SIR.—Mr. Levin's splendid and important report on the monster of
Piccadilly Circus raises two separate questions.
The first is what to do about our rebuilding and town planning. The tragedy is that the ordinary man, even the ordinary educated man, in Britain is supremely uninterested in architecture and supremely reluctant to make an msthetic judgment. The im- portance of the Piccadilly row is that here is a building proposed that is so monstrous that even the ordinary uninterested man in the street can sense that something is wrong. I do hope that it will be made the spearhead of an anti-ugly counter-attack, because if we lose here we might as well give up. As it is, in the absence of public interest, money always wins. By the time the LCC has laid down the plot ratio, the developer has insisted on maximum lettable space, and the prospective client has demanded lots of small offices for his staff,. and therefore lots of small windows and partitions, the shape of the building is pretty well determined. All the architect has then to do is to decide whether the lump of masonry is to stand on its end or its side, and to design a flashy entrance hall and luxurious chair- man's suite in order to clinch the sale. The profits on this sort of development range from 30 per cent. of the investment up to 120 per cent. or more. I am sure that an aroused public opinion is the first essential; in America there is at least as much concern with financial considerations as here, but company presidents seem sold on the idea of,good architecture as a prestige consideration. Over here, the only con- sideration is that the block shall be conventional enough to satisfy the financing insurance company's fuddy-duddy notions of decorum.
The second problem is what to do about the LCC. Even socialists, such as myself, who every three years help to elect it, and admire much it has done, view this creaking bureaucracy with dismay. The newly elected member finds one thing is certain : if ever he gets seriously out of line on any issue he will never, ever, achieve a chairmanship that matters, and it is the chairmen of committees who are the only people who count. Either the ordinary members swallow their principles, their ideas, and submit, or they resign themselves to that peculiar mixture of hard work plus powerlessness that makes up the flavour of the LCC members' existence. When the Labour majority was increased at the last election one Labour member told me in despair it was a disastrous result; he would no longer be able to prime his Conservative opposite number to raise the issues he dare not himself discuss.—Yours faithfully,
141 Grays inn Road, WC1
PATRICK HUTBER
P.S.—Unofficial opinion in the LCC architect's de- partment believes that the official scheme is very nearly as bad architecturally as Mr. Cotton's pro- posal.
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