Sir: The sight of the Prince of Wales cruising through
our towns and cities in his private train at the invitation of the BBC, passing scornful judgment on their post- war architecture, was, to say the least, unedifying. As he warmed to his sanctimo- nious rhetoric of partication and protest against the 'planners', I could not help comparing him with the men actually responsible for the buildings he attacked: with, for instance, my parents' next-door neighbour, a retired joiner who served as chairman of Edinburgh Corporation Hous- ing Committee in 1962-5, and who is still proud to acknowledge that he set in motion the city's multi-storey flat building drive, in order to sweep away as quickly as possible the slums in which his fellow working-class citizens were then housed.
He recalls that 'it was a magnificent thing to watch, as I did many times, whole streets of tenements being demolished' and, indeed, a great consensus swept the country in those years, to destroy the slums and provide the greatest feasible number of new houses. Whatever our hindsight judgment today concerning the architectu- ral and social qualities of multi-storey blocks (now increasingly recognised as far from an unmitigated 'disaster') or the flaws or merits of our cities, change was carried through by elected councillors, Conservat- ive and Labour, in accordance with honestly stated and openly published plans.
The activities of the 'People's Prince', by contrast, remind one instead of those earlier architectural Caesars of pre-war Russia and Germany, in their combination of strident populism with the confident exercise of autocratic power — the power to condemn an architectural project through a single word of public disapprov- al, the twitch of a limousine curtain, or the pressure of a hidden circle of 'advisers', and the ability to vilify, unchallenged, the honest endeavours of men no longer alive, or too elderly and frail to answer back. Is there not a growing conflict between Mrs Thatcher's crusade to release the hold of Big Brother over ordinary citizens — in the field of architecture and housing as in any other — and the apparent determination of our future king to establish, with the assistance of the BBC and the architectural and planning establishment, and the en- dorsement of Mr Ron Brown, an apparatus of oligarchic control over this area of our national life?
Miles Horsey
13 Brandon Street, Edinburgh 3
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