Areas in the City of London: A General Introduction to Their Character,” ed. Department of Planning and Transportation (City of London, 1994).
22. The Mansion House Square inquiry convened by Stephen Marks was held in the Livery Hall of Guildhall from May 1 to July 6, 1984. (see Figure 54) The inspector’s final report, which contains summaries of the testimony and evidence, can be found in folder AT 41/411, National Archives.
23. Report by Inspector Stephen Marks, sec. 10.88, p. 47, folder AT 41/411, National Archives. Additional papers pertaining to the Mansion House Square inquiry are contained in the RIBA Archives, with John Summerson’s testimony included in the John Summerson Papers. For an analysis of Summerson’s testimony in relation to his concerns about preservation, see Michela Rosso, “An Open Space at the Constricted Centre of the City: Summerson and the Artificial Inflation of Victorian Values,” in Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography, ed. Frank Salmon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 155–69.
24. Summerson, Architecture of Victorian London, 88, 54.
25. Report by Inspector Stephen Marks, sec. 10.88, p. 56, folder AT 41/411, National Archives.
26. Ibid., 55, 57. Opponents also argued that the reputation Mies enjoyed was itself a fiction, forged largely by the sustained propaganda of Philip Johnson. Richard Rogers aimed to rebut this claim with an explication of the broad historical importance of Mies’s work.
27. Ibid., 57.
28. John Harris, “Was the Design by Mies van der Rohe?,” Financial Times, April 30, 1982. Harris was referring to the two public exhibitions of the Mansion House Square scheme. The 1968 exhibition is shown in Figure 52.
29. In a minor controversy during the inquiry, the inspector was told that Dr. Ludwig Glaeser, curator of the Mies archive and a supporter of the proposed tower, had suborned Hitchcock, attempting to induce him to recant this statement. The inspector did not pursue the accusation formally but surely took note of it.
30. Report by Inspector Stephen Marks, sec. 10.88, p. 46, folder AT 41/411, National Archives.
31. The secretary of state issued his decision on May 22, 1985. See Press Notice, “Patrick Jenkin Rejects Mansion House Proposal,” folder AT 41/411, National Archives.
32. See Peter Carter, “The Design Was by Mies van der Rohe,” Financial Times, May 5, 1982, and “Expert Witness: Peter Carter,” Architects’ Journal, August 22 and 29, 1984, 24–25.
33. Report by Inspector Stephen Marks, sec. 10.10, p. 40 and sec. 10.50, p. 48, folder AT 41/411, National Archives.
34. Ibid., 132–33
35. Ibid., 131.
36. Ibid., 17.
37. Inspector’s report quoted in “Give These Vigorous Victorian Buildings a Chance” (SAVE Britain’s Heritage), np. The architect is Frederick J. Ward, who also designed the Albert Buildings, which stood across the street. Noting the stylistic extremity of these architectural solutions, Summerson described both buildings as “very disturbing solutions of the office block problem.” Summerson, Architecture of Victorian London, 53.
38. The literary theorist Seán Burke has described this effect as a “structure of resummons whereby the author may be recalled to his or her text,” proposing that the signature “offers itself to any tribunal which may be subsequently established upon the basis of the signatory’s text in relation to as yet unrealized historical circumstances. The signature accedes to this tribunal.” Burke, “The Ethics of Signature,” in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, ed. Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 289.
39. Ibid., 289.
40. Michel Foucault, in his essay “What Is an Author?,” noted that with the modern notion of the author (or what he characterized as the “author-function”), the relation between author and text (or here between architect and building) was fixed by signature so that the circulation of illicit or transgressive discourses could be disciplined or curtailed. An author’s signature was an acceptance of liability for the undersigned contents; in order to evade that discipline, the signature “Anonymous” appeared in its modern form. See Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Burke, Authorship, 141–60.
41. Summerson, Architecture of Victorian London, 6.
42. “Palumbo to Commission New Scheme,” Architects’ Journal, May 29, 1985, 24.
43. Stirling Wilford and Associates became Michael Wilford & Partners in 1993.
44. “Foster and Rogers Add Weight to No. 1 Poultry Listing Bid,” Architects’ Journal, July 13, 2015, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/foster-and-rogers-add-weight-to-no1-poultry-listing-bid/8686170.article.
45. “James Stirling’s Widow Hits Out at Poultry Plans,” Architects’ Journal, September 1, 2015, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/james-stirlings-widow-hits-out-at-poultry-plans/8688289.article.
46. “Wilford: ‘Claims Stirling Was Unhappy with Poultry Are Wrong,’ ” Architects’ Journal, July 27, 2015, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/wilford-claims-stirling-was-unhappy-with-poultry-are-wrong/8686777.article.
47. Ibid.
48. The stated concern was that the several cultural communities that had come to reside in the neighborhood maintained different cultural practices and traditions, in some of which the presence of human remains would require avoidance of the building altogether.
49. “Case No. 15: Christ Church Spitalfields,” April 12, 2004, Consistory Court of the Diocese of London, 3.
1. “A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace,” May 30, 1984, https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-royal-institute-of.
2. This expansion of the National Gallery had been initiated decades earlier. The government purchased the site in 1958 to remove it from possible commercial development, and the following year the Sunday Times staged a competition soliciting ideas for the gallery’s expansion. Several dozen entries were given recognition, but as no commitment of government funds was forthcoming, no action resulted from the competition. The later competition was announced by the government in 1981, and made use of a different format, in which both an architect and a developer would be selected, with the developer permitted to use some of the site for offices. Only a basic brief of information and requirements was provided to entrants, with the assumption being that further refinement to specify and satisfy the needs of the National Gallery would follow after the selection of an architect and developer. For an account of the history leading up to the extension of the National Gallery, see Colin Amery, A Celebration of Art and Architecture: The National Gallery Sainsbury Wing (London: National Gallery Publications, 1991).
3. In the informal public poll, the entry by Richard Rogers Partnership received 29 percent of the first-place votes and 36 percent of the “least popular” votes. Seven schemes (out of seventy-nine entries) had been shortlisted and exhibited. In October 1982, the competition advisors announced that three firms would be asked to further develop their designs: Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), Arup Associates, and the eventual winner Ahrends Burton and Koralek (ABK). At the end of the year, apparently after contentious deliberations, it was announced that none of the designs were satisfactory, but that ABK would be selected as architects and would be asked to prepare a new scheme based on revised requirements. Amery, Celebration of Art and Architecture, 43–49.
4. Quoted in ibid., 48.
5. See newspaper clipping reprinted in “RIBA President Rides into a Storm,” Building Design 24 (August 2007): 36.
6. “A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace,” May 30, 1984, https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-royal-institute-of.
7. “The Prince of Wales’ Speech,” Andrew Allberry memorandum to the Secretary of State, May 31, 1984, folder 17/739, “National Gallery Extension, Public Inquiry: Discussions, Papers, and Correspondence,” National Archives.
8. John Delafons memorandum to the Private Secretary for the Secretary of State, June 1, 1984, folder 17/739, “National Gallery Extension, Public Inquiry: Discussions, Papers, and Correspondence,” National Archives.
9. “A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee’s Annual Dinner, Mansion House, London,” December 1, 1987, http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-corporation-of-london-planning-and-communication. Two useful sources on the participation of the Prince of Wales in these architectural debates are “Prince Charles and the Architectural Debate,” AD 59, nos. 5/6 (1989), and Charles Jencks, The Prince, the Architects, and the New Wave Monarchy (London: Academy Editions, 1988).
10. “A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee’s Annual Dinner, Mansion House, London,” December 1, 1987, http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-corporation-of-london-planning-and-communication.
11. Ibid.
12. See the Mass Observation archive, http://www.massobs.org.uk/.
13. Peter Collins, Architectural Judgement (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), 192.
14. Ibid., 190.
15. Report by Inspector Stephen Marks, sec. 22.01, p. 128, folder AT 41/411, National Archives.
16. Collins was inspired to write Architectural Judgement after spending a year as a fellow at the Yale Law School. Intrigued by legal history and influenced by the concepts of precedent in legal reasoning, Collins argued for the possibility of revitalizing architectural judgment by adopting some of the perspectives to be found in jurisprudence. Collins also published brief reflections on ugliness in Peter Collins, “Uglification and Derision,” RAIC Journal 36, no. 8 (1959): 282–83.
17. On the Town and Country Planning Act and town planning in Britain, see Gordon E. Cherry, Town Planning in Britain since 1900: The Rise and Fall of the Planning Ideal (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning (Leighton Buzzard: Leonard Hill Books, 1974); and Francis J. C. Amos, “The Town and Country Planning Act 1947,” Planning Outlook 30 (1987): 12–14. For theoretical consideration of the space of the inquiry (from the perspective of sociology of science), see Stephen Yearley, “Bog Standards: Science and Conservation at a Public Inquiry,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 421–38.
18. At present, this would be the secretary of state for community and local government. During the 1980s, it was the responsibility of the secretary of state for the environment. Planning procedures generally refer simply to the “secretary of state,” so that nomenclature is used here.
19. The two other national amenity societies concerned with architecture and monuments are the Ancient Monuments Society and the Council for British Archeology. There are also parallel societies in Scotland, and hundreds of local preservation societies as well as charities like SAVE Britain’s Heritage. Within the national government, Historic England (formerly English Heritage) operates as an executive body in the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. See the National Heritage Act of 1983. Sources on the emergence of the institutions of the heritage movement in Britain include Simon Thurley, Men from the Ministry: How Britain Saved Its Heritage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), and Michael Hunter, ed. Preserving the Past (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1996).
20. The judiciary in Britain is independent of the sovereign, who is no longer the “fount of justice,” and the sovereign is independent of the law. The monarch is immune from civil and criminal prosecution and cannot be compelled to give testimony in legal proceedings. Under constitutional practice, the monarch refrains from engaging in political matters, formally accepting the advice of ministers as the policy of the government she heads. On the Duchy of Cornwall, see http://duchyofcornwall.org/.
21. See chap. 4 in Vaughan Hart, Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), and for the political theory of the king’s two bodies, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). On the relation of monarch and architecture in the City of London, see Christine Stevenson, The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2013).
22. See Michael Rustin, “Postmodernism and Antimodernism in Contemporary British Architecture,” Assemblage 8 (1989): 88–104.
23. The Chelsea Society was a local organization. English Heritage (described in note 19 above) had been consulted because of the possible effect on a listed building; CABE, another executive body under the authority of the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, was responsible for advising the government on matters pertaining to architecture and the built environment.
24. Patrick Barkham and Bob Sharp, “Architects Clash on £20m Update for Wren’s Historic Hospital,” Guardian, May 12, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/may/12/urbandesign.arts; Neil Tweedie and Helen Johnstone, “Architects at War over Infirmary for Old Soldiers,” Telegraph, May 23, 2005, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1490570/Architects-at-war-over-infirmary-forold-soldiers.html.
25. Qatari Diar withdrew its application for planning permission, after the intervention from Prince Charles but prior to the actual hearing in front of the Kensington and Chelsea committee, leading the CPC Group to file suit against their partners on the grounds that they had a contractual obligation to try to obtain planning permission. CPC Group Ltd v. Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co [2010], EWHC 1535 (Ch) (June 25, 2010).
26. Robert Booth, “A Tale of Two Princes: How Prince Charles Altered the Landscape with a Word in the Emir of Qatar’s Ear,” Guardian, May 17, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/may/17/prince-charles-chelsea-barracks.
27. Sunday Times, April 19, 2009.
28. Jonathan Glancey, “The View from Highgrove,” Guardian, April 23, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/apr/23/prince-charles-richard-rogers-riba.
29. Robert Booth, “Prince Charles’s Meddling in Planning ‘Unconstitutional,’ Says Richard Rogers,” Guardian, June 15, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/15/prince-charles-richard-rogers-architecture.
30. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Chapman & Hall, 1867), 103.
31. In the British context, a constitutional convention is a rule or procedure that emerges from customary practice and, though not enacted into law, is agreed to regulate the conduct of relevant institutions of the state, and the Crown in particular.
32. This proposition had been asserted speculatively by Rodney Brazier. See Brazier, “The Constitutional Position of the Prince of Wales,” Public Law, Autumn 1995, 401–16. Also see Adam Perry, “Constitutional Conventions and the Prince of Wales,” Modern Law Review 76, no. 6 (November 2013): 1119–28.
33. Evans v. Information Commissioner [2012], UKUT 313 (AAC) (September 18, 2012), para. 106, p. 33.
34. Ibid., para. 160, pp. 44–45.
35. Rob Evans and Robert Booth, “Attorney General Blocks Disclosure of Prince Charles Letters to Ministers,” Guardian, October 16, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/oct/16/attorney-general-blocks-prince-charles-letters.
36. The black spider memos are available online: “Prince of Wales Correspondence with Government Departments,” https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prince-of-wales-correspondence-with-government-departments. The decade-long case laid out the terms of argument, although it will not set a precedent because Parliament in 2010 passed a revision to the Freedom of Information Act exempting communications of the heir to the throne and the second in line to the throne.
37. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
38. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
39. See CPC Group Ltd v. Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co [2010], EWHC 1535 (Ch) (June 25, 2010).
1. Edward Hollamby was the chief architect who commissioned John Outram, Richard Rogers, and Nicholas Grimshaw to each design one of the pumping stations. See the official listing for the Isle of Dogs Pumping Station by Historic England: “List Entry: Isle of Dogs Pumping Station,” https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1447069.
2. See Grenfell Tower Regeneration Project Engagement Statement, October 2012, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/idoxWAM/doc/Other-960662.pdf?extension=.pdf&id=960662&location=VOLUME2&contentType=application/pdf&pageCount=1.
3. As of this writing, official inquests and inquiries have not commenced, but the disaster has been intensely scrutinized in the general and professional media. Reports on the exact nature of causes at these different levels are thus provisional, but are more than speculation.
4. In her recent judgment on a petition for a faculty to approve, retroactively, the construction of a building on church grounds next to Christ Church Spitalfields, Chancellor June Rodgers of the Consistory Court of the Diocese of London bluntly cautioned that “the many advantages which the Church of England gains from being exempted from state listed building control can only be justified if the operation of this ecclesiastical system works competently and fairly. We operate as a Court of Law, within the legal system of this country, not a rather cosy club. To behave as such is always the risk in small specialised legal jurisdictions. . . . This present case highlights what happens when an outside spotlight, including Freedom of Information requests, is turned on this jurisdiction and its operation.” See “Judgment in the matter of a building in the churchyard of Christ Church Spitalfields and in the matter of an application for a restoration order and a petition for a confirmatory faculty,” December 17, 2017, Consistory Court of the Diocese of London, 9.