It’s like Worzel Gummidge’s ‘joke’: “What’s the difference between a lemon and a banana? They’re both yellow.” What’s the difference between a new town sign, a housing estate and a doctor’s surgery? They’re all ugly. Across the land, buildings are being erected, signage replaced, facilities upgraded, yet little of it seems an improvement on what came before. My commute from our village to my place of work in a cathedral city has been aggravated in recent months by a great march of incremental uglification.
Our local old town wooden sign used to read: “Welcome to Townsville.” It had a brick structure that included a trough, filled every season with bedding plants. It was pretty. Naturally it has been replaced with a bland metal sign: “Townsville, Please drive carefully.” Topped as it is with an aggressive yellow and red 30 sign, like an ill-fitting bobble hat, it’s aesthetically unbalanced.
And passive aggressive.
Where the older sign welcomed visitors to the elegant Georgian market town, the new one makes dreadful assumptions about those who have the temerity to drive in. In asking us to “drive carefully”, it assumes that without the bossy sign, we are all speeding lunatics about to tear through the town and mow down a group of school children.
Next up is the Taylor Wimpy estate of 350 homes built on the town’s margins, after years of strenuous opposition. The next-door field is a solar farm. Houses are enormously expensive and yet most double bedrooms only have enough space for a single wardrobe and no chest of drawers. Utilities and central heating may be improved but visually, not one house looks better than the Georgian houses in the historic town centre.
“Now, now,” chides my husband, “let’s not be rude about where people live.” He was up a ladder trying to replace the rat-eaten soffits beneath the gutters of our 1980s dormer bungalow. Yes of course, shelter and affordability are important, but so too is visual beauty. I feel like William Morris who lamented: “I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age.”
What entirely spoils my commute is the new city centre surgery that has been thrown up in the heart of Anglo Saxon Winchester. Only two months old, the St Clement’s surgery (pictured above) already looks like an abandoned 1960s precinct. When I compare this medical centre to the nearby Hospital of St Cross in Winchester, a stunning Romanesque building founded by Henry of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror, to help the poor (pictured below), a wave of sadness pulls at my heart. It is square and solid and buttermilk stone in the summer sun, the sort of Abbey you would travel to Normandy to visit. It has stood resplendent for nearly 900 years, continuing to support the robed Brothers of St Cross who live in what Simon Jenkin’s describes as “England’s most perfect Almshouse”. Can there be a stronger example in England of the degradation in style and substance of buildings that claim to help those in need?
At the six-month anniversary event of Looking for Growth, Harriet Green of Basis Capital spoke about the natural reflex to campaign against building projects. She cited the attempt to replace Bath’s Art Deco fire-station:
When people hear that new buildings are coming… there is upswell in support for people trying to block it. We have subbed in progress for decline, we assume that if something is going to be ‘improved’ it’s just going to be quite rubbish… when we hear that change is coming, we know it’s probably going to be shit.
While previous generations prompted architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner to write that, “Church spires, market halls and guild buildings stand not just for religion or commerce but for the human urge to dignify its surroundings,” it appears that this urge has long since departed. The Healthcare Property ‘experts’ Assura, who developed the hulking St Clements surgery, boasts: “The development will meet the latest sustainability and energy efficiency standards. It will be able to generate onsite energy through the installation of solar panels on the roof and the design follows Net Zero Carbon principles throughout.” Mention of the dignification of the local surroundings, there is none. Of the potential of great buildings to uplift the human spirit, silence.
Various explanations have been offered to explain the collapse in modern consideration for beauty. Dominic Frisby talks about the replacement of human based measurements, feet and inches, with the metric system; Roger Scruton, the primacy of functionality over form and the philosophical rejection of tradition; my chum who’s a civil servant in the housing department, blames planning officers; others, our societal atheism precluding the need to recreate heaven on earth. I blame corporate ideology: the visions and values of the companies and councils who commission and design such buildings and street furniture.
The over-riding impetus when replacing the market town sign would have been around safety and affordability. Likewise, the new housing estate is ‘built’ around the three key concepts of ‘community,’ ‘location’ and ‘sustainability.’ Only when architects, designers, town planners, council members, healthcare property developers and house building conglomerates all orient their intentions away from such ugly-making concepts as sustainability, efficiency and safety and back towards beauty, truth and goodness, will our human made environment once again enhance this green and pleasant land. Then, John Ruskin’s rallying cry has a hope of succeeding:
When we build… let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think… that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!
Or as Harriet Green put it more pithily: “When we hear ‘progress’, when we hear ‘change’ it should be an unwavering, unmistakable positive.”
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.
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Now the House of Lords is urging the Government to follow the same failed Covid-19 totalitarian playbook to implement Net Zero. Cheered along by policymakers and and commentators who barely have a degree in a STEM subject between them.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/covid-lockdown-files-lessons-applied-net-zero
The biggest aspect of the Lockdown Files is that the entire political/state system needs dismantling and something smaller to replace it. The first thing needs to be tackled is the messed up disaster that is the House of Lords!!
Yes, very true but nothing will be dismantled!!!
IMHO the Hancock files will be used by the government to demonstrate that future pandemic responses (lots to come, I’m sure) should be direct by WHO ‘experts’ rather than be left to unqualified bumbling, government ministers. And guess what’s only a pen stroke away? The WHO Pandemic Treaty that this Government will probably sign up to imminently.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-hancock-files-no-scoop-just-propaganda/
Great substack article thanks!
The tyranny of the virtuous. Though maybe Hancock is purely a narcissist..
Starmer/Sturgeon and the ‘harder/faster’ lockdown Left have been wallowing in their virtuousness however.
To label those advocating lockdowns, masks and mandatory vaccines as ‘doves’ and those against them as ‘hawks’ is surely delusionary virtuousness!
House of Lords?
Yes, these things happens with ill-considered constitutional changes, and I make no apologies for supporting antidisestablishmentarianism.
Great word antidisestablishmentarianism haven’t heard it since the ‘60s brings back a few memories.
Precisely the reason that net zero and smart city zealots will be ignored. We now know who we are led by. Inveterate liars.
I don’t need Hancock’s nonsense to feel “vindicated”. I was pretty sure I was right at the time and nothing has changed my mind – quite the opposite. There’s nothing surprising in the “Hancock Files”, nothing we didn’t know or suspect. Everything that was done was wrong, morally and practically, and it was all in plain sight.
Nice to have it resoundingly confirmed though?
Though, of course, depressingly, the Govidiots of the BBC, Guardian, etc are able to cherry pick and edit their reporting of Hancock’s blatherings to suit their agenda.
I didn’t need it confirming.
I just want those most responsible for the global scam to be held to account, and kept away from the levers of power, and for their evil faux-collectivist technocratic ideology to be exposed for the nonsense that it is. Anything that furthers this objective I welcome, but the slight squirming of a minor cog in the wheel gives me no satisfaction and in fact Joe Public will read about this and miss the point for the most part.
I applaud Allison’s and Liam Halligan’s (Planet Normal podcasts) stance over the last three years against the insane Lockdowns that have decimated our country and the lives of millions of healthy children and adults. The only thing that concerns me is her/their almost complete avoidance of discussing the subject of the damage that these experimental mRNA injections have done to thousands of people. Why? What are they afraid of, being cancelled by the sinister forces of the state, the media censorship? I wrote to Allison several times about this and never got a reply. Is she controlled opposition? I hope not.
Indeed. I also emailed her back in 2021 almost begging her to raise pertinent questions about the ‘vaccine’ and pointed out the ONS data being used to support the ‘vaccines’ was actually deeply troubling. Tumbleweed. Opposing lockdown was the easy bit, so no back-patting from me I’m afraid.
I agree with you and have tried on a number of occasions to press Allison on Twitter about her “silence” regarding the harms done by the injections. For example:
Twitter exchange – 11 Jan 2023
Allison – Let me help Steve [Barclay]. Lockdown caused thousands of excess deaths. Shutting down entire NHS depts, not conducting basic cardiac/diabetes checks. All tragically coming home to roost now. As Liam Halligan and I predicted on the Planet Normal podcast.
Chris D – Just complete waffle, blaming anything and everything other than the real cause which are the experimental ‘vaccines’ which is also the reason why excess deaths are a worldwide issue.
Allison – That’s not right, Chris. Many of the excess deaths are down to delayed cancer diagnoses and treatment, failure to provide heart medication. That is fact.
MM – Allison, I’m afraid your silence is deafening as regards the significant number of deaths that were caused by the injections. You are simply being disingenuous, for whatever reason…
I assume her hands are tied to some extent by The Telegraph, but even if this were true, it would be a betrayal of the essence of journalism (exposing the truth).
“I assume her hands are tied to some extent by The Telegraph” yes $3,500,000 worth of hand tying by W Gates.
Gates Foundation payment to DT iro £4m. It’s all so easily done. Follow the money.
Correct.
I gave up listening to Planet Normal the day Alison Pearson agreed with “vaccine” passports. She said under the circumstances they were a good idea. And don’t forget The Telegraph is funded by a certain W Gates, well you can guess the rest.
The really odd thing is which newspaper is taking him to the cleaners. Better late than never, perhaps, but let’s hope that the other culprits are dealt with effectively, and that future organisations are prevented from using similar tactics.
Of course as we here all know, the rest of the government, the opposition, all institutions, a large part of the general public, the MSM etc etc were in all lockstep. Hancock was just a cog in a big machine. Any “normies” who are now critical of Hancock need to take that on board, though I suspect the criticism would be that he wasn’t efficient enough at covid tyranny.
“Superb investigative journalist Isabel Oakeshott” who claims the use of Midazolam is a “conspiracy theory” when it isn’t. She fails to mention the murderous DNRs. She fails to mention empty hospitals. She fails to mention Jab deaths and harms. She partnered with Tice who pushed the jab and still pushes Net Zero
Nothing that was revealed is new. Nothing is superb.
Alison Pearson, like the rest of the Telegraph, only says what she’s allow to say and would talk about Meghan & Harry before ever mentioning the jab deaths.
Stand in the Park
Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Though credit must go nevertheless to Isabel Oakeshott for having the the balls to release this tranche of online history, given to her by the arch twit Hancock. He was, presumably, so drunk on his own power and self importance to be blind to his self inflicted downfall.
Hardly ‘investigative’ journalism however. She didn’t have to investigate – he just gave her the WhatsApp history and she published it!
”fit, younger people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable cancers.” And yet no mention of the vaccine injured or the “fit, younger people” dropping like flies with myocarditis and other heart and circulatory crises. I’m afraid it’s yet more of what James Delingpole would term ‘limited hangout’. I’ll reserve my jubilation thanks, until the senior executives of the jab pushing organisations, the ‘enabling’ regulators and CMOs are in the dock, or better still dangling from a scaffold.
I suspect the Telegraph raking in money from the Gates Foundation prevents them saying too much against the vaxes. How could they be so stupid as to take money from an organisation like that. The grant ended February 2022, so there was no need to renew and allow Paul Nuki to continue to shill for these crooks.
We didn’t need the ‘Lockdown Files’ to show that we were right. No one with more than about 6 independently working braincells needs the Lockdown Files’ to prove they were right.
Are they ‘limited hangout’? I don’t know yet. Certainly they’ve deflected attention, for the time being, from the murderous stabs. And by heaping blame on Hapless Hancock – a very easy and convenient target – they’ve deflected attention from others just as, or even more, culpable.
One thing that bothers me about what’s come out of the files so far: the almost complete absence of Gove.
That snake was at the heart of this crime, and needs to be held to account. I’ll wager he was a far more important player than Hancock – if only because he’s far more intelligent (not saying much I know).
The spotlight needs to be turned on Gove. For the lockdowns and his role in the stabs.
Agreed – Hancock very much the punchbag and also now left office – too easy. As is all major plandemic political leaders stepping down after ‘burnout’ etc just as the truth is coming to light to avoid the obvious scandals and lawsuits.
Up steps the next bunch of WEF stormtroopers and we begin again.
There absolutely has to be metaphorical heads on stakes for this. And minions like Hancock will not suffice.
Why metaphorical?
If I don’t write metaphorical my comment will probably be moderated …
Seriously. A while ago now I had a comment removed because I suggested that some individuals had committed worse crimes than some people had n this country in the past been hung, drawn and quartered for.
A true statement I am sure. Unlike in my original post I haven’t actually named any individuals here, so hopefully this one will pass …
I see. Been there done that and got a telling off. Something about my suggesting an ex PM was guilty of large scale murder.
Yes, I noticed and said the other day that Gove (one of the Quad making the decisions and a lockdown enthusiast) was remarkably absent from the WattsApp messages.
Perhaps the DT is saving them for later …… or perhaps the scumbag was rather more careful than the inflated-ego that is Handcock.
“Called a murderer”???
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that people who went along with the lockdowns and related human rights abuses contributed to the deaths of children. Projection?
I’ll be interested to hear Laura Dodsworth’s comments on this exposé
You ain’t seen nothing yet once the WHO treaty goes through. I’ll leave the words of Private Frazer ringing in your ears….
Indeed.
Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan were pretty much the only journalists in the MSM speaking out against the Government’s EVIL policies.
Isobel Oakeshot and The DT have done the British people a great service in publishing these WattsApp messaged: at the very least it means that when the official Public Inquiry eventually goes ahead, those “giving evidence” and attempting to protect their sorry arses will have to be very careful NOT to be found out blatantly lying.
“So much that we “conspiracy theorists” suspected turns out to be true, from the Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak (“racist” back in 2020 but now highly likely says the FBI)”
After everything that’s happened in the last three years and you believe the FBI?