For three delightful years, I studied Philosophy at Birmingham. I learnt a smattering of Nietzsche, a smattering more of Schopenhauer and had my first, tentative forays into somewhere that was beginning to describe itself as a “gay village”, with that post-QAF new sense of pride – and marketing potential – that was taking root in queer communities in English cities.

Whilst I was there – in 2000 – the Mailbox opened. This behemoth was noted amongst my Brummie friends as something of an ananchronism: it was due to house a Harvey Nicks, amongst other things. Jeez, this wasn’t what Birmingham was known for. Trashy hen weekends, yes; car manufacturing, sure; a strange round 60s tower called the Bull Ring, kind of. But high-end retail? Nah. I mean, that was what Rackham’s was for, right? And only your posh cousin Stanley’s grandma shopped there.

The Mailbox, in typical Birmingham style, was a building that fronted a busy A road and had a canal out the back. The site had previously housed an enormous sorting office (hence the referential name), built in 1970 with mechanised sorting and a tunnel link to the nearby New Street station; it had been the largest building in the city and its core steel structure was re-used in the new building.

That’s not to say the Mailbox wasn’t welcomed. This building, which you can walk through, the restaurants and shops, the canal behind with its new bridges and walkways, became a new promenade for the city’s young folk, who would swank through from their office jobs in the city centre to their favourite All Bar One on Brindley Place. Unfortunately on their way there they had to traverse the optimistically decorated underpass out the front.

Come on guys, it’s not like Brummies are unfamiliar with the dingy concrete idiom of subways and flyovers! Still, the architects chose to decorate this space. The coloured bands, in case you’re wondering, go up the streetlights. It’s entirely unclear why.

The Mailbox and the surrounding area behind are prime exemplars of the great experiment of New Labour urbanism – that grand project, spearheaded by the unlikely bedfellows of Richard Rogers and John Prescott, to revitalise the country’s cities through mixed-use, high-density developments. In this variant we get high-end retail, a canal, proximity to the entertainment area (quarter?) around Broad Street, the BBC (gotta have those “creatives”) and – of course – plenty of flats.

So we get these typical canal houses, with their wood cladding, splash of colour (blue window frames! Perfect!) and utterly unforgivable Juliet balconies:

(It should be noted that this area is made immeasurably better by the presence of real actual people living and playing on real actual narrowboats.)

And the other major crime in the area is the typical over-reliance on terracotta cladding, whereby the finest building material ever utilised by human or beast is transformed into so much thermodynamic wallpaper:

You wanna live there, right? Still, there is one building that is actually reasonably impressive. Local boy done good Ken Shuttleworth left Fosters to set up MAKE Architects (their errant capitalisation, not mine) back in 2003. MAKE, from what I’ve seen of their output, aren’t too bad. Some buildings (like the Grosvenor Waterside development, which I inexplicably enjoyed a while back. What was I thinking?) are terrible, but this one has a searing confidence to it and a quality of construction that you just don’t get down here in provincial Brighton.

There are obvious nods to the deconstructivist tendency, with the obscure spill-over roof. Quite simply it looks like a mistake, an untucked shirt collar perhaps. And then there’s the heavily peirced facade, and those myriad pixellated Greek crosses, bubbling up the front.

Of course, this isn’t Liebeskind – this jagged, broken structure has no meaning. Yes, there’s the usual archispiel platitudes on their website about how the building’s architectural language is:

derived from strong local references to Birmingham’s industrial heritage, celebrating the contrasts between heavy industrial metal working and hand-crafted jewellery and watch making.

This is, of course, bollocks. But it’s a good building, one which contributes positively to the city. And whilst I stuck to the other side of the canal and didn’t venture inside, it seems to me that it’s much more of an architectural success than anything nearby.

The Cube is the last of the buildings to be constructed on the site as part of the redevelopment. It is, then, something of a last hurrah for Birmingham’s mixed-use urban renaissance bullishness. A few streets away one can find clear evidence of what the next stages were meant to be. The area behind Broad Street is full of this building’s poorer relations – the low-rise high-density blocks of flats and occasional row of townhouses that embodied the predominant form of aspirational home ownership that typified the early 2000s, and there’s a thankfully empty plot, with the usual hoardings promising “exclusive city living” in “luxury apartments” and a picture of a building so appalling that, surely, it can only ever have been meant as a joke.

With the bursting of the housing bubble and the rise of the Tories, the urban renewal project came to a crashing halt. No doubt in a city near you there are similar sites, waiting for a future that will now never happen. Here, in chipboard and rainbeaten posters, is one reason that New Labour’s project failed: most of the buildings their private speculators built – or threatened to build – were rubbish. For every Cube there are a hundred of these mean, underthought blocks of flats which even buy-to-let speculators were wary of.

The canal project at Birmingham was an attempt to create a place where all people needed were flats, leisure distractions and shopping malls, as if somehow Birmingham could become a city of the endless drizzly holiday. As if to demonstrate this great vision of the future, the hoardings on another undeveloped site are created from the oversize grinning bonces of the ideal citizen.

Lovely moderist office blocks tower in the background, sneering at the buildings that never were, smug in the knowledge that they at least have purpose and function and windows and a little thing called physical presence.

We wait to see what the future holds for our cities. It seems to me that our current political overlords are doing their darndest to reinflate the housing bubble, in the vain hope that this will “get the nation building again” (when the one sure fire way of doing so would be for the nation to, er, build some buildings). But we know, from the draft NPPF, that there will be little control on where this housing is (if it even arrives) and less prioritisation of high-density city living. We will never know whether this great urban dream could have been anything more than the partial success we see here at Birmingham.

Pancras means, literally, “the one that holds everything”, and the station that bears this martyr’s name tries to do precisely that. “fine” burgers, “natural” remedies, “authentic” fossil (apparently that’s a distinctive modern vintage global lifestyle company specialising in consumer fashion accessories). You can even go to somewhere that helps you to “transform daily routines into the special rituals they once were”; going to the toilet never sounded so appealing. You can see a giant statue of two people melodramatically kissing, a much smaller statue of that wonderful old curmudgeon Sir John Betjemen, and – presumably for the next year or so – some Olympic-sized rings. If you’re really unlucky you might get to hear someone as arse-crushingly anodyne as Ed Sheeran whipping a crowd of international commuters into a frenzy of bedraggled bemusement as part of the “station sessions” series of unfortunate concerts.

And of course you can hop on a train and travel at enormous speed to a small town they call Paris, without even stopping at the sea. Which – I will happily grant you – is no mean thing.

Let us trip downstairs, away from the champagne bar and the swanky restaurant, which so clearly indicate that upstairs is Not For Me. What lurks in the undergrowth?

Downstairs, trainlife becomes more prosaic, the muted beiges and greys of anywhereville, the comforting, uncosy array of pseudo-swanky chain outlets lines one wall, a forest of fearsome columns lurking opposite.

What’s down there? I was too chicken to find out; those vacant supports disturbed me.

Downstairs it’s all clutter and busyness; the secrets of international travel – that it needs to be subsidised by commerce, that it’s a serious hassle – become clear. Not, of course, quite as much of a hassle as the station makes domestic train travel. You have to walk the entire length of St Pancras – over 200 metres – before you even reach the domestic part of the station. This continues the humdrum aesthetic of the main station’s undercroft. Here we get shiny new concrete with shiny new striplights in a space infinitely more horrible than Euston ever could be.

And the kind, thoughtful architects have built this ceiling at a tender, low level; none of the soaring space-age flights of Eusonian fancy here. Nice new claustrophobia – that’s what the people want from their stations.

This strange space, hidden directly behind the end of Barlow‘s train shed, is a sharp slap in the face to all that romance and whimsy upstairs. NO!! it screams, TRAIN TRAVEL IS SOMETHING YOU DO BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO!! STOP BEING SUCH A SAP AND GET YOUR SORRY BACKSIDE THROUGH THE BARRIER!!

Let’s go back upstairs, let’s talk about Barlow’s shed. This is, no doubt, an incredibly impressive structure. The span was, at the time, the largest unsupported roof anywhere. And its polite, sky blue repainting sure looks pretty -  though I see Quakerish simplicity in this colour; it does little to reflect the high-power business of shunting trains.

And I’m not convinced that, aesthetically, this is a particularly interesting space. It seems to me that it lacks any emphasis – the point of the arch draws the eye up, but it has none of the sheer verticality of the gothic churches. With no supports, and such a broad end, it offers little perspectival delight. And the width, whilst we know it to be impressive, is somehow lost.

No, for the real architectural drama, the great work, we need to go outside.

George Gilbert Scott’s design for the Midland Grand was exuberant, expressive and  – most of all – expensive. The hotel was one of the finest in London, though others quickly overtook it. The building was used as – what else? – offices for British Rail, before falling into disrepair. Thanks to Betjemen’s campaigning ways, it was listed toward the end of the Sixties and saved from demolition. Following its restoration, we can see it for what it always was: a crass, fanciful, opulent, overblown slab of Victorian whimsy – and one of London’s most wonderful buildings.

Scott’s Gothic building is not the pure Venetian revivalism that Ruskin might have approved of – though it certainly has oodles of that. This is, though, a thoroughly European building – the roof, with its double tier of dormers, takes us to Paris; the spires and pinnacles are transported from Bavaria, perhaps; the stepped gable ends from the low countries.

Scott’s tasted were eclectic, and this astonishing building reflects his brilliance.

It seems quite clear, particularly given the clock tower, that here is Scott’s vivacious riposte to the palace of Westminster, completed a mere five years earlier. This, Scott seems to be saying, is how you really do Gothic. Is it better than Barry and Pugin’s building? Yes. On the outside, anyhow.

Of course, there remain questions over the restoration of the building – for a restoration this is; little conservation here. No doubt many splendours have been uncovered or recreated, though a lot of the internal structure has been altered to make way for mod cons and super-swanky lofts. You and I paid for the exterior work in the 1990s through our friends at English Heritage and British Rail, which I am mighty pleased about. And I suppose it seems churlish to ask whether the interiors have retained the spirit of their original design, given that this building is once again what it was designed to be – an upmarket hotel (called, ridiculously, “Renaissance”, IT’S NEO-GOTHIC, you numbnuts!) for rich people. A simple tour will set you back twenty quid.

It is right and proper to celebrate this station’s rejuvenation. The various campaigns, the listing process and the work of historians, conservationists and other experts has meant that this magnificent structure (and I mean the train shed too) has been kept – for the nation, as they say about art. Yet whilst it is right to celebrate this building’s continued existence, I think it’s perfectly correct to also mourn the damage done, even if it was unavoidable.

Maybe it’s the times we live in, but I feel immeasurably disheartened by this place. I have this worry, that I cannot shake, that in twenty years time we will look back at the revamped St Pancras with an incredulity, a distain for the sleek moderniste vulgarity of the place. That those acres of glass barriers that separate the trains from us mere mortals will be greening and cracked, the clock and whizzy lifts permanently out of order, the creamy tracery smudged and heavy in its mortar, the soaring girders having sloughed off their paintwork and Betjeman, alone, standing unweathered in a dingy hall. I hope I’m wrong.

Bright sunshine gleaming off the polished granite, metal frames and glass of crisp, late international style office blocks. This could be somewhere on Park Avenue or – just perhaps – one of the less showy buildings in the Chicago Loop. Except not.

These flashy buildings stand proudly in front of Euston station in London, in some ways the last hurrah of British Rail (which, succeeded by its later incarnations, occupied much of the offices on this plot) before that bastion’s decline in the 80s and the subsequent, despicable privatisation.

Until recently, Network Rail has had a plan to completely redevelop the entire Euston site, demolishing the buildings by Richard Seifert (who also designed the now-listed Centre Point, as well as the NatWest tower) and the area into what I think I described at the time as a hulking monstrosity. It turns out that all that speculation on property was a great big bubble and you can’t make shed loads of cash out of building millions of tiny apartments. Who woulda thunk it.

So instead, the plan is for a redevelopment of the existing station, albeit a putatively temporary one until all the HS2 money comes rolling in. I couldn’t be happier about this (erm, well – nearly. Keep going) because, contrary to popular belief, Euston is a good station that has the potential to be a fantastic one. Let’s look at the facts. It is wonderfully well-connected both to the tube and the bus network (it has a bus station out the front) and it even has an underground car park! It has a great big waiting hall, properly separated from the train shed, it has a highly functional courtyard with a mixture of eateries, and (the other side of the bus station) there’s a good swathe of greenery. There’s even a craft beer establishment in one of the remaining entrance lodges from the Victorian building.

And the architecture’s pretty fantastic. The taut concrete of the ceiling is quite special…

…as are the egg box mouldings in the ticket hall:

There are issues, mainly to do with the clutter outside and inside the station; clearly the station manager hasn’t heard that modernist architecture is about clean lines. And there is the trickier problem of Seifert’s administrative buildings and the bus station, which casually obscure the wonderfully confident full-width colonnade. Yet with a little love and thought, this building – even the whole complex – could be reinvigorated. If we must attach a nostalgia in order to sell the notion, how about that Mad Men/Pan Am schtick except with glamorous train stewardesses and businessmen bustling back and forth from the City to their wives in Cheddington. Or we could strip away the 50 years of accumulated rubbish and make what is already a nice place to be into somewhere even nicer.

To be fair, the architects (Aedas) seem to recognise this, and their plans involve removing the fast food shacks that stand directly in front of the station and improving the signage and so forth. However, my heart sank when I read this:

Increased lettable area will be provided by the addition of a mezzanine deck within the concourse, allowing growth in the premium food and beverage offer.

So not only are they going to make the station darker, block the wonderful ceiling off and make it feel more crampt, they are doing it so they can open a Carluccios up there. (You really don’t want to get me started on the use of the word “offer”. Or the superfluity of “deck”. Read the whole press release, it’s a classic example of corporate brain-crushing bunkum. I once again call upon the nation to behead its press officers.) Anyway, here’s a picture of what it almost certainly won’t look like.

What’s interesting, I think, is the contrast between what’s happened (or not happened) at Euston and the approach taken a little stroll up the road at St Pancras and the wonderful King’s Cross. Where Euston is derided as dark and ugly and then slated for demolition, these other stations are extolled for their beauty and romance, their architects lauded and millions spent on their makeovers. Why? Because old Modernism is deeply unfashionable and because good people campaigned to get these buildings listed.

Anyway, come back soon for part 2, in which I argue that St Pancras station is RUBBISH. I’m perfectly serious.

Two split pediments, canoodling behind a hedge:

A nice bit of stonework, snugly supporting a friendly cherub:

A rather pristine swoop of terracotta:

Yesterday afternoon, whilst you mere mortals were scrabbling around for an invite to Google+, the decider-actioners of the Brighton & Hove City Council Planning Committee were ringing the death-knell for one of the few remaining grand cinemas of our fair city.

“Eco-offices and jobs replease [sic] empty cinema” went the press release. (Which makes the classic press office mistake of not being able to spell overestimating the numbers – apparently the offices will bring “almost 200 jobs”. No, the actual estimate is 170 jobs. Is 170 almost 200? No. It’s exactly 170. Most of the populous can quite easily grasp the number 170. Perhaps if there were 192 jobs, you might call that almost 200. But 170 is nearer 150 than 200. Oh, OK are we rounding up to the nearest 50 now? So 151 is actually almost 200. *Sigh* I know a four year old that counts like that. Seriously. Grr. Calm down.)

Under different circumstances you might have found me rallying to the defence of a grade II listed building, if all they’re planning to replease replace it with is some rubbish offices. But in this case, the Councillors made exactly the right decision.

Let’s talk about planning policy. No! Sit down, Smithins! If you pay attention at the back you might actually learn something.

So you might have thought that the decision about whether or not to knock down old buildings came about because of what those grey-haired buffoons on the planning committee had in their porridge, or that some officious blouse-wearing prude up at English Heritage wields their unscrupulous, pedantic red pen. But actually there is national policy, contained in a document called – thrillingly – PPS5. (You wouldn’t get that in the States, would you? It would be called “Guidance for The Defendors of the Ancient and Modern Wonders of Americaland”.)

If you want to go about knocking down old buildings, you usually have to meet all of these four criteria (I’ve paraphrased this a bit):

The nature of the building prevents all reasonable uses of the site

No viable use of the building can be found

Conservation through grant funding isn’t possible

The loss of the building is outweighed by the benefits of bringing the site back into use

Note, if you wouldn’t mind, that none of this relates to the condition of the building. It doesn’t matter whether the building is a ruined hulk or a pristine gem (which is fortunate, when you think about it – we all love a nice castle. Plus it gives me an excuse to post this; you’ll remember how fugly Embassy Court used to look before it got tarted up. Looks alright now, I daresay.)

And it also, whilst we’re neologising and portmanteauxifying, doesn’t matter if the building is fugly. One woman’s National Theatre is my Gerkhin, if you get my drift. Of course, the state of repair and the beauty of the building will have an effect on what grant funding you might get, or how viable the building is, but it’s not directly considered by the local planning authority.

 I’m not going to give you the whole sorry saga about the poor Astoria (you can read it all yourself in the excellent report by the planning officer – search here for application BH2010/0375); suffice to say that I think the right decision was made. Or, in other words, these four criteria were met and could be shown to be met.

What’s important, what I’m trying to say, is that it’s reassuring to know that we don’t just demolish old buildings because they’re undashionable, or because they can’t turn a profit on their own, or because someone wants to put something else there, or because they need a lick of paint. We do it when we have to, to make sure that our cities don’t become beautiful ruins.

Postscript: I’ll endeavour to put up some photos of the Astoria at the weekend. Whilst the right decision was made, I don’t think that means that we should forget about what was, once, a rather nice building.

I’ve not really talked about the riots on here. Though I’m not devoid of thoughts on the subject, this is mainly because I think that riots are an incredibly complex urban phenomenon and it’s not something that I feel particularly qualified to comment on. During the riots I was merrily commuting between leafy hove and a bit of lovely Frank Bridge at the Royal Albert Hall. I’m not saying that nice, side-parted middle class vicar’s sons can’t ever comment on matters that don’t concern their immediate experience. I’m merely saying that the impetus behind rioting and looting is so foreign to me, and the brew of complex and contradictory motivating factors – coupled with the inherent randomness of big cities – such a vast area to try and comprehend, that this subject seems a little above my proverbial pay grade.

Having put that thrilling caveat in, I do feel entirely qualified (by which I mean brain-between-the-ears qualified) to tear apart the analysis offered by Space Syntax. (Of course, you dear readers both don’t actually need telling any of this. You’ll read their work, scoff, chortle, roll your eyes and reach for the skittles. I do this for my own smug self-satisfaction.)

Space Syntax claim that “the spatial configuration of large post-war housing estates is the key influence” behind the riots. Yup. Uh huh. Why? Well, according to Bill Hillier of Space Syntax, large post-war housing estates are full of “over complex” spaces, where the kids can hang all on their lonesome and come up with nasty plans to steal dvd players from cash converters, unsupervised by adults. The hanging about that is, not the stealing. Moreover, “this pattern of activity … is not found in non-estate street networks.” Huh. So kids never hang around unsupervised on, I don’t know, street corners. Or in car parks. Or playgrounds. Or at school. Or at home, ffs.

Look, I’m not a romantic for “post-war” housing estates (by the way, it’s been 65 years, when do we stop using that term please?). I’ve read my Lynsey Hanley, and I’ve walked around enough housing to know that some housing estates are shit holes, some are poorly designed, some are interesting and stimulating, some are great. And I’m not going to pretend that the design of places doesn’t influence people’s behaviour. Of course it does; I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it didn’t. But this sort of “research”, that tries to hitch its flimsy waggon to the runaway cargo ship of the latest public catastrophe, this futile attempt to posit a singular, subjective, pseudo-quantifiable constant as the catalyst for the most random of urban events, is demeaning to all involved.

Right, well done for getting to the end of that. Have a pretty picture.

Yeah, OK. I know it’s not the most thrilling of subjects. I mean, what fool would actually consider working in planning? I ask you. No really. And I realise that our beatific overlords are responsible for some other – how to put this politely? – execrably malodourous behaviour, but if you have a passing care for our environment (natural, built, or otherwise) then I would suggest that this NPPF is something that ought to concern you.

The background. Currently, the country has a lot of planning policy. A lot less than it used to, but quite a lot none the less. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing (though my views on this aren’t the same as a lot of planners’); our government, however, believe that it is, and have basically replaced a whole load of respected planning policy with 60-odd pages of astonishingly light-touch regulation. Which worked well for the banking industry, I think we can all agree.

Planning, it is deemed, is now basically in existence to encourage growth. No longer is it a tool to, er, plan. It is there so that we get growth. What is growth? Development. Apparently. “Development means growth“. Wha?!?! Is it growth when you knock down a school to build houses? Is it growth when you build an Asda on previously agricultural land? Is it growth when you, I don’t know, stick in double glazing? Planners, if the NPPF becomes policy, will be people you have to ask nicely to say yes to you. They won’t be able to say no, except in the most unusual circumstances. (By the way, planners say yes to about 85% of all applications at the moment. So we’re not talking about planners needing their wings clipped, we’re talking about removing their ability to say no to the 15% of rubbish that comes in.)

The National Trust and the Telegraph have both dug in their heels, mainly concerned about the threat to the countryside – and they’re not wrong. However, being an urbanite I’m particularly concerned with the diminishing of the reasons planners will be able to reject development on design grounds – only “obviously poor design” can be refused. Whilst I don’t claim that the last fifteen years have been salad days for architecture, at least planners were able to say no to the mediocre and unsuitable, the crass and the jarring; no longer will we strive for good design. If the NPPF goes through, we will see a decade of cheap, tacky, boorish buildings in nasty spaces. That’s a promise.

Scott’s name was one of the first I learnt as an autodidact of architectural history. Difficult to remember exactly why one remembers something, but I suspect it had something to do with the name’s dynastic tendencies and trying not to get into a muddle over my Gileses and (multiple) Georges. Indeed, both Jenkins’ article (now corrected) and the Mirror (brava Kirsty Henley-Washford! We commend your architectural predilections if not your accuracy!) cocked up the lineage. Of course, I need not have bothered. That excruciatingly embarrassing faux pas never occurred; very few people have heard of George Gilbert Scott (or his progeny) because very few people have heard of any architect. And, yes – I realise that you (dear readers both) have heard of all the architects, but that’s because you’re special. Seriously, though, which Victorian architects are better known? I offer Charles Barry and Pugin, but only because they did this. Waterhouse, maybe. Butterfield? Blomfield? Street? Hardwick? I can barely remember what they built, and I actually care about these things. Sigh.

Of course, this is all due to a bicentenary and the trend-setting power of Google. More interesting to me than whether this man deserves a biography (what a dreckishly dull conceit to hang an article on!) is the architectural furore that Sir GGS provoked.

With the rise and rise of revivalism throughout the nineteenth century there was weighty debate about how to conserve older structures. Sir GGS took part more as a practitioner than a theoretician, it seems, though his thoughts are set out in his Plea for the Faithful Restoration of Our Ancient Churches, where he deplores the tendencies of so-called restorers who would seek to “destroy the truthfulness and genuine character” of these buildings. Sir GGS knew his stuff – he probably studied and restored more mediaeval cathedrals and churches than any other Victorian. But, in a similar vein to Eugene Viollet-le-Duc across the Channel, he was more interested in preserving the architectural spirit, shall we say, of these old buildings. OK, Viollet-le-Duc was perhaps a touch more vandally, seeking to make buildings better than they already were, or ever had been. Crazy mo fo. Sir GGS, however, still had the notion that a building could be true, that there was a definite character to it that he could decipher and imprint into his restoration.

It was Sir GGS’s proposals for restoring Tewkesbury Abbey that led to William Morris forming the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Eeshk. That’s a slap in th wotsits. To this day, should you wish to become a member of this illustrious group, you have to declare your allegiance to their manifesto, which reads as a faintly infuriated riposte to the simplistic and egotistic approach of Sir GGS and Viollet-le-Duc. So the issue mildly rumbles on. On the one hand, those who believe that we must make our restorations obvious, that there should be a material demarcation between the ancient and modern, that the addition of the new doesn’t necessitate the insult of the old but rather that only and constantly through time does a building acquire its totality of meaning. And on the other, those that believe that a building is an idea, that it inclines toward a Platonic form which – through understanding and inspiration – can be reached, that the provenance current materials don’t matter so much as the truth the building somehow declares. Oh, and then there’s most people who don’t give a flying buttress about the whole thing as long as it looks nice.

I do wonder whether there isn’t an honest and humble middle ground, that recognises that buildings change, that seeks to encapsulate, retain and even renew the aesthetic merits of an existing structure whilst questioning our own motives and spotting the easy slide into pastiche; that is confident enough in the modern to not make it a simple servant to the past, yet that acknowledges the limitations in our current stylistic tendencies. Oh cripes, that’s quite enough – I’m starting to feel a manifesto coming on…

No time to write something meaningful at the moment I’m afraid: too busy participating in a “visual study” for The Course. Lots of badly produced maps of a certain part of Brighton. But it has given me a chance to take the camera out on a wander. Results contained herein: