Tebe Terra

20/10/24 13:54

A few months ago, I spotted the earthly remains of an Artemide uplighter listed for sale on an online auction site. I enjoy tinkering and assembling things from bits – on a smaller scale but in the same way that folk with acres of land buy old bulldozers, saving them from the scrapheap and then restoring them to running order.

I already had the components of roughly one-and-a-half uplighters, including three glass shades which were different colours. In theory, this was an opportunity to put together two complete lamps, because the listing noted that the vendor had bought a new glass shade from Artemide but never got around to fitting it to the lamp. The new one matched one of the three I already owned, and parts of another uplighter were chucked in for good measure.

Ebay and other online auction sites such as Vinterior and Etsy are a good source of second-hand furniture and fittings – but the latter two are awash with dealers, plus amateurs with greedily optimistic expectations of what things are worth. Ebay has some of those, too, but there are also lots of folk simply trying to clear out their loft or garage. Their prices are much more realistic, but Caveat Emptor still applies.

After some haggling, I bought the lamps and arranged to collect them a few days later. The address was a large house in the leafy western suburbs of Edinburgh, and a cheerful chap in jumbo cords and cardigan met me at the door with a box of lamp components. He apologised that some were a wee bit rusty, after having lain abandoned in the garage for a few years.

It wasn’t difficult to read between the lines. The glass shade had broken and he’d decided to buy a replacement, without checking first how to fit it. Perhaps it came with instructions, but those had been lost along the way. Perhaps husband or wife were practical folk who are good with their hands – but on the evidence I saw, that seems unlikely.

Maybe they’re just clumsy, a throwback to our pre-historic Neanderthal ancestors who lacked the ability to use tools. We all know folk who trip over their feet and slice their fingertips while chopping onions. An alternative is that they’re giant-brained people who have evolved beyond Homo Faber, and have since lost the ability to use tools. Perhaps you can blame genes, upbringing, or the class system for the fact that some professional people don’t value practical skills, and worse still, they transmit this disinterest to their children.

So the folks in Cramond may have evolved to become more interested in reading highbrow novels about a shape-shifting petty criminal in Georgian London, or attending chamber music recitals in the Queens Hall, or become pre-occupied with the configurator on Range Rover’s website, trying to decide which combination of colour, trim and accessories they’d prefer when the time comes to replace their spaniel-scented Volvo estate. Regardless, it seems they have no manual dexterity when it comes to domestic repairs.

Once I got home, I unpacked the lamps from the box and disgorged a Sainsburys-bag-for-life, which was full of seemingly random grub screws, washers and nuts. I scrutinised the partly-dismantled uplighter body to see what needed fixing. Someone had already loosened the nuts which located the terminals for the linear halogen lamp, and in order to free the little casting the terminals were mounted on, they’d also loosened the large nut which holds the shade by clamping together a sandwich of glass, silicon gaskets and aluminium.

But then they’d evidently got stuck. The wires which feed the terminals have crimped connectors on the end which didn’t quite fit through the central hole. So they’d just chopped the connectors off! Fortunately, I already had a complete shade: using a pair of Lindström needle-nosed pliers, I gently compressed the metal tangs which held the crimps within the connector, then released the wires and guided them through the hole. I was able to swap the wiring and connectors between the uplighter bodies. Using the right tool, the job took five minutes.

Fixing the uplighter gave me a moment of intense satisfaction, as I’d probably saved it from the skip.

A few weeks later, a spring on the loft ladder gave up with a loud bang. I’d been running up and downstairs with rolls of Knauf Loft Roll 44, as I try to bring the house up to current day insulation standards. So far, I’ve laid 350mm of glasswool quilt behind the uprights of the roof structure where it tapers out to the eaves, and 150mm in the depth of the first floor joists along the centre. I had to lift about 60 square metres of chipboard deck before I could insulate that central part of the floor, though.

The loft ladder was made about 50 years ago by Ramsay Ladders in Forfar. In Scotland, the Ramsay Ladder has become synonymous with loft ladder: it’s a metonym, in the same way that “Hoover” and “vacuum cleaner” were once interchangeable. I drove up to Forfar and bought a pair of new springs, and the helpful maintenance chap at Ramsay Ladders explained how to fit them: I needed to loosen some fixings whilst keeping my knee on the end of the radius arm, otherwise the one with the good spring would rebound and break my wrist.

He asked if I’d replaced springs on a ladder before, then narrowed his eyes when I explained that I was an architect. I thought I’d reassured him that I knew how things went together; but his experience was that architects know more in theory than they do in practice. He shared his thesis that architects should spend a few months working on site during their training. They should spend time working with an electrician, then a joiner, then a bricklayer, and so on.

It’s a fair point. If you know how a building fits together in practice, it’s bound to improve how you design and detail. But that’s partly why the Year Out exists, so that students get some practical experience and also a feel for what the reality of building things is like. The flip side of that is that the Year Out can ruthlessly expose student architects who have no practical aptitude, and little interest in actually building things. At this point, they may realise that an academic career might be more suitable – and there’s no shame in that.

Thankfully, just like the little needle-nosed pliers in my tool box, I also have a set of Whitworth combination spanners, so replacing the Ramsay Ladder springs was straightforward. For a second time, I was pleased with myself – until I dropped the big plastic drawer which holds frozen loaves in the bottom of the freezer. The polycarbonate panel smashed, so I ended up having to buy a new one.  That’ll teach me to be judgmental about other folks’ lack of dexterity, because it proves that I’m a ham-fisted blockhead, too.

Neither does it bode well for my next task, which is to insulate the solum. But since the house was constructed with a gas-fired warm air heating system and underfloor ducts, I’ve got some hard labour ahead, because I've discovered that the ductwork is still in place in the solum crawlspace. You can imagine how much fun it will be to cut up the ductwork using a hacksaw, while lying on your side on a bed of bitumen and furnace ashes…

By • Galleries: specification

I really wanted to like it. I wanted to take it to heart. After all, it’s almost within walking distance of home, and in 2024 it has been hosted in a factory which I visited on a school trip around 1990, whilst it was still in operation. But 2024’s Dundee Design Festival reinforces the impression I took from its previous iterations that “design” is a clique controlled by a handful of gatekeepers.

Dundee Design Festival suffers from many of the same issues that the V&A Tartan exhibition did, and which magazines like The Skinny buy into, too. Their view is that “design” is primarily the production of craft objects by recent graduates from the Scottish art schools. “Designers” are a self-selecting group who work individually, or in tiny collectives, producing quirky one-offs. Somehow, airliners, cans of beans, cars, computer software, vacuum cleaners, mobile phones and buildings aren’t “designed” in a way those gatekeepers can acknowledge.

There’s no interactive software or UX design, no architecture, no computer games, no sound design, no vehicles, and nothing mass-produced or popular at the Dundee Design Festival. Some of what’s on show here is bad art rather than design, and there’s a powerful emphasis on the identity and individuality of the designer, rather than the needs of end users. That’s the wrong way round. I counted several dozen mentions of “self expression” – but only one or two about ergonomics or functionality or user needs.

Dundee Design Festival in 2024 is a glaring lost opportunity.  Within a few miles of here, you could have visited several computer games companies such as Tag Games or Rockstar North. NCR employ 500 people in Dundee, many of whom are working on interface design for sophisticated electronics. Rautomead design high-tech continuous metal casting machines. Wemyss Textiles and Strathmore Woollens design textiles. OSD-IMT are naval architects who design ships.  Design is integral to them all, as it was to Michelin, which once designed and manufactured car tyres in Dundee.

What’s on show at the DDF isn't inclusive, either. I didn’t see any design for people with physical disabilities, hearing or sight impairments. Similarly, given the prevalence of autism, dementia and other conditions, it would have been great to see how designers carried out research then worked with people who live with those conditions to improve their lives. That would have helped to demonstrate how design is crucial, how it can change lives for the better, and how it plays an integral part in creating a more equal and fairer society.  Inclusivity is something architects and interior designers deal with every day.

Ironically, the Dundee Design Festival isn’t good on Dundee, either. Other than an A5 flyer, the festival doesn't acknowledge the history of its venue, the former Michelin plant at Baldovie which employed 1000 people until the start of the 2020’s. While local textile firms Halley Stevensons and Scott & Fyfe are mentioned in passing, we don’t discover anything about their design process, nor their products or production methods. Did you know that Halley Stevensons make all the waxed cotton for Barbour jackets? I knew that already, but there was nothing more to learn about it here.  Nor was there anything about Dundee’s long history of furniture design and manufacturing, which included Thomas Justice, Francis East & Co., and East Brothers. The tradition continues today with firms such as JTC, Dovetail Industries and LamArt.

At the entrance to the festival, there was a display of “cassies” made from stone supplied by Denfind Stone at Monikie – but cassie setts were made from Aberdeenshire granite or Cunmont whinstone – so if outsiders are going to try to speak the Dundee vernacular, please ask a local to translate for you. Not me, because I'm no expert, but I do know that the so-called cassies here are actually the much larger “plennies” or slabs hewn from the Carmyllie flagstone beds which Denfind Stone has begun quarrying again.  They join a rich vocabulary of Scots and Dundonian terms including the "pavey" or pavement, immortalised by Michael Marra's song, The Word on the Pavey.  Then you have "cassies" or causeway paviors, "cundies" or road drains which derive from "conduit", "plennies" or stone paving slabs planed by the world's first stone planing machines which were invented at Carmyllie, and "pletties" or tenement landing slabs which derive from "platforms".  Another missed opportunity to connect with local folk, by speaking their language.

A more universal issue is that the Dundee Design Festival concentrates on designer-makers, but largely ignores small, medium and large commercial companies based in Scotland which employ hundreds of design graduates from Scottish universities each year. I don’t understand why they’ve been ignored. Is this an expression of anti-capitalism, given the references to Marxist-feminist design in some for the exhibits? Is it a reaction against consumerism, against the mass-produced things that we all buy and use, because we can’t afford to fill our house with hand-crafted one-offs, even if we wanted to? Or this simply another example of the Scottish Cultural Cringe?

Rather than leaving on a total downer, I tried to be positive: Morton Young and Borland’s cascading lace sheers at the very back of the second hall were a subtly understated play on light. Ploterre (Rebecca Kaye) displayed an intriguing data-driven screenprint. Among the exhibits from other UNESCO Design Cities such as Osaka were genuinely good pieces of design, while Muirhead Leather's airliner seats were beautifully finished, and it was fascinating to discover the record-pressing plant which Jack White (of The White Stripes) has built in Detroit.

So it troubles me to write a negative review, because this festival should have been something positive for Scottish designers and architects. It should have been about the renaissance of manufacturing in Dundee, given the many millions of pounds spent trying to regenerate the Michelin site. It should have made an effort to connect with the place it's in.  Instead, the Dundee Design Festival is not about design in Dundee. It has a completely different agenda which ignores most of what Dundee, and Scotland, designs and makes.

I wonder whether anyone will stand up to challenge the approach which the V&A Dundee and Dundee Design Festival have decided to take? They may be in Dundee, but they’re certainly not of Dundee.

By • Galleries: dundee

The architectural manifesto falls out of fashion from time to time, and one of those times is now. At the moment, everything seems more important than developing architectural ideas using an architectural language. It may come back into fashion once folk tire of campaigning about things they don’t like, arguing on social media about small differences – or when architects have the intellectual courage to break their thrall to social philosophy.

The architectural manifesto has a long pedigree and its time will come around again. The prototype for everything that followed was Vitruvius’s De Architectura, published as Ten Books on Architecture. De Architectura is the source of the idiom “firmitas, utilitas, venustas” which we were told translates as firmness, commodity and delight; however, the phrase apparently derives from an 18th century mis-translation of the Latin for beauty (venustas) as delight. My schoolboy Latin wasn’t good enough to pick that up.

Vitruvius was followed by a seven-volume treatise by the Italian Renaissance theorist Sebastiano Serlio, Seven Books of Architecture, which cover everything from housing to the classical orders – followed by an excellently named bonus volume, “The Extraordinary Book of Doors”! On its heels came Serlio’s The Five Books of Architecture, first published in an English Edition of 1611. You can see that there are diminishing returns in multi-volume manifestos, as we’ve gone from ten to seven to five, and no doubt a good editor would press for them to be boiled down further into a single book.

The Victorian Style Wars were rife with manifestos, and William Morris is one of the guiltiest parties, writing The Ideal Book (1883), The Manifesto of The Socialist League (1885), The Arts and Crafts of Today (1889) and with Philip Webb, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Manifesto (1877). Similarly, the early days of the Modern Movement were a fertile time for manifesto writers, including Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, who first came to notice for their manifestos published in newspapers, journals, and little magazines – years before they built anything.

Ornament and Crime is Adolf Loos’s best-known manifesto, written in 1908 and intended to shock the Establishment into rejecting decorative patterns and ornaments. His aesthetic purism was a reaction to Art Nouveau and the Deutsche Werkbund, which he viewed as anathema in the struggle to develop a new style fit for the 20th century. Loos was a zealot, and that’s borne out by the closing paragraph of Ornament and Crime, “Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.” From that you can deduce that he believed ornamentation is a sign of degeneracy.

When it was completed in 1904, Charles Rennie Mackintosh handed over the Hill House in Helensburgh to his client Walter Blackie with the words: “Here is the house. It is not an Italian Villa, an English Mansion House, a Swiss Chalet, or a Scotch Castle. It is a Dwelling house.” In a way, that articulates the six page manifesto of Adolf Loos in a couple of lines.

Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923 had a lasting effect on the profession, after it had been translated into English in 1927 as Towards a New Architecture. It became the New Testament for a generation of architects, and a focus for the hatred for others. As the dustwrap’s blurb says: “Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations.”

Walter Gropius's Scope of Total Architecture was published in 1956, and it covers the nature and archaeology of architecture, its historical context, and its role in the industrial society of the time during which the book was written. “Since my early youth I have been acutely aware of the chaotic ugliness of our modem man-made environment when compared to the unity and beauty of old, preindustrial towns. In the course of my life I became more and more convinced that the usual practice of architects to relieve the dominating disjointed pattern here and there by a beautiful building is most inadequate and that we must find, instead, a new set of values….”

As the 1950’s progressed, architectural history gradually shifted from objective writing which analysed the form of buildings and cities – to studying the social context of architectural production, which relates more to culture, philosophy and the history of ideas. One example was Steen Eiler Rasmussen's 1959 book Experiencing Architecture, which was more concise and poetic than what came before, and took more heed of the findings of phenomenology, a field which was in its infancy when Rasmussen was writing.

Whether Rasmussen is to blame for architectural ideas being infiltrated by social philosophy, or whether he just recognised which was the tide was flowing, writing about the history of architectural ideas can sometime become like the academic game called Humiliation in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places in which you score points if you haven’t read a canonical text. The more famous the book you haven’t read, such as Moby Dick or Hamlet, the higher the score.

All the famous architectural manifestos win high scores, and one or two count as a bullseye. For example, Ricardo Bofill wrote an rhetorical manifesto in the early 1970’s:

Architecture no longer exists.
Only impersonal cities, without description and without style which nobody has ever dreamed of, or desired.
Against these clear and facile modern towns, we launch monuments which single out space, destroying it and investing it.

Plan the Revolt
Against the thousands of identically repeated, stupid, lined-up houses.
Against the rational and schematic ordination of territory.
Against the importation of prefabricated, Nordic cities.
Against architecture…

Architecture no longer exists? Although Bofill had built some grandiose post-Modern housing schemes based on giant Classical orders by that point, as Geoffrey Broadbent noted in the Architectural Review of November 1973, manifestos of this sort usually come from people who have thought a lot about what is going wrong with architecture, but have not built anything much themselves to reverse the process.

My favourite manifesto was written by Dieter Rams, the architecturally-trained designer of Braun gadgets and Vitsoe shelving:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

Rams’s sign-off line, “Back to purity, back to simplicity” is immeasurably better, more rigorous and principled than the anti-boring manifesto contained in Thomas Heatherwick’s banal book, “The Seven Characteristics of a Boring Building”. Boring, like nice or pretty, is a non-word with no place in a manifesto – but Heatherwick didn’t train as an architect, and his practice has long been a masquerade since he can’t call himself one.

Today, contemporary architects express their personal philosophy using small, well-crafted books which are well regarded within the profession, but ignored by those outside it. That’s mainly because they’re written by architects for other architects, and published by small presses which typically carry out little promotion beyond the circle of people at the architecture school where the authors teach.

Some fairly recent manifestos (along with their reception) include Architecture, Craft and Culture by John Tuomey. “All in all a great little book jammed with culture, life, and on-the-job experiences,” said the reviewer on Amazon. Published by Gandon Editions, a terrific but low-key Irish publisher with a good architecture and design list. But no website, only a homepage which is perennially under construction.

Peter Zumthor is seen as the architect’s architect, and his manifesto Thinking Architecture is now on its third edition. But not everyone enjoyed it. Another reviewer on Amazon found it was, “A rambling, totally unsatisfying jumble of thoughts with no obvious outcome.” Och, surely no! Perhaps in his efforts to maintain his persona, Thinking Architecture is 65 pages thin, and full of epigrams such as, “The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition and their tangibility, smell and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language that we are obliged to use.”

Similarly, John Pawson is the minimalist’s minimalist. Published 25 years ago, “Minimum is an extended visual essay exploring the idea of simplicity in architecture, art and design across a variety of historical and cultural contexts.” I won’t quote the Amazon reviewers again, because Mr Bezos is rich enough already and doesn’t need my encouragement to make any more money.

Yet these architectural architecture books are still a rarity. Many writers who consider themselves serious and intellectual feel the need to bolster their architectural arguments by leaning on the writing of Continental philosophers. During the 1980’s and 90’s, the favourites were the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, who together framed some of the key concepts behind Post-Modernism. Masters dissertations of a certain era are littered with references to Deleuze & Guattari, with the occasional reference to Lacan.

Today, the political theorist Hannah Arendt is in fashion. She was interned by the Vichy regime in France during the early stages of WW2, and later coined the phrase “the banality of evil” following the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. While her political writings about totalitarianism strike a chord today considering what’s happening in Ukraine and Palestine, they speak about the human condition rather than about architecture. It goes without saying that people – whether architects or not – should reject authoritarianism and totalitarianism if they see it, and shouldn’t work for brutal regimes, plutocrats or dictators.

A smart diploma student could do worse than draw up a proposal for encouraging the production of new architectural manifestos; a meta-manifesto, if you like. Hopefully this piece is a good starting point; you can measure your success by counting how many tutors have their bluff called if you write a serious study on the history of architectural ideas, rather than a work of pseudo-philosophy.

Of course, depending on your professor, that may prove to be academic suicide – but perhaps better to die a martyr than to drink the Kool-Aid…

By • Galleries: books, canon

The Bulldozer

16/08/24 19:57

The comedian Ben Elton was interviewed recently on Radio 4, and pointed out that when Morecambe & Wise appeared on TV at Christmas during the late 1970’s, they got an audience of 28 million people. Although I barely remember the late 70’s, I know there were only three television channels, and Elton’s point was that everyone sat down to watch the same programme at the same time, making the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show into a unifying experience.

That doesn’t happen any more: broadcast media has atomised, there are hundreds of cable and satellite channels, plus online gaming, and the panoply of the internet to choose from. But one advantage of atomisation is the ability to find niche content. For the past while, I’ve been researching an American corporation which a distant relative founded a century-and-a-half ago. Postings on forums, personal websites and clips on YouTube have been priceless; in the late 1970’s, finding that content would have been impossible.

For example, without an enthusiast shooting a video on his iPhone, I would never have seen a mechanic working in a lumber yard somewhere in Oregon or Washington State on the west coast of the US. The Allis-Chalmers HD-21 bulldozer had sat idle, he speculated, for 15 or 20 years. He clambered onto its orange hulk, with saplings growing up through the tracks and idlers, and started tinkering.

A brand new HD-21 outside Allis-Chalmers’s earthmover factory in Springfield, Illinois.

In the 1960’s, the HD-21 was the world’s most powerful bulldozer. It’s 100% Allis-Chalmers, unlike earlier machines which were fitted with Waukesha or General Motors engines. The AC 21000 turbo-diesel fitted to the HD-21 had a reputation for being being easy to start, but what followed seemed miraculous.

The mechanic had fitted new 24V batteries beforehand, then barred the engine over by hand to make sure it wasn't seized. He cranked the starter for 30 seconds or so, with the fuel cut-off pulled out, in order to get oil flowing through the engine’s galleries again. He then took a break to let the batteries recover, pushed the excess fuel plunger in and pressed the starter button again.

If you listen intently you can hear the whirring of the pinion on the starter ring of the flywheel as the 21000 cranked a few times, and this time the mechanic sprayed Aerostart into the intake. There was a wisp of ether and unburnt fuel from the exhaust, then it caught on two or three cylinders, coughing and spluttering into life. The HD-21 took a couple of seconds to clear its throat, and that was followed by a fusillade of noise as it fired on all six.

The re-awakened 21000 kicked an enormous cloud of black smoke into the air from its stack, followed by all the years’ worth of dirt and crud that had scaled off inside the exhaust manifolds. By now the mechanic was no longer conscious of his mate with the iPhone; he was focussed on the oil pressure and temperature gauges, watching the needles creep round towards the green arc as the machine warmed up for the first time in a couple of decades. As the bulldozer's engine settled into a steady rumbling idle, I reflected that it was like Lazarus: a 30 ton bulldozer raised from the dead.

Although Ben Elton saw TV comedies like Morecambe & Wise as a way to unite people, the message of that YouTube video is that accomplishing something tangible is powerful. It’s already had several hundred thousands views on YouTube, which demonstrates how closely folk in the US Midwest still identify with Allis-Chalmers, and incidentally they snap up its merchandise too. Rather like Taylor Swift fans, they have literally been there and bought the t-shirt – plus the baseball cap, the coffee mug, and the bumper sticker too.

If it’s true that society, just like broadcast media, is becoming atomised then it’s more important than ever to ask the question, “What is it like to be you?”  The video helps to answer that.  For architects, it’s especially important to gain an insight into other peoples’ lives, since we can’t expect to design anything if we don’t understand how it will be used, and discover something about the folk who’ll use it. The bulldozer resurrection video is a rare example of social media with redeeming features, in an era when platforms are controlled by unhinged billionaires such as Leon Skum, who recently took over Twitter.

By • Galleries: technology

A few weeks ago, I went along to a Pre-Application Consultation. It was fascinating to be on the receiving end for once, rather than the delivery end. This PAC dealt with the forthcoming National Application for a piece of infrastructure called the Emmock 400kV substation, which is planned to become a key part of the National Grid in eastern Scotland.

Having recently written about the 80th anniversary of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electricity Board in Urban Realm, then about the final days of the coal-fired West Burton A power station for another magazine, it was interesting to see how the electricity industry handles new developments.

Emmock lies just north of Dundee, and will form a node where lines from Kintore, Westfield, Seagreen and Alyth converge beside a 1950’s substation which was built on a World War 2 airfield, which lies in the valley between the Emmock ridge and the Sidlaw Hills. The old substation handles 275,000 volt power lines, but the new one will carry 400,000 volts, and it’s crucial to add capacity to the Grid for new windfarms and hydro power stations.

The consultation was held in the village hall at Inveraldie, which was originally the recreation hall for RAF Tealing. Inveraldie is a deceptive place. From the Dundee–Aberdeen dual carriageway it looks like a handful of cottages, but come off the road and you find a giant three-storey deck access block which stretches away along the edge of a turnip field, looking like something from East Germany during the Cold War era.

The consultation had begun before I arrived, and the car park was already full of muddy 4x4 pickups and Land Rovers, along with hatchbacks and SUV’s. Other than the occasional Forfar bus, there’s no public transport to Inveraldie. Inside, the hall was packed, with around a dozen SSE staff and perhaps 30 locals milling around, plus a photographer from The Courier. That proved something was going on – as did the lone protestor waiting outside.

Powerlines seem to attract controversy and argument. Years ago, I came across an angry man who lived at the northern end of the Beauly–Denny powerline. He was vehemently opposed to its upgrading. It was difficult to have a rational conversation with him about powerlines, but I gathered that he’d come to the Beauly area about 20 years earlier, then taken on the mantle of an environmental champion who would (perversely) try to block renewable energy projects.

The thing is, hydro power came to Beauly 40 years before he did, and that begs an obvious question. Should you give consideration to other people? Should there be a balance between your personal interests, and what affects Scotland as a whole? As I mentioned recently, too often policies seem to be influenced by those with the loudest voices amplified by social media megaphones: vested interests, extremists, pressure groups, lobbyists, activists and campaigners. Mr Beauly seemed to be the very definition of a NIMBY, or perhaps Pull Up The Ladder Jack, I’m Alright.

That’s one reason why the HS2 railway line will stop at Birmingham, rather than reaching Manchester and Leeds, then eventually the Border. NIMBY’s in Tory constituencies forced the railway line into miles of tunnel through the Chilterns – adding billions to its cost. You could say that’s democracy in action, the power of the little man and woman: or you could consider it your civic duty to consider society as a whole, rather than always placing your own interests and prejudices first.

What will achieve the best outcome for as many people as possible? That philosophy is known as Utilitarianism, a philosophy coined by Jeremy Bentham in what he called "the greatest happiness principle" or "the principle of utility", a term he pinched from David Hume.  At its crux is the notion that we should do that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Enabling more renewable energy to be generated and transmitted seems to fall into that category.


Bentham had a wider influence over British politics: the Reform Act of 1832 and the secret ballot both reflected his concerns and his influence spread to some unexpected places.  George Kinloch, the Reform candidate for the Dundee constituency, marked his friendship with Bentham in a unique way.  In the village of Ardler, at the very heart of Strathmore, is Bentham Street, one of the shortest streets in Scotland, which was Kinloch’s tribute to his friend - see photo above.  (Incidentally, the Reform Party of 1832 has nothing to do with Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle).


When I come across people trying to stop renewable power projects, and hear about protestors trying to disrupt traffic on motorways, I’m increasingly on the Utilitarian side. Achieving the best outcome for a majority of people was one of the things which Socialism once represented for the Labour party, and “One Nation Conservatism” alike for the Tories. Both seem to have been lost in recent times.

Meantime, back at Inveraldie, SSE were helpful, the protestor wasn’t disruptive, and all going to plan the Emmock 400kV substation will be energised in 2029. A few years after that, the infrastructure will start to disappear into the landscape, just like the compressor stations along the Forties Pipeline have done. Forty years after they were built, they lie almost unnoticed on country roads between Peterhead and Grangemouth.

Perhaps some things should be above politics: after all, its been said that there is no left wing or right wing way to empty a dustbin. The bin needs to be emptied by the binmen, regardless of which party controls the council. Powerlines are no different.

By • Galleries: dundee, politics

Things change, places are re-shaped, old certainties are defeated. As a graduate, the only glass manufacturer I dealt with was Pilkingtons: the Lancashire firm which invented the float glass process. Pilks provided us with pocket-sized handbooks which were indispensable in the days of dial-up internet. They’d swallowed up their last British rival, Chance Glass of Birmingham, several decades earlier, and even in the 90’s and early 00’s, architects still specified British products: Pilkingtons for glass, Corus for steel and BPB for plasterboard.


No longer. A few months ago when I was specifying a curtain walling system, I asked the technical rep for a spec to suit what are relatively large units on the southerly and east-facing elevations. We had to consider the solar transmission coefficient for overheating, the strength of toughened & laminated glass for barrier loadings, as well as the usual R-values. When the proposed IGU spec came back, with Saint Gobain inner and outer panes, I raised a metaphorical eyebrow.  He explained that Pilkingtons were no longer the dominant force they once were.


That came as a surprise, and I became curious about what had happened to Pilkingtons. After their takeover by a Japanese firm, NSG Group, the rep felt that Pilks' profile had diminished. And perhaps their French competitor used more aggressive marketing…


On a recent trip down south I spent a couple of days in Rossendale, looking at a combination of good and poor adaptive re-use projects, which had taken redundant cotton mills in the Colne and Irwell valleys and converted them into flats. The best example is Ilex Mill in Rawtenstall, which still towers over the little town just as the Lancashire cotton magnate who built it intended. After I’d finished with the mills, I headed across Lancashire to St Helens, a town dominated by glass manufacturing, just as many towns in East Lancashire were dominated by cotton.


The smoking chimneys and distant roar of furnaces in central St Helens tell you that Pilks are still very much in the glassmaking business, but their former head office complex in Alexandra Park closed a few years ago. The buildings are in limbo, with new owners who have carried out a soft strip and asbestos remediation, then inexplicably stopped. The building I was particularly interested in was the Pilkington works canteen, which is a relative rarity in Britain: a building by Fry & Drew that you can visit (after a fashion).


Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were in the vanguard of British Modernism. Fry was a local boy, born in Cheshire to a Canadian chemical manufacturer who ran the Liverpool Borax Company. He studied at Liverpool School of Architecture under Charles Reilly, when Liverpool was seen as the best school in Britain. Fry began professional life as a reluctant neo-Classicist who converted to Modernism in the 1930’s, and got heavily involved with the MARS and CIAM groups.  He built some of the earliest Modernist buildings in Britain.


Meanwhile, just like Fry, Jane Drew's career combined the roles of architect, town planner, author and academic. She trained at the AA in London, and rumour has it that she was recruited as an MI6 operative during the War. Drew later curated exhibitions, taught at MIT and Harvard, and did a good deal of interior design work. Perversely, she’s now better known for the prize named after her, than for her buildings.


Reading the profile which Alan Powers wrote a few years ago, Fry and Drew were well-off bohemians with utopian socialist leanings. In the late 1930’s, Fry designed the Kensal House flats in Ladbroke Grove, London, then the Impington College campus – both with Walter Gropius, before the latter headed off to the US. After Fry met Drew, the two married then went into practice together, designing the Tanys Dell and Chantry housing estates in Harlow New Town, then working on several projects in the tropics during the 1950's including housing in Ghana and Chandigarh in Northern India where they worked as associates of Le Corbusier.


The idealism of their early social housing schemes was gradually set aside when they returned to the UK and designed a series of corporate offices. The Pilkington HQ in St Helens is probably Fry & Drew’s most important work in Britain, and it was completed in the mid-1960’s, quite late in their architectural careers. The Alexandra Park complex sits close to Pilkington’s Watson Street and Greengate glass factories, and consists of a landmark office tower, a slab block under it, an ornamental lake, and a canteen building.


The canteen is a long, low flat-roofed block which appears to float over the water and acts as a vista stop to the lake. The lower, entrance floor is brought down almost to eye level of the ducks and geese on the lake. It’s a single aspect building, with a glazed facade to the south, towards the office tower, and a blank face to the north. The floorplate has been punched through with a series of lightwells which illuminate and bring greenery into the depth of the plan.


Despite Fry & Drew’s socialist beliefs and the Pilkington brothers’ credo as a paternalistic employer, the building was planned hierarchically with a 620 seat capacity canteen for office staff on the upper floor, a 500 capacity canteen for glassworkers on the lower floor – and separate dining rooms for managers, visitors and senior staff. Even in the 1960’s, Britain’s most enlightened companies were still trapped in a class system which emphasised an employee’s place in the pecking order. Researching another company for a recent article, I discovered their canteen was also split into four: separate rooms for directors, managers, white collar and blue collar staff.  At that point, I realised that the famous "Class" sketch from a 1966 episode of the Frost Report (with John Cleese looking down on Ronnie Barker, who looked down in turn on Ronnie Corbett) was social realism rather than satire.


Ironically for a glass manufacturer, most of the canteen’s windows have been smashed, and many of the glazed ceramic tiles, too. As well as a glassmaker, until a few years ago Pilks were also a tile manufacturer, with a giant tilery at Swinton on the outskirts of Manchester. The canteen had once been a product showcase for the company, but the combination of remediation and vandalism makes it tricky to see the original design intent.  The large format glazed tiles on the serveries have gone, but the structural columns are still lined with marble-effect tesserae.


Although the ceiling soffits were originally lined with slatted hardwood, in their stripped condition the coffers of the concrete waffle slab make the spaces incredibly photogenic as each soffit picks up reflected light from the lake in front of the building. Arguably, the building in its present condition, with timber flooring and soffits removed, is far closer to the Brutalism which is currently undergoing a fashionable revival, than the more polished Modernism which Fry and Drew practised.  In fact, we're in danger of overlooking the work of architects like Fry & Drew, along with Basil Spence and Robert Matthew, simply because they used hardwood and stone cladding rather than visual concrete everywhere.


The complex is listed Grade II and miraculously, the Victor Pasmore mural is still there, although slightly vandalised – see second last photo.  As I stood there, I reflected on how Pasmore might have received his commission. Fry and Drew mixed socially with Henry Moore, Alvar Aalto, Barbara Hepworth, Ove Arup, Herbert Read, Hugh Casson and Eduardo Paolozzi. Pasmore was part of the same milieu; in other words, you can’t help but feel that he got work through the old-boys-and-old-girls network. Again, the artists and architects may have had a Modernist ethos, but theirs was still an old-fashioned society where the strictures of class ruled, and true meritocracy was rare.


Visiting the canteen was a curious experience: I arrived early in the morning and discovered a strong smell of smoke hanging in the air. Someone had burnt a hole through part of the hoarding, but all was quiet, so I wandered inside. After an hour or so, a wee guy in a blue nylon cagoule turned up, gabbling away in a strong dialect. Once he figured out that I wasn’t from the local newspaper, and wasn't a security guard, he disappeared downstairs to rummage through the rubbish.


I shot a set of photos using a digital camera, then switched to medium format and fed some film into my Mamiya 645. Later on, I watched from a first floor window as a battered Fiat Punto reversed at speed up to the hole in the hoarding. The wee guy jumped in and they drove off towards Prescot Road with a series of crashed gearchanges. I’m not sure what he’d discovered amongst the debris at Pilkington’s canteen, but he clearly felt it was precious.


By • Galleries: ghosts

I’ve been struggling to articulate the creeping malaise I’ve felt about politics for the past few months, and that came to a head with the recent meltdown in the Scottish Government, then the announcement of a general election at Westminster. If you’re not keen to read about politics, look away now.

Six weeks ago, it was announced that the Scottish Government was to abandon its “world-leading” goal to cut carbon emissions by 75% by 2030. Put simply, instead of improving things, our politicians are making matters worse – but perhaps not in the way you think. Surprised?

I’m conscious of the environment and invested in sustainability. Thanks to my far-sighted mentor Mike Gilmour, I worked on one of the first zero-energy housing developments in Scotland, which he designed along with Prof. Gokay Devici. That was fifteen years ago, and ten years before that the subject of my honours thesis was the salvage and re-use of scrap materials.

However, I’m critical of politicians who set unachievable carbon reduction targets – which scientists acknowledge couldn’t be met. That’s known as greenwash. Humza Yousaf did the right thing by acknowledging that the 75% target for 2030 wouldn’t be met; the Greens are much diminished by continuing to suggest that the targets should have been retained. The longer they insist, the more naive they sound and to me it comes across as hypocrisy, phonyism and pomposity.

By withdrawing support for Humza Yousaf and the Scottish Government, the Greens sided with the people who have blocked the fitting of carbon capture equipment at Longannet and Peterhead power stations, who have held up pumped storage hydro developments in the Highlands, and have objected to onshore wind developments.  In Mike Gilmour’s words, which paraphrase the US president Lyndon N. Johnson, you need to decide whether you’re inside the tent pissing outwards, or outside the tent pissing in. The way to make progress is to take part and to take people with you – to win them over to your way of thinking. The Greens are firmly outside the tent.

The concept of “de-growth” which they promote goes against everything we need: more homes, better infrastructure, modern hospitals, technology to create clean energy, and to refurbish existing buildings. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the only way to deliver that is by encouraging the economy to grow, and like it or not, that requires capitalism.  As an example, the Swedish company Elekta AB is one of three companies – and the only independent one – making linear accelerators for the treatment of cancer.  Until someone comes up with a cure for cancer, they cater for a (sadly) growing market; without them, even more folk will succumb to that horrible condition.

The alternative to growth is allowing the economy to wither, destroying our ability to improve Scotland. We just have to make sure the economy grows in a clean way, rather than a dirty way.  The other self-interested point to make is that a shrinking economy will need fewer buildings, and that almost certainly means less construction work, hence fewer architects.

Strangely, the BBC and newspapers barely give airtime and column inches to independent, non-partisan bodies in Scotland, including a wide spectrum which takes in the Common Weal, the Jimmy Reid Foundation, The Fraser of Allander Institute, and investment firms like Baillie Gifford. The latter were the biggest investor in Tesla for many years, and whether or not you approve of electric cars, they’re potentially one way to reduce the carbon dioxide being produced by transport. Yet Baillie Gifford are currently being vilified in the media, thanks to a tiny group of activists who focus on a negative but refuse to acknowledge the positives.

The second strand of political malaise is much closer to our profession. While getting some work done to a crown (ouch) I had a conversation with my dentist, who explained that the Scottish Government has instructed the dental profession to reduce check-ups from six monthly to annually. Of course, you can go private, as many of my friends south of the border have been forced to do, as there are even fewer NHS dentists in England. My dentist is very much against that, as she believe that oral health will suffer.

Around the same time, I had a meeting with my solicitor. She also had concerns about government funding. In this case, her fee of £240/ hour is set at that level to cross-subsidise the court work which her practice carries out – in this case because the UK Government won't pay what’s required for Legal Aid.  Again, my solicitor thinks that the quality of justice being dealt in Scottish courts is reducing as the years go on.

Both my dentist and solicitor are around my age. Both studied at Scottish universities, both consciously decided to practice in Scotland, and both are unhappy with the way their professions are being undermined by government. It seems that Westminster and Holyrood are both determined to attack the professions.

In the architectural profession’s case, it’s been going on since the 1980’s when Thatcher legislated to remove fee scales, and the-then Prince Charles attacked Modernism and Modernist architects like ABK. The status of the RIBA’s fee scales changed from “mandatory” to “recommended” in 1982, then to “indicative” in 1992, following investigations by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Office for Fair Trade.

Architecture’s voice is weak, and that’s because our professional bodies don’t carry the weight of a $tn American social media company which employs ex-politicians to lobby endlessly behind the scenes so that legislation is watered down – or the weight of a politically-connected media mogul who is part of the Establishment and can thus keep press regulation as a voluntary rather than mandatory.

As a result, I’ve grown suspicious of activists, campaigners, pressure groups and protesters who seek the ear of politicians. Do they have your interests at heart? Think about that, before you make your mark on the ballot paper on Independence Day.

Next up, something entirely unrelated to politics.

By • Galleries: scotland, politics

Although I’ve been writing steadily in 2024 and have published in a few magazines including UR, I haven’t posted anything here for a while.

I’ve just been to the dentist for half an hour’s worth of crown preparation work, and I came close to posting an angry political rant as revenge on the world – but thought better of it. I’ve left the rant simmering in the “drafts” folder until I calm down, and to give John Swinney time to sort out the mess the Greens have made of our carbon reduction targets. Clownshow.

Meantime, a little anecdote from a few years ago, which is of course based on a true story.

Mr Wolf inherited the refurbishment and extension to Deer Island’s only hotel from a practice down south who won it in competition – then realised they would lose enormous amounts of money flying up to Scotland and taking two ferries each time they needed to visit site.

At first, they wanted Mr Wolf to take over the project in its entirety and carry his own P.I. cover; I believe that type of arrangement is known in the trade as a “poisoned chalice”. After lengthy horse-trading, they agreed that he could work freelance and would be covered by their insurance. Mr Wolf relied on his ten year old car to take him to the thirty year old ferry which crossed the Sound to visit the two hundred year old building.

He quickly discovered that things are different on Deer Island. The builders order everything online and collect it from the merchants in the Port; it has to come across on the big boat. The big boat only sails twice a week; the rest of the time, Deer Island is only connected to Scotland by a car ferry. Post persons on the island have little electric vans which never last the route, so they have to return to base where they swap to the diesel. Tourists are welcomed ambivalently; except when they’re not. Day trippers, as above.

On his first overnight visit to Deer Island, Mr Wolf discovered that the takeaway had a monopoly and kept short hours; you had to time your hunger carefully. Mr Wolf joined the queue and discovered that the woman behind the counter was appallingly rude. She was a human version of Shrek: surly, cynical, venomously cranky – and with a strong Scots accent. Innocent questions were met with sarcasm mixed with disdain: ordering a fish supper was a bit like visiting the zoo to watch the orang-utans misbehave.

When the customer in front politely requested something advertised on the board outside, her response consisted of one word: "No". This was repeated, accompanied by a deadpan expression, when he asked a follow-up question. Then he got a very sharp retort, along the lines that this isn't an establishment which sells anything “ready to eat” – despite the signboard outside to the contrary which advertised Fish & Chips.

When he dared to ask a fish-related question, he was met an even frostier reception. What about the crab turnovers which are advertised on the sign outside? "No, you can’t have any – I've not made them yet". Once he decided to order some fish suppers – seemingly the only food available from the rapidly diminishing options, she harassed him with, "So how many DO you want, I need numbers, NUMBERS…"

The customer eventually left, four fish suppers heavier and thirty pounds lighter. After he reached the counter, Mr Wolf asked if he could have an extra portion of chips? The proprietor told him curtly that she supported the local fishermen, not the local potato farmers.

During the wait for his supper to be cooked, Mr Wolf heard the two guys in the kitchen arguing with each other, "I kennt this wasnae haddock, why did you say it was haddock, I kennt you made a BIG mistake". Then one decided the chips were done, the other thought not, so he poked his fingers amongst the chips and squashed a few of them. “See, I telt you,” before dropping them into a polystyrene carton.

Mr Wolf offered Amex. The proprietor shook her head. MasterCard? Nope. What about Visa? She gave him a withering look. A £10 noted was accepted, ungraciously, but change wasn’t forthcoming until he asked for it. When the fish supper was being wrapped, he picked up the 70p Tesco ketchup bottle from the countertop, and discovered that it was temperamental with its squirts. It dribbled into the Formica. Mr Wolf set it down again and the proprietor scowled at him.

Finally leaving the chip shop half an hour after he joined the queue, Mr Wolf spotted a rat running along the side of the building, unperturbed, with a giant chip between its jaws. Mr Wolf headed in the opposite direction, to sit on a bench in front of the hotel, just downwind of the island’s distillery, then breathed in deeply. Next time, he’d have his tea in the hotel bar.

I hope that image cheered you up; meantime the dentist’s freeze in my upper jaw has almost worn off, so I’m away for something to eat. More from Deer Island in due course, as Mr Wolf discovers how difficult it can be to build things in rural Scotland.

By • Galleries: scotland, politics

I visited the Tartan exhibition at the V&A Dundee a few days ago, just before it was due to end. The show was wide-ranging, thought-provoking and left you wanting to learn more, which is always a good thing as you clatter down the stairs and back out into the wintry blast of the firth.


Outside the exhibition hall, in the first floor foyer where one of Ian Callum’s Jaguars used to sit, was a Hillman Imp with tartan seats. I read the caption closely, twice; despite what it said, the Imp wasn’t the last mass-produced car to be built in Scotland. After Imp production ended, the factory at Linwood – which passed from Rootes Group to Chrysler and would soon become Peugeot-Talbot – began making Sunbeam hatchbacks. Mass production in Scotland ended when the Sunbeam went out of production.

However, the initial jolt that things you read on exhibition walls aren’t necessarily true, did prompt another connection. Although it doesn’t get a mention in the Tartan exhibition, I recalled a snippet about the Volkswagen Golf GTi which demonstrates the international reach of tartan.


The decision to select tartan upholstery for the Golf GTi came from designer Gunhild Liljequist, who was a porcelain painter and chocolate box designer when she was hired, at the age of 28, to work in Volkswagen’s Department of Fabrics and Colours at Wolfsburg in 1964. She was one of the car industry’s first female designers and prior to her, the VW’s interiors were drab. Some would say that many of them still are.

Liljequist’s focus was on colour, trim, and interior detailing: when the first Golf GTi was planned in the mid-1970s, she was asked to design a “sporty” interior. Specifically, Scottish sportiness: the tartan cloth design. She recalled, “Black was sporty, but I also wanted colour and quality. I took a lot of inspiration from my travels around Great Britain, and I was always taken by high-quality fabrics with checked patterns … you could say that there is an element of British sportiness in the GTi.”


The fabric she chose was named “Clark” by VW, as a reference to double F1 world champion Jim Clark, whose his home in Duns isn’t far from the cloth-weaving heartland of the Borders woollen industry. Jim Clark was the talent of his era, and just like most great drivers he made speed look effortless, with none of the theatrical oversteer and screeching tyres you see in Hollywood films.

So the sporting check made its way to the grouse moor and the golf course, then it was co-opted by the fashion industry, and finally crossed over to motor racing. The GTi’s tartan upholstery is now referred to as “Clark Plaid”, which confuses people because tartan and plaid aren’t the same thing. The pattern on the x- and y-axes is identical in a tartan, but the patterns are different in a plaid. Nonetheless, tartan is often misrepresented as “plaid”, especially in the US.

Liljequist’s decision to use tartan-upholstered seats made the GTi of 1976 easy to distinguish from a base model Golf, just as she had intended. Fifty years later, tartan seats have endured, although the fifth-generation Golf GTi which emerged in 2005 had a classic black, white and red tartan renamed “Jacky”, perhaps in tribute to Jim Clark’s friend Jackie Stewart.

Meantime, for me, the best images in the V&A Tartan exhibition were firstly a shoot for Vogue magazine by Sarah Moon, a French photographer with a superb eye. True to the original clan tartans, prior to Walter Scott and George IV’s Public Relations visit to Scotland 200 years ago, the models in her photos wear subtle, autumnal colours. The second image is a Bo Diddley album cover which stands out thanks to the joy of his shy smile and pillarbox red tartan jacket. Compared to the po-faced fashion plates on show elsewhere in the exhibition, Bo Diddley is having the time of his life.


Passing the Hillman Imp again on the way out, though, something was missing. I had a nagging feeling that the V&A’s curators treat their subject as art historians would, rather than as a living tradition. Perhaps they didn’t speak to Johnstons, Isle Mill or Strathmore Woollens – who have a mill just up the road – while they were putting the show together. The exhibition needed a tangible demonstration of how tartan is made, with a Dornier P2 loom – like the working mills in Forfar, Keith, Elgin and Hawick use – so that visitors could see tartan cloth physically forming in front of their eyes, as the rapier swishes to and fro through the warp.


When folk reportedly say of the V&A, and other galleries, that “It’s no’ for us,” or that “There’s nothin’ for us there,” that’s sometimes construed as people in Dundee’s traditionally working class northern suburbs saying that they don’t have a connection to the arts, especially to visual culture. That shouldn’t be the case.

Just as The Rep theatre has made an effort over the years to put on shows which connect to the working traditions of Dundee’s jute industry, perhaps the V&A should look closely at what was (and is still) made across Tayside. Then, everyone in the city would make a connection with the tyres, watches, lasers, computers, confectionery, ships and many other things which their families helped to make, and which contribute to Scotland’s material culture – including the polychrome checked woollen fabric on the Hillman Imp’s seats.


By • Galleries: dundee, scotland

Right to Decide

01/01/24 12:27

A few years ago, a fresh critique of the Town Planning system came from an unexpected direction.

You can’t do this; You can’t do that; You can’t go forwards; And you can’t go back.

The psychedelic rock band Hawkwind released the single, Right to Decide, in 1992. Mark Radcliffe played it a few times on the radio, but at first I couldn’t decipher the lyrics. A week or two later, I came across a snippet in one of the inkies – weekly music papers like Sounds or Melody Maker, which have long since disappeared.

Right to Decide is about a long-running dispute over an illegally-constructed building: householder Albert Dryden took on the Planning department in County Durham, but got nowhere with them. Songwriter Dave Brock’s lyrics speak to the constraints which are placed on individuals who want to build, but eventually have to bend or ignore the rules: Dryden felt so strongly that he took the law into his own hands, and the story came to a tragic end when a Planning officer visited site.

Brock’s analysis is correct. There’s a massive list of Can’t Do That’s in the Planning system. Feu splitting, building on the Greenbelt, ribbon development, restrictive zoning, drainage embargoes, and the concept of plot ratio are just some of them. The 21st century perception is that Planning has become an expensive handbrake on progress. Everyday folk are required to engage architects, sometimes Planning consultants and occasionally solicitors, just in order to build a house extension.

Besides the hassle and delay, the suspicion of some is that Planning fees are just another tax: a way for Councils to raise money, justify their existence and maintain a larger public sector than right-wing politicians would like. That’s become an attractive narrative for the tabloid press: why can’t we just build what we want on the land we own? It’s a theme I explored a few years ago when I wrote a feature about Judy Murray’s plans for Park of Keir.

Yet Hawkwind come to the subject from a diametrically opposite direction to property developers, right-wingers and celebrity tennis mums. The band formed in the hippie squats around London’s Ladbroke Grove, and their politics are anti-Establishment, pro-anarchist and far to the left of the angry letters-to-the-editor writers in the Tory press. In fact, Hawkwind and libertarian free marketeers seem strange bedfellows, until you realise that everything printed about the Planning system nowadays is negative.

Right to Decide was a departure for Hawkwind, a protest song rather than an exploration of inner space. In the Indie era of the early 1990’s, they seemed like an anachronism from a time before I was born, part of the ancient scaffolding of rock ‘n’ roll which included King Crimson, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Apparently, writing about music is as pointless as “dancing about architecture”; yet sometimes, it gives expression to people’s frustrations about how society is ordered, rather than just channeling teenage angst. At that point, it’s fair game to explore what the songwriter intended.

Meanwhile, developers feel projects are being delayed unjustifiably, when they have to appeal every other application to the Scottish Government’s Reporter. NIMBY’s feel their concerns are overridden, and local democracy is being trashed. Westminster feels that Planning is an impediment to meeting housebuilding targets – although perhaps the Planners are useful idiots in that regard, since they have become a scapegoat for Britain’s perennial issue of under-providing affordable housing.

Perhaps Right to Decide could become an anthem for the disaffected, from right-wing ideologues such as Michael Gove, to the anarchist squatters which Hawkwind once were.

Happy New Year, let’s hope that 2024 provides a solution to all our Planning problems.

By • Galleries: politics