Absolutely gutted
From Hugo de Groot
Sir: I agree wholeheartedly with the antimodernist thrust of Roger Scruton’s homage to Quinlan Terry (‘Hail Quinlan Terry’, 8 April). His observation of the personal domestic arrangements of those who commission such soulless edifices and those who design them took me back 20 years to when, as a student, I often cycled past ‘Sir’ Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital on my way to Chelsea Art School. Glancing up one evening on my way home, I noticed that two of the beautifully proportioned white terrace houses in St Leonard’s Terrace were knocked together (both would have to have been gutted before rebuilding), thus forming an enormous cavernous living space, complete with the brushed-steel-andwire stairs and balustrading so loved by Modernists. Almost covering one threestorey wall was an enormous Warhol silkscreen of that old cultural vandal supreme, Chairman Mao. I wondered how one receives planning permission to destroy two interiors of what surely must have been Grade II* listed houses when so many have difficulty getting a loft/kitchen through. And the man who rebuilt and lives in these two houses, with their uninterrupted view of Wren’s domestic masterpiece of understatement, including the newly cleared site for Quinlan Terry’s new infirmary wing? None other than the man who questioned the very choice of Terry, ‘Lord’ Rogers of Riverside himself.
Hugo de Groot London SW8
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