Because I no longer follow Twitter, I had not spotted that the article I wrote in last month’s edition of The Critic has now been posted online. It concerned a private house which had made it to the long list of the Stirling Prize and which I thought looked interesting: a free interpretation of an Arts-and-Crafts house in Farnham, Surrey, which was once-upon-a-time my home town. I went to visit it in July. It is, as I had guessed, beautifully well considered, fitting neatly into its leafy environment, not pretending to be historical with a dramatic angled chimney facing the road and a steeply sloping roof with differently shaped protruding windows. Unusually, The Critic has not provided photographs of the exterior, so I am reproducing three of mine.

Not surprisingly, it has not made it to the shortlist. I think there is a deeply rooted prejudice against private housing, regarded as private whim rather than public responsibility, which may be one of the reasons why so much new housing is so bad because it does not grow out of a carefully considered culture of consumer interests and public demand:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2023/a-new-take-on-arts-and-crafts/