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Blame Le Corbusier
Sir: Le Corbusier, whom Theodore Dalrymple accuses (Global warning, 7 June) of causing more damage to European cities than Genghis Khan, the Luftwaffe and Bomber Harris combined, uttered one of the most evil phrases of the 20th century. ‘The house is a machine for living in’, a notion taken to heart not only, alas, by French architects but British ones too. It has been the motto of every school of architecture in the country for more than 50 years and more than anything else accounts for the horrific and inhuman environments our urban populations have to live in. Is it surprising that mindless violence is on the increase in those hell-holes of concrete mass-housing, the council estates of south London? If you give people machines to live in, why expect them to behave like humans?
When our architects are required to design an individual house they are completely at a loss. They were never taught the elementary lesson of how to combine a roof with a facade, still less how a facade should be balanced. They have heard of proportion but have no idea that it is based on the human scale. They know nothing of detail, classical or otherwise. They were taught to despise the past, and so have no reference points. They have a trade union, the RIBA, which has a stranglehold on their education and grants them their qualifications. It is high time it was abolished.
John Hoar
South Molton, North Devon
Irony bypass
Sir: Is Paul Johnson (And Another Thing, 31 May) an American or has he merely had an irony bypass? Kingsley Amis’s tongue was never more firmly in his cheek than in his bravura description of Dixon’s hangover in Lucky Jim. To spell it out for Mr Johnson, the reference to ‘filthy Mozart’ is a measure of Dixon’s foul mood, not Amis’s musical taste.
J.M. Hallinan
Linley Point, New South Wales
Local empowerment denied
Sir: Leo McKinstry’s experience of failing to prevent a wholly unsuitable planning application in a neighbour’s garden (‘Naked greed meets Stalinist control’, 7 June) is sadly familiar. A few years ago a developer persuaded three neighbours of ours to sell him parts of their gardens. A planning application to build five huge detached houses to fill the space was duly filed.
Essentially every single neighbour objected to this application, the only exceptions being those who had a financial interest in the application being successful. The parish council planning committee condemned the application. The local district councillors objected to the application. The application was turned down at the district level. Repeat applications were made, with trivial adjustments, often before the previous application was turned down. Eventually, the district council gave up the unequal struggle and caved in.
Of course the outcome was inevitable. The developer had too much to gain to give in. What is the loss of a view over a mature garden worth compared to the profit from developing five large detached houses on a prime site in a village in the middle of the green belt? The forces at work here are exactly the same as those that keep the Common Agricultural Policy in receipt of the lion’s share of all revenues to the EU.
Many proposals have been made to reform the Town and Country Planning Act but, as McKinstry correctly points out, this Stalinist piece of legislation works very well both for politicians and for those who fund political parties. The chances of it being significantly reformed are nil.
Stephen Hemingway
Knebworth, Hertfordshire
Sir: In Leo McKinstry’s article, he puts the blame (as we all would) at the point where the result disagrees with his wishes. That happens to be the new planning ombudsman, but anomalies of the type he writes about happen at many different levels. Here in our small town, for example, someone applied for permission to open a take-away right on the busiest road-junction in the town. A petition urging the planning authority not to allow the shop was signed by many local people, worried that customers ‘just popping in’ for a take-away would park at the junction, making the traffic problem worse than it is already. The town council discussed the application and unanimously recommended rejection. But the planning authority, which is the district council, whose offices are ten miles away, passed it without visiting the site, apparently because all the planning requirements were fulfilled by the application and no objection was raised by the highways department of the county council, whose offices are 18 miles away.
‘Local empowerment’ denied once again. But this time the villain was not the Labour government but a Conservative-dominated district council. Until local empowerment has real teeth, it cannot be expected to bite.
Ian Baird
Framlingham, Suffolk
Apostrophic faith
Sir: Suffering from a condition verging on OCD when it comes to usage of the apostrophe, I am compelled to write in defence of St Thomas’ Hospital to Dot Wordsworth’s suggestion (Mind your language, 31 March) that it misuses this notoriously difficult punctuation mark. I was taught at grammar school in 1973 that there are two correct options for using the possessive apostrophe for singular nouns ending in s, depending on personal preference; thus Thomas’s and Thomas’ are equally acceptable. This is backed up by Wikipedia (using the possessive apostrophe with singular nouns ending in s or z). Correctpunctuation.co.uk agrees, although it goes further, to say that when using a possessive apostrophe with religious or ancient names ending in s, the ’s option should not be used. So, no need for an expensive sign change for the hospital, I believe.
Claire Keeling
London EC3
Sir: Perhaps Dot Wordsworth or another knowledgeable person can solve this problem. Travelling on the underground, I pass Barons Court and Earl’s Court. Earl’s Court has a possessive apostrophe, but Barons Court does not. Does this mean that the Barons have gone a-courting?
Thinking about this profound problem helps pass the time.
Anne Wotana Kaye
London SW13
Not good, but outstanding
Sir: If, as Matthew Parris asserts, ‘There are no “good” teachers’ (Another voice, 7 June), then there can be no good practitioners of anything. To state that those teachers who are good for some children invariably ‘wreck another’s prospects’ is a reasoning which could be applied to all professions.
How does a good Prime Minister promote the best to Cabinet without discarding the deficient and defective? And what of those journalists who decide each week who is worthy of their attention, invariably to the detriment of others who may be just as worthy? The promotion and affirmation of one is necessarily at the expense of another. Some might call it natural selection. Or is Matthew Parris advocating equality of outcome over equality of opportunity?
I must declare an interest: I am a teacher. But I am not ‘good’; I am ‘outstanding’, or so Ofsted tells me. But this ‘outstanding’ is not as the dictionary defines — that is being concerned with superlatives. No, teachers who are ‘outstanding’ are ‘at least good in many respects’, so that they may be decidedly less than good in others.
The desire to make all teachers feel good about themselves has resulted in grade inflation, such that Ofsted’s ‘outstanding’ no longer means outstanding. Indeed, one might as well introduce an outstanding* to distinguish the truly outstanding from Ofsted’s assessment.
Good teachers, as Matthew Parris demonstrates, are those who inspire and somehow live on in the lives of their students. For one to be lauded by a former pupil half a century on, and immortalised in the pages of The Spectator, is indicative of a truly outstanding teacher and manifestly belies the assertion that there are no good teachers.
Adrian Hilton
Ripon College, Oxford
A brutish term
Sir: I cannot be the only reader to be dismayed by the tone all too frequently struck by some of your male contributors. The latest example came in Theodore Dalrymple’s rant (Global warning, 7 June). He writes of ‘shivering, drunken, scantily clad sluts…’. No doubt these young women do not represent the flower of English womanhood — but ‘sluts’? The coarse aggressiveness of the term, unimaginable from the pens of Paul Johnson or Charles Moore, says, I suggest, more about the brutishness of Theodore Dalrymple than about the character of these misguided young people.
I do hope you agree.
Ruth Chambers
Durham
Rod’s boy
Sir: Tyler Liddle (Letters, 31 May) sounds like a plea to get a reluctant builder back to work.
Peter Fineman
Warminster, Wiltshire
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