I have just caught up with Oliver Wainwright’s article in this morning’s Guardian about the latest high-rise in the City (it’s one of the benefits of waiting two hours for a non-arriving train).

He says what many people think: that is everyone except those in charge of the City.

But it is now probably too late to halt what is happening.  Someone was asleep at the helm.  It was Peter Rees who was responsible for the idea of the high-rise Square Mile in a glorious and magnificent cluster.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/31/city-of-london-office-towers-planning-architecture?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I have been instantly castigated for my negativity about privatisation by someone who, as it happens, used to work in HM Treasury (but not the person who first lectured me on its virtues).

He points out that numbers using the train service have boomed and that the faults may lie in Wales where the service has been renationalised.

Maybe I am viewing it through rose-tinted spectacles, but it happens that I am currently waiting for a train due at 6.19, now expected at 8.10, a mere two hours delay, not for the first time on a ten-day holiday.

When we’re in Wales, we are very dependent on the train service to collect visitors from Bangor station (occasionally Bodorgan) travelling from London. 

Over the last decade, the service has declined from being somewhat unreliable to lamentable with only a small number of through trains every day, sometimes cancelled. 

I may have exaggerated my memories of the service in the 1990s, but I seem to remember being able to catch a 5.20 on a Friday evening from Euston, being able to eat supper on board, and arrive for a weekend away at 8.20.  It is probably not quite as simple as this, but it feels like a systematic decline which hits not just the likes of me, but the wider sense of connectedness, because, of course, the cost has increased in direct proportion to the unreliability. 

North Wales is now probably further from London psychologically than it was in 1858 when the Chester and Holyhead Railway merged with the prestige London and Northwestern Railway to run the Irish mail service to Dublin.  The mail service was reliable.  So were the trains.

I mention this partly because I have a very vivid memory of travelling from London to Cambridge with someone senior in the Treasury in about 1998 who explained how privatisation would revolutionise the train service.  It was bound to be so much better because it was underpinned by economic theory.  There would be more investment, stimulated by competition between the franchises.  Everything was bound to get better.

I can’t help wondering what went wrong with this very simple idea.

I have a small number of suggestions on how the Stirling Prize is administered if the RIBA is interested in combating the impression of London-centricity, in a Prize where four of the current shortlist are in London (the same is true most years):-

1.  It would be relatively easy to announce the regional awards all at the same time instead of staggering them through the spring and early summer.  Then you could make more of the interesting projects by less well known practices outside London and you would get a better sense of architecture as a national practice, not so dominated by the big London firms.

2.  It should also be possible to produce an online map of the long-listed projects, indicating which projects can be visited.  This would be helpful in creating more public interest in, and knowledge of, contemporary practice which it is the role of the RIBA to support.

3. I realise it would be tricky to organise, but it would be good to get the short-listing committee to visit the regional winners, because otherwise the key part of the process is conducted in London.

I have made these suggestions previously, but not in a considered way and probably not to the right people, so I am now publishing them in the hope that they might be considered, not least by the incoming President.

I always find the Stirling Prize interesting, partly as a way of following what is going on in architecture.

This year’s shortlist is going to set the final judges a nearly impossible task:-

The Queen Elizabeth Line is a massive infrastructure development, magnificent, on a huge scale, spacious and calm.  Quite a remarkable achievement (although it still annoys me that they axed the second entrance at Whitechapel and disabled access is too complicated).

I am a great admirer of the King’s Cross development, laid out long ago and worked on over the last decade by multiple different architects to create a new urban quarter.  Argent, the developer, deserve a prize.

Then, the new National Portrait Gallery is also very successful in the way it opens up the northern façade to create a new and much more generous public entrance on the Charing Cross road.

I like the look of the new housing in Hackney.  I must go and look at it.

Only two projects outside London.  Nothing in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales.  Is architectural practice really so skewed towards London ?  No private houses ?

How are they going to choose ?  Maybe there are category awards, as there probably need to be.  But publicity will want one winner overall.

I wonder if the bookmakers are taking bets.  I think I would put my money on the social housing scheme.

https://architecturetoday.co.uk/2024-riba-stirling-prize-shortlist-announced/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter+31+July+&cmid=64795640-3222-412a-90cb-295f34ab905f

I woke up just at the moment when the sun came up and the early morning mist over the river was clearing:-

Whenever we are in north Wales, we try to go over to see Llanfairfechan, Herbert North’s model village, which he developed in the grounds of his father’s estate, beginning in 1899 whilst working for Lutyens and moving up Park Road.

This is one of the best preserved:-

Then, it is always a treat to see the Churchmen’s Club, tucked on a path immediately behind the earlier Churchmen’s Institute, so redolent of village life between the wars:-

The charity which looks after the two buildings has been looking for someone to take them over.  I have tried to find someone who might be interested without success.  They are only an hour and a half from Liverpool.

A great number of people have read my post about Daphne Astor, which suggests how many people were devoted to her.

I have some additional memories.

One was when I was trying to find out more about the architect, Philip Johnson.  I had an instinct Daphne might have met him as he was part of her father’s Harvard modernist circle.  I asked her.  She said, ‘Oh yes, we used to smoke dope together on the double bed of his guest house’.

Then, I totally left out Micky who she married in 1979 and probably rescued her from a rackety life.  We travelled with them in a lorry on a memorable visit to La Ribaute.  They shared a passionate interest in organic farming, the land, ecology and everything else.

Then, totally selfishly, she was an early supporter of my blog.  She was, slightly oddly, doing an MA in creative writing – was it in Falmouth ? – and would ring up if she liked something, particularly during COVID.  I didn’t know that once-upon-a-time she had been a professional photographer.

Finally, someone has kindly sent me a link to her obituary.  It may work.  It did for me.  There you will discover much I didn’t know, including her mother’s side of the family in the wild west.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/17ea3032-ffdd-43cf-9b8d-7592e50b02e0?shareToken=125e4dcd6e9ca4f243117a918e40ff67

My eye was caught by a beautifully pristine Austin A30 in the car park below Caernarvon Castle, complete with bonnet straps which I have never seen before.

I find it odd to think that my first grand tour – 4000 miles round the sites of France, Italy, Germany and Belgium – was in the back of an Austin A30 in August 1971.  I’m not sure I had passed my driving test.