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- [00:00]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Both the left and the right makes a parallel error in thinking about the history of the regulation of the built environment, certainly in this country, which they sort of vaguely assume that Clement Attlee started it with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. And on the whole, the right thinks that's a bad thing, and on the whole the left thinks that's a good thing, and they're both wrong. Who now has anything to say about the deindustrialization of this country?
- [00:49]
Callum Drysdale
Georgian townhouses on the moon, the highest GDP per capita in the Milky Way.
- [00:54]
Tom O
Small modular reactors under every village green.
- [00:57]
Callum Drysdale
This is Anglo Futur.
- [01:14]
Tom O
Listeners. Welcome back to the King Charles III Space Station. I'm Tom O.
- [01:17]
Callum Drysdale
And I'm Callum Drysdale.
- [01:18]
Tom O
And we have with us today in our orbital pub, Nicholas Boyce Smith, who is a great hero of ours. He is a campaigner for architectural beauty. He advised the last government on the matter, working with the great Roger Scruton.
- [01:31]
Callum Drysdale
He remains the director of Create Streets, a design practice and think tank. And he's also a purveyor of much needed timeline cleanses on X. Nicholas, your
- [01:41]
Tom O
first question from us is the following. Will you give us an aesthetic critique of the orbital space pub that is our home?
- [01:47]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Perfect. 25 out of three.
- [01:51]
Tom O
I mean, it was a nightmare getting the thatch up here, but we thought we wanted to respect the. The traditional design. Yeah.
- [01:58]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I've not done an actual analysis myself on the oxygen retaining capacities of traditional thatch reading, but I suspect it may be a little bit lacking as a mechanism for safe space existence. But I'm beyond my knowledge base here.
- [02:14]
Tom O
I fear, though, that you might consider it a pastiche.
- [02:18]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
No, no, not at all. It's absolutely spot on. Well, I'll tell you what. Joking, joking. Most space rockets, I think you could argue, possibly as a consequence of what they need to do, are a pastiche of 1960s space rockets, whatever that is. It's not a pastiche of most people.
- [02:35]
Callum Drysdale
Yeah, Actually it's a point that no one has raised, actually. Tom. Yes. That. That this is the first rocket of its kind, which makes us actually frighteningly avant garde in our. In our orbital vehicle.
- [02:48]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
But it is a series. I mean, I know you're sort of making a serious point, which is that in everything we design there is a necessary focus on what it is that it's doing and a necessary focus on how it works for the people who are in it or are passing it or are using it. So I'm not clearly not an expert on how you design a rocket, but it needs to get you into space and needs to get the people inside it up safely and in sufficient comfort that they're not traumatized by the experience. You can't just leave the dog to orbit around the Earth and die. So the focus on functionality in spaceship design is going to be overwhelming. But if you have people living in space, just like if you have people living anywhere else, then suddenly you're in a space, or forgive the pun, then you're in an area where. Because if people are living in a place for months or years on end and actually their ability to live, to not go mad, to have meaningful interactions with the machines with which they're working and with their fellow humans, our view
- [03:46]
Tom O
is that perhaps we haven't finished yet. Who knows, maybe there'll be a city in the British Antarctic territory. Maybe there'll be settlements on Mars, on the moon, in orbital rings around the planet. So our question to you is, what should we think about when we're designing these places and we're going beyond the very bare minimum of what is needed to survive?
- [04:08]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
It's an easier question for the Arctic than for the Moon, because actually it's a question that mankind has already solved. Here's the weird thing. If you look, think of Stockholm, think of a town in the north of Norway. Think of Marrakech, think of Malta. The shapes that we create, our streets, our towns in, are actually similar wherever you are in the world. It's just that the proportions change. So if you're in a very hot country, you tend to have. And by the way, this was then essentially codified in the Quran and lots of other places you tend to have. I'm putting my hands together, though, that's not going to be. That's not going to be visible on the recording. You tend to have narrow streets with quite high walls and often you might have thatch or reed awnings over them, because what are you trying to do? You're trying to avoid the sun, because the sun is actually murderous for much of the year and for much of the day, when what you tend to have in colder climates is that the streets get possibly a bit lower, or turnaround, proportionally lower, and they space out because you're actually seeking the sun. So we already know the answer as to how we would build in a colder climate. We also know we probably wouldn't build detached houses far apart with huge gardens, presumably because nothing would grow in the garden. And you can live more inside. Well, we've created lots of cities, Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires, where people are inside quite a lot of the day for reasons of pleasure as well as for reasons of climatic necessity. So you'd end up with something, I don't know what local material you'd use. I'm sorry, tough to pass on that one. But you would use the. A thermally resilient material probably wouldn't be stone that you could get there cheaply. You'd probably try and use something local that you can recycle into it to provide insulation. And if you're being sensible, you'd then provide buildings that can adapt and evolve because you don't know what you. If you're actually creating a proper city, not just a sub scientific research thing, and a lot of the same principles that work in cities up and down the world would work again. You just have to put more focus on things being inside and, and on. You know, presumably you'd be more people living there during the Arctic summer or the Antarctic. So which end are we at? I can't remember. You know, during the summer, you know, clearly I'd imagine you'd have a population which is more there during the long summer than during the dark winter. So you would be seeking that light. So weirdly, I think that's quite imaginable on the moon, I think is a harder question. But I would say this, which is that once you've created an environment on the moon with oxygen in it in which humans can breathe and, well, presumably you're not wearing spacesuits the whole time, again, I think you'd end up with something remarkably similar to the way we live in all the different climates and ways that we already live on the Earth. Once you've created something in which men and women can actually survive. I'm struck that's a serious craft.
- [07:14]
Callum Drysdale
It is, it is. And actually I'm struck by what you said there about using local materials because actually the moon and Antarctica would probably be two of the only places where you would have any cut. You would have to use the local materials. Right. You wouldn't be able to ship in steel and glass.
- [07:32]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I don't know what's under, forgive me, I don't, I don't know what rocks are underneath Antarctica.
- [07:36]
Tom O
I think you think it's. I think it's granite. And the exciting thing is that most of Antarctica is covered by two miles of sheet ice, but the British Antarctic territory is mostly exposed rock. So we, I'm imagining these, these huge.
- [07:48]
Callum Drysdale
You've really got, you've got. Tom Hunter is absolute favorite.
- [07:51]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
And the moon is sort of obvious because you there's there's lots of. There's lots. Yeah. And look, stone is a really great building mater material as long as it's local because you just need to cut the thing. Well that's, that's great with you know, Infinite Free.
- [08:01]
Tom O
We love bar in the show but I think dragging it to Mars does feel beyond even this podcast imaginative breadth.
- [08:08]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
So it's. I would not say where because it was a. It was a. It was a client project, but I was, I was somewhere earlier this week which is a granite part of the world and the last granite quarry for sort of proper use, Estonia closed 40 or 50 years ago. People are very aware of that. So lots of stuff that's been done in this place in our lifetimes and beyond, our lifetimes isn't done using local granite. Local granite is an incredible. To put it in sort of non Anglo futurist terms, incredibly sustainable and green material because it comes out of the ground just down the road. So it is crazy that we started importing things from all around the world where you had things that were loved, beautiful, usable, an incredibly long granite. It's going to long last long beyond any of the buildings or things that, that we create.
- [08:56]
Tom O
Think of all those kind of Cornish cottages. Any of the stuff whitewash but, but
- [09:01]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
so it would be great. The streets in the moon would be great. Maybe we'd paint often when you. Sorry, sorry, you're trying to come in but often where you've got, you know, quite a dir. Building material, granite, you know, that is, you know, you often put render on it and you then paint it. So man is great at creating color and joy and a bit of vitality if, you know, if everything is. So I come back to the moon. I can imagine the moon being sort of. I'm playing you back on your thatch pub in space here. You can imagine it as a series of, you know, Cornish buildings because you'd be using moon rock. Probably be a bit dreary after a while, I'd imagine we could paint it. You could imagine pastel pinks and yellows and blues.
- [09:42]
Callum Drysdale
I'm struck though, I mean obviously, you know, we like these things. I'd like to just get your answer of why did people make the transition? I know it's a sort of which transition from local vernacular stone because obviously it's a lot easier to do and it's a lot more repeatable and actually I was struck by how practical your first answer was talking about Marrakech or talking about Paris. That those are immensely practical questions and is what we're doing when we build with steel and glass, not just an extension of that practical question that these are better materials and we can. Samuel Hughes, I remember when he came on the podcast, talked about how houses were much better internally now than they have ever been. And people simply complain about the outsides. And it's the last three inches on the outsides that is frustrating. Or do you disagree with that? Do you think the houses themselves are actually worse?
- [10:45]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
One must be very careful disagreeing with Samuel Hughes. But you've got about 15 questions wrapped up in about four sentences. So let me take the first half dozen questions then come to the second half. So just on materials there is a straight historical answer to that, which is once you invent first canals and then railways, the unit cost of a heavy material, you know, not around the corner from where it comes, goes down in relative terms. So the reason that we historically used to call coal sea coal was because it had to come by sea. And the price of sea coal in London was many multiples higher than the price of sea coal in Newcastle upon Tyne, where it has been hewn out of the live banks of the Tyne. So you start getting bricks in more parts of England in the 19th century because we have railways. I mean that's the straight answer to the first of your questions. And nothing wrong with that actually. I mean, I think it is worth pointing out and now we're getting to emotion as well as practicality. But I would argue that the emotion of people living in a town or village matters. It is striking how aware people are of local build materials outside big towns and cities. I think I can say this. I mean, I think without exception, whenever we've done a visual preference survey in a village or a smaller town or in a rural community, very high proportions, we don't always tabulate it because sometimes it's done in a drop in session rather than collating data. But I'd say north of 80% in every single non city or very big town we've done one of these things of people are able to spontaneously identify the local build material, Yorkstone or granite or might be red brick and say that's what they'd like new buildings to be built out of. And interesting, that's something that even modernist architects on the whole would now sort of concede. They would still have problems with ideas of humanity and detail and ornament and joy, but they wouldn't on the whole have problems with the idea of a contextual and local material. So often if you see what you might call polite modernism. Quite often it will actually. The architect will design it in the local material. He'll just strip out all the detail or the ornamental.
- [12:56]
Callum Drysdale
Yes, it'll be a box that's the same color as the thing.
- [13:01]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
And I would argue this is now anticipating your later questions. I would argue that part of the, not the whole part of the purpose of a street or a building or a thing that we build for humans to make use of is to help make sure that the people who will pass it or use it are not miserable. And that therefore, if having something that feels of here is meaningful to us, and I think as a statement of fact, it is meaningful to quite a lot of us, then just because we can bring, you know, bricks from the other side of the world doesn't mean we always should. But by the same token doesn't mean we never should. Now, to come back to inside versus outside, a lot of. A lot of the joy in inside buildings as well as outside. And I'd say the inside of a building is entirely a private matter, unless it's a public building. So it's of crates streets doesn't write about it much because, you know, what you have Callum in your home is done in my.
- [13:51]
Callum Drysdale
It's not create drawing rooms.
- [13:55]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
It's none of my business. And indeed vice versa, you know, that I think is a private matter. But when you build a street, unless, you know, when you build buildings, the far more people will probably see the outside of your building than the inside. So I think it's a philosophically different thing to talk about the insides and the outsides of a building. But the wider research would suggest that similar principles apply. And actually Christopher Alexander's work on patent books, he looks at both the insides and the outsides of buildings, which is we need spaces and places in which we can retreat and feel on our own and feel safe. We need places in which we can be with our immediate family. There are places in which we will welcome guests. We need places that enclose us in which we feel comfortable. There are quite a consistent set of patterns that most of us mostly prefer. Do new buildings do that better than old buildings? Well, they certainly work on the whole more effectively. We can chuck them up more cheaply. They tend on the whole to overheat or to have dry rock problems in a way that old buildings often didn't because the air went through them. But we can regulate the temperature in a way mechanically more effectively. They're using far more energy. So I'd be less convinced than Samuel that they're working as well as the designers. But it's notable that on the whole, people complicate their interiors. They personalize them, they add things, they make them less clean. Corbusier was very upset when he visited a terrace of houses that he designed many years earlier when he realized that all the residents of them had personalized them all, put in new windows, changed things and done that inside as well as out. So on the whole, we personalized them, our spaces to things that work for us and for our family. And I'd argue that will ever be so.
- [15:45]
Callum Drysdale
I have complained in the past about people putting onerous building requirements on house builders. The things that you need to put swallow bricks, all these small things that sound very nice, but in the aggregate and summed up increased costs and decrease the number of houses. And at the risk of sounding heretical, how do you respond to the argument that beauty is actually a luxury?
- [16:16]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I think again, as a sort of. I'm a sort of historian by background, the state has always done it and not just the modern state. So both the left and the right. This is something I've actually said many times before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but both the left and the right makes a parallel error in thinking about the history of the regulation of the built environment. Certainly in this country, which they sort of vaguely assume that Clement Attlee started it with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. And on the whole, the right thinks that's a bad thing. And on the whole the left thinks that's a good thing. And they're both wrong in that it did not start with Clement atlea in the 1940s. We have been regulating the built environment with the British and we every other civilization for as long as we have got evidence of the built environment. So clearly in we know this in Greek and Roman civilization in Northwest India, in the Sumerian early cities. There is a regulating authority in there sort of has to be. I mean, unless you're a complete even if you're a believer in the night watchman state, doing literally the minimum possible by the function of living in a city, you are in very close proximity with your neighbors, you're building certainly in all the historic cities until 18th century is likely to be physically coterminous and touching your neighbor. And so that forces the state. It has forced the state into worrying about the consequence of your actions on my actions and on the externalities of how we behave. So that's why the state has tended to get dragged into this really for as Long as we've had cities and you can see regulating authorities in the shape of block plans and in materials. One of the early extant ones from this country is a, I think from memory, early 12th, maybe late 11th century decree in the City of London. I think you will have to concede conceptually that this is something the state will do to some degree. You can then have a discussion about swallow bricks, which can come back to. So I think that's quite important because I suspect many of your listeners, I share this, actually, are nervous about regulation and nervous about state intervention. But I'd argue you can whip it away as much as you like, but it will keep coming back. So I would argue the better question is right, given that it's going to keep happening, let's think about how we can do this effectively and efficiently for good outcomes. I want to come back to beauty, but. Yes, sorry.
- [18:33]
Tom O
Well, I was going to ask you about beauty as well, because we're among friends here.
- [18:36]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
We can all agree no one else is listening.
- [18:40]
Tom O
Perhaps the three of us can all agree that modern building styles are shite and the old ones are nicer. Do we have to upgrade some fundamental cultural beliefs about politics and egalitarianism in order to have beauty back?
- [18:55]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Well, I think that's more fittingly put of what was there. So we don't. In a way, it doesn't matter what we three think. It is a statement of statistical fact that in every single fair visual preference survey ever done in this country, in Holland, in America and in Norway, and with slightly less control in a couple of other surveys in places like South America, it's a statement of statistical factor, end of the parenthesis, that most people prefer buildings and streets with certain types of pattern embedded in them. Texture and the density. I mean, you know, things like thatch with a little bit of detail as you get up close, and then embedded symmetries, variety in a pattern, some sort of coherent complexity as you step away from the building. So most people prefer that. So it doesn't just need to be us three, then? I think yes. And to come back to Callum's question, that preference and higher well being is not a matter of social status, it is not a luxury. So we've got really good evidence now, and probably best in the uk, but also from America and other countries, that if you spend your time in a place that you find aesthetically attractive, where you walk, where you are, that you are likely to have statistically better physical and mental health. We can argue about causation and correlation for ages and Ages, but it just keeps coming up in the data in different ways in different studies by different people with different expectations. So, no, I don't think this is just a luxury living in a town that you find aesthetically attractive, in which it's easy to walk, easy to meet other people not overwhelmed by. And I'm not going to introduce a new element into the conversation. Fast cars that make it very dangerous to walk from A to B. That is better for you mentally and physically. And I don't think that is a luxury. I think what I'd say is it's interesting. I mean, we work, we create streets, work with local government of left and right. There is no difference in the polling on what labor reform, Lib Dem and Tory voters think about the built environment in terms of their expressed preference. We do see a difference, I think it's fair to say in political circles where on the whole, I'm going to make rod for my own back here. What I'd say is that politicians in London on the centre left are much more nervous of this concept. And in big cities, actually we work with Labour politicians and Labour voters outside the big cities and I'd say they're far more similar to the centre right. I'm deliberately making the point more complex, not because I'm trying to be pathetic, but actually I think it's quite an important, interesting distinction. So, you know, one of our long standing projects is in Grimsby. I don't think the very nice chap who leads the community group there, whom we've been working for many years, I don't think he would mind if I said publicly, he's definitely on the left of the Labour Party. He has no problem, no problem at all with the, you know, quite fundamentally clear idea that the streets in which people, be they poor or rich, should live, should be ones that they find aesthetically attractive and safe and enjoyable to walk in. It is only in some bits of, I think, elite opinion, more probably elite opinion than Labour opinion, that you then get into what we call the design discipline.
- [22:07]
Tom O
Famously, it's the architectural schools rights. The longer you spend an architectural school, the more your tastes become divorced from those of the.
- [22:14]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
There was a famous study which had been a bit lost, which I sort of found. It was one of those days where you, Crikey, David halpern did about 40 years ago now, showing exactly that. So he showed two images of. He was actually researching how repeated exposure to an image affects your perception of it. It was one of those perfect tests where you're actually testing for a And you then you go and find B. And he was looking at faces and at buildings. And what confused him was that he was getting very different sort of patterns of perception on the faces and on the building. So basically everyone agreed on the attractive and the unattractive faces. But on the buildings, he had two sets of data, and he looked at it a bit further and he found that the. They were very perfectly different. So the favorite building and the least favorite building were literally opposite in the two groups. And you can see where this is going. Group A was basically the architecture students, and group B was everyone else. And we've perhaps a little bit less cleanly we've repeated that evidence in a survey I did years ago looking at favorite buildings in an urban context in the uk where architects, planners and designers had a measurably different perception to everyone else. And that's also been replicated in. This is from memory. It's a Canadian study and a slightly better South American study. And I certainly, anecdotally, my experience now over 12 years of doing this is I can and do give similar talks, you know, up and down the country and literally get cheered. And I might, I might do less often. I do a fair number to credit. I do a fair few talks in less than last couple of years to architecture schools. I'm so. I think I'm sort of wheeled in as the sort of the. The goblin to throw that. That's a bit unfair. And I have on occasions literally been jeered. Not often to be fair, but I mean, certainly it's a very different conversation where what I'm saying is, is clearly seen as much more problematic. As you may know, we do, we create streets. And by the way, we still got places going if I was interested in applying. We do a summer school. About a third to half of the people who come on that are either current or recent architecture students. The rest of you know, planners or developers or people doing a career change. Some of the feedback we get from some of those architects or students is actually moving. And it's quite, you know, when you think about. It's quite profound. So one girl said, thank you. This week has changed my life. I mean, that's quite a big thing to say. Someone else said, and, you know, thank you. I've learned more in the last few days than I've learned in the last three or four years. Because you're suddenly saying to people, it's okay to draw buildings, it's okay to look at the ornament, it's okay to look at the Dentals. It's okay to look at the corbels, it's okay to look at the sills
- [24:46]
Tom O
and all that, to give in to impulses that your colleagues might view base.
- [24:50]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
That's very well put. Yes, and that's fine. Just to be able to draw it and to think about it and to say I will copy some of these things doesn't mean. And this comes actually to the question you were coming out earlier, doesn't mean you have to repeat it mindlessly. It just means you're allowing yourself to play with a rich pattern of biomorphic detail and complexity. Again, we know from the research most people, somewhere between 70 and 80% in most of the surveys, up to 19, some prefer.
- [25:19]
Callum Drysdale
It's an interesting point you make there about the copying, the improving the playing and the feeling that you are continuing or at least improving upon or modifying or taking inspiration from patterns and techniques that have come. I know when I see sculptures produced by these new companies that use robotics to carve them, they appear wrong. There is. There's something incorrect about them as sit in the uncanny valley. And I wonder whether in a sim similar way, a lot of the ornamentation that people now try to do almost feels like the work of children because you're having to learn these skills.
- [26:04]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Again, it's a fascinating question or series of questions just on the robotics point, I think what some of the,
- [26:13]
Callum Drysdale
you
- [26:13]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
know, the studios, if that's the right word, who have started to use robotics to create statues are doing, as I understand it from my conversations, and I should say, we don't have a robot creating statues here in the crates of its office. Maybe we should do is they're basically unleashing the humans for the last 5%, almost, almost adding the imperfections that seem to make it feel more real to most of us. Just on. But on your. On your wider question, look, there was a cesura in the education of the built environment. So between the 1920s and the 1950s, early 60s, 60s, every single architecture school in the west, bar none, essentially chucked away several hundred years worth of accumulated organic wisdom and learning. I'd argue maybe this is a rather Birkin point that's never going to be a wise thing to do if you believe that there will be accumulated knowledge that an understanding that you are not privy to, but which you are repeating, chucking it all away seems to be foolish. And so that was sort of perhaps epitomized to one of the things that students used to do, particularly in the Beaux Arts schools in France. But it was something that's then copied over in the Anglophone world as well, particularly in America, was back to drawing. So they would have lots of plaster casts of statues, of decoration. Because you couldn't always go to Venice or go to, you know, Florence. You'd sit there in the, in the, in the Bartlett school of architecture drawing the thing in the 1960s in Paris at Bartlett and schools around the world, or indeed earlier, they literally threw those in the bin. Some of them survived in places like the Victoria and Albert Museum. So some of them sort of got, you know, recycled into museums. Most of them got skipped. So I think that quite symbolizes this to zero. So yes, you're absolutely right and that I think it's fair to say you see it most, that it has been hard to come back. You see it most clearly I think actually in the volume house builders work. If you look at the houses, the normal architecture created by builders, engineers, just normal guys making buildings happen 150 years ago, I think most people would argue, and the polling would certainly support this, it's actually built with a stronger sense of symmetry and of detail and of fitting in a rightness of feeling coherent than is normally produced by house builders and builders working without an architect in a sort of sub traditional pattern today. I mean most of the volume house builders actually are traditionalists because they know what the market likes, most of them, most of the time. There are some exceptions, I should say, don't do it very well. And the reason they don't do it very well, I'd argue is because there's actually a divorce between them and the architects. Who should be leading on this, who should be good at this. Oh, we don't do design. We find the public don't like it. Which when you think about it, is a profoundly obscure but actually totally rational thing to say. And another house builder said to me, sorry, actually one of the big residential architects said to me, we only really get brought in by the volume house builders when the planners force them, force them to. So there's something deeply wrong going there because the volume house builders should be able to turn to the architects. The architects should see the volume house builders as their most normal clients. The architects tend to work on the bigger buildings, the public sector, or in places where planning and complexity is required to make it happen. So we're all losing from those divorces. But look, it is starting to happen. It is starting to pick up. It's now 40, 50 years that there started to be a pushback against the year zero modernism of the 1920s and 30s, that sort of swept all the way through up into the 50s and 60s. You then started to get a growing number of architects wondering, is this right? There were just a few who were educated before the war who never stopped. They had very, very few commissions. Just a handful of them. Raymond Derrith is the best known and definitely the most important in this country, who your listeners have probably not heard of unless they're really into the obscure bits of traditional architecture history. He's a guy educated early in the 20th century called Quinlan Terry, who had a very upsetting experience at architecture school. Quinlan Terry, who's still alive in his 80s and still practicing. His son, Francis Terry, who's a good friend of mine, learned his classical architecture as a child from Quinlan Terry. So going round great cities of Europe, drawing them, because this is. This is muscle memory. This is a mental process that none of us three can speak for. Myself, I just didn't learn this stuff as a child. I think I'd be very good architect if I tried to be. But. So it's interesting when you design something. With Francis, I don't design, but I've worked with him as he's designing buildings. We've worked with him on. It's almost internalized how you draw a facade, how you add an extra cornice line or an extra line to it, because he's learned it as a child. Now, the number of architects of whom that is true, practicing today in a vernacular or classical tradition is probably in single figures. It's certainly not more than double figures. I know till three, and I don't know of any others in Europe, but that was totally normalized. Because, of course, if you go back at architectural architects before the 20th century, they essentially learned as apprentices, they learned as children. I'm not making a case, by the way, for sort of forced obligatory teaching of children to be architects, but. But this is. You know, these types of skills, like Bernini or Borromini, learning to be sculptors as children, actually, you learn them best very young. It's quite hard to do this later in life. So, yeah, I think schools and universities essentially need to start teaching the practical skill of design and drawing and thinking about buildings and places, you know, as early as is commensurate with the rest of the syllabus. But that's starting to happen. You know, we've had 50, 40 years now of slow Renaissance, very slow. I think we're beginning to be. I mean, I would say this one. I guess I'm hoping I'm a little small part of It. I think we might be at the inflection point. There are more and more summer schools happening up and down Europe. They're exploding. There are more, thanks, I think, to social media. It's now possible for a growing number of architecture students or young architects or planners or developers to say, hey, I don't like that crap. That's not how I want to live. I want to live somewhere that feels humane, which brings us together.
- [32:27]
Tom O
I mean, this business.
- [32:28]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
And we're finding each action.
- [32:29]
Tom O
Yes.
- [32:30]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I mean, you can call it populism, you can just call it. You can call it vox popular, you can call it common sense. I mean, you know, the moment you call it populism, quite a lot of people will find it a troublesome concept. It is interesting. I can. I won't say who, but, you know, a former president of REBA has criticized me as a populist. I don't think of myself, you know, as a character type. You know, me, Nicholas Boyd Smith.
- [32:48]
Tom O
I mean, you're a funny kind of populist.
- [32:50]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Yes. My friends would say the same.
- [32:51]
Tom O
What needs to happen, basically, for us to kind of fall in love with architectural beauty again?
- [32:57]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
You know, every problem, you can attack every problem at different points and there's no one thing that will resolve that problem. But one thing that is important, and this comes back, Callum, to your earlier question, is that the state needs to stop saying, you must do the opposite, which it often does. So we cannot ever be in a situation where. And I'll give you an exit live example, so you refer to some of the work I did with the previous government and come back to that if you want. But there was a teams call I was chairing or officiated at in some way with lots of public officials a couple of years ago, where we were looking at the concept of design codes and how councils can understand what local people like and make it easier to build that, which was very much the case we were trying to push. We can come back to that as a concept. But one of the senior officials on that said, and this is, again, as best I can remember, a direct quote, he said, yes, yes, but if we do that, what do we do about the traditionalist prejudices of the public? And that was literally the phrase. So clearly, I don't think that's an acceptable thing for any state functionary to think little. Well, you can think we lie, but very hilarious. I think it's a wise approach to. So, yeah, so that's part of it. We need to keep demonstrating to landowners and developers that they can make more money when they do this. Well, so there's a study I commissioned from Knight Frank's about five years ago where they looked at the value per hectare of better so called new urban developments, ones that are a bit tighter, pulling themselves together, proper street scrapes, not just spread out sub suburbanism. Most but not all with some variance of traditional design patterns in a sense of place. But if I'm honest, with varying degrees of success, Poundbury was the best of the bunch. So the value per hectare of land in Poundbury compared to comparable normal house builder elsewhere in Dorset is now this actually from a few years ago, a few years ago is at a 55% premium. That's a heck, I mean that's not trivial, that's not 5 or 6% and that's a Knight francs number. I would say that, wouldn't I? Knight francs are not. They're more neutral in such matters. And that's due to two things. It's due to the fact that people are prepared to pay more per square foot of home because Poundbury is giving them something that they are valuing. And two, because I think this is almost as equally important. People are accepting of a higher density if they like the place because suddenly you see a value in density, because there are values and disadvantages in density. Density means you can walk to the pub. Density means that your child can walk or jump on the bicycle to go to school. Density means it's actually easier to meet X to have a chat about Y before you head off and do that. Or in some circumstances less relevant for Poundbury that you know, you've got enough density to have a good tram or bus service to get to work more easily than other things. There are also disadvantages of density. You know, you're more likely to hear your neighbor being sick. You may, you have less personal space, your home is likely to be smaller. You're likely to depend on how small you live around.
- [35:55]
Callum Drysdale
Right.
- [35:55]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Well but I mean if we've got, you know, just, you know, you know,
- [35:58]
Callum Drysdale
Paris, you know, that's constant problem. Even if you're in a lovely building, you can hear people just tramping about around.
- [36:04]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Yeah, I mean on the whole, on the whole, modern buildings tend to be better at that. Not always, I have to say. So, you know, so you know, there are pros and cons of density. I'm not making a naive density is always better argument. I'm very much not. As you know, we talk about gentle density. So to come back to answer, how do we fix this? Landowners need to realize it's actually a rational thing to do. The state needs to stop stopping it happen, which it still does. And then back to your earlier question, Callum. We need to have a growing ecosystem of advisors and experts who are both willing that's important and then capable of doing something about it. So that's why I think the renaissance that is now starting to happen in architecture education slowly I think is part of it. But no one thing in its own will solve this problem.
- [36:45]
Tom O
Well, it feels quite urgent because Labour is planning this set of new towns and as I understand it, the design codes have not been laid down yet. But perhaps we have a vanishing window.
- [36:54]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Yeah, well I'm. Well the good news is. Well the bad news and the good news is most of them are not going to happen. So I mean most of them are outside the southeast. Most of them are therefore non viable. As you may have spotted. The government's got quite a lot of things to spend its money on and that's only getting harder. So they'll need to chuck public money at 8 or 9 or 10 of those. So I would be very surprised if any serious way any outside two or three in the southeast actually happened. Now that's fundamentally bad news, but at least it's good in terms of public beauty. Yeah, the great loss because we great streets actually wrote the first document that led to the Labour's new towns policy. We wrote some work for the Labour Party then in opposition setting out a way to approach this in terms of town creation. Town builders, we call ourselves a town builder. Gentle density, beauty, popular beauty. Labour were very happy to promulgate that and make a big thing at the times. We were delighted. Before the election the report they finally had done by Michael lyons kept about 80 to 90% of what we'd said. Great. But all the stuff on popular beauty, popular design codes got taken straight out, which I think is a function of elite opinion. I think, I think there's another way to interpret that. It was an elite stuffed panel. I think that's a mistake because that will make their politics harder and it will make the places they create in so much as they create them less good than they would be. Because if you're going to create a new town in the current political economy, you are going to have a role for the state. You like that or not. But it's a fact that's going to happen. So in so much as there are design codes, there will be a public led top down element to them. I think that's problematic in multiple ways. But Given that, it would be nice if they said they should represent what people like and they don't.
- [38:36]
Callum Drysdale
It's a good point you make there that actually people assume that a lot of these new buildings are neutral and the putting of beauty on top of them would be an active effort. But actually the way that they are is also the product of a choice. It's not a neutral one.
- [38:56]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Before you, I can see you've got another 55 questions, but just quickly, on implicit questions, I think it's important point. So, you know, what is it that people like in buildings and does that add extra cost? So a lot of it doesn't add extra cost. It might be proportion, some level of symmetry in the way the windows are put together. That adds no extra cost. That's just good design. Probably slightly more expensive materials, a little bit of decoration, ornament. That will probably. I mean, it does add cost. Beyond the very cheapest buildings you could build, it doesn't add cost compared to anything of high modernism or even high postmodernism, which tends to have very high cost to build and then tends to be less resilient and less durable as a building. So can you build the cheapest possible buildings that most of the public will find very attractive? No. Does it need to be more expensive than the sort of normal. No. Is it likely to have. Certainly if you build to some degree with traditional materials. That's a different subject. Is it likely to endure longer and thus have a lower lifetime cost of ownership? Very probably. Now you can ask the other questions.
- [40:03]
Callum Drysdale
I'll tee you up with a. With a couple and like those fair games, I'll throw some rubber ducks down the river and you can kind of fish out the ones that you like. The look of you gods. Well, is that I want to talk about communities and the way that people, even those sort of more firmer on the left on ideas of house building, they worry with new houses that you get gentrification. And gentrification is obviously a very loaded word. And I wonder, here's a question for you, whether there is some element of different ethnicities or groups or people having different visual preferences, because it feels almost like this is not for us. This is a different place.
- [40:47]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
It's a really interesting question and I'm pleased and I won't bat it away because I think it's an important question. So I've often had that said to me and I can think of a specific conversation with a specific architect after a talk I gave probably about a year, year and a half ago who Said, not quite those words, but pretty much what you just said, which is concepts of beauty are social constructs. And you, Nicholas, are imposing your set of values on other people. And actually, to be fair, when I first started researching and reading this 12, 13, 14 years ago now, I sort of rather made that assumption about myself. You, Nicholas, have these preferences and prejudices and like we all do, which are a function of just who I am and where I come from and the journey I've been on. And maybe I'm imposing that, but no, not imposing. I was just reading at the time. Maybe I'm seeking to impose these on other people, but that's not true. I mean, so we can see again. So I'm going to repeat myself for a moment, but I think it's worth it. When we do our visual preference surveys in this country, we do it with enough respondents to be able to give not just a political, but also a regional and a demographic and a racial breakdown of what people think. They basically think the same because their humanity is actually more important than the specificity of whatever ethnic or other group they're from. And perhaps even more striking in similar surveys done in America. And as you're aware, America has some differing views about the polity and aesthetic. Well, perhaps not always about politics, quite profoundly so in the American visual preference surveys done, it's not true to say there's no difference, but the difference is very minimal between Republican and Democrat and between white and non white voters in America. So yes, clearly, clearly at an individual level you are influenced by what's happened to you, but you don't see it in the data. And the reason? Well, again, argue by analogy, when you go to Paris or to Venice or to China, you will probably look at some of the older, more traditionally created buildings and places and if you're like everyone else, you'll probably find them more attractive than the functionalist post war modernism created in the last 50 years. That would be the normal response from most people. But you're not from China and you're not, I think, French. So I lived in, worked in China years ago and that was my preference. A few years later, some of the people I had worked with in China I met, well, I met them over, so I continue to meet them. Some of them came to my wedding, others came to stay with my parents in rural Bedfordshire. The bits of England or France that my former Chinese colleagues like are the same bits of England and France that I like. So I have huge differences to being. I'm not Chinese, I don't Speak Chinese? I speak a little bit Chinese, but so I'd say that our humanity actually is more important.
- [43:26]
Tom O
Nicholas, I'd like to know what kind of futuristic design or building projects you would like to impose on the country and the happy events that you become kind of design Vizier of Great Britain.
- [43:38]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Well, forgive me, I'm going to reject the premise of that question. I sincerely don't wish to be designed, Vizier, and I don't wish to impose anything. I want to help local communities.
- [43:46]
Tom O
That is why it must be.
- [43:47]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
You okay?
- [43:47]
Callum Drysdale
Yeah.
- [43:49]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I want to help. I sincerely wish to help local neighborhoods and places and people fall back in love with the future by living in a world and environment where it is normal and natural for new buildings to be as, if not more lovely than the old. And it is the public expectation which is common across all of society. That is not the case, I have to say, quite reasonably, that I think explains partly, not all of the mess we're currently in. So what would be. Look, I mean, the saddest thing to me personally, going around the country, one of the great joys of my job and what I do is I get to visit lots of bits of Britain that life wouldn't otherwise have taken me to. It is heartbreaking, I find, to go to Stoke on Trent or Grimsby or Huddersfield or bits of Glasgow, not all. And contemplate the divergence between the beauty and the prosperity and the life that was happening in many of what we now call our post industrial towns then and now. So the hollowing out of our towns is devastating and it actually has very important consequences for where our economy is, where people live, where housing demand is. There's obviously a huge shortage of homes. It's not regionally equally split, as any economist or house builder will tell you. There's a lot more demand in the southeast and a few other hotspots than everywhere else. If we could get Stoke on Trent being a place in which people setting up businesses, there is a bit of a gaming industry there. Are aspiring to live, aspiring to bring up their children, are aspiring to work, wishing to create companies because you've got actually some amazing buildings and some things that could be lovely streets. They're not as they're currently working. That would be, I think, a profound consequence to our ability as a country to grow and to feed and clothe and house our people. So sorry to finally answer your question. I would love to. I would love the path to more homes to run through Stoke on Trent as well as through Surrey. And that's what I would like to achieve.
- [45:58]
Callum Drysdale
It's a very striking thing when you go to northern Midlands towns. I remember I went down the high street of Preston and as so often in these towns, the Wetherspoons is sort of the old bank and they preserve that. Everything else is really degraded. And you do wonder whether actually part of the reason that we have this big split of London drawing in all the rest of the country is yes, because a lot of these towns are now unattractive.
- [46:27]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
London's been. I mean, I think I'm a little bit older than both of you, so forgive me if I'm gonna sound like an old uncle. London has been on an amazing renaissance, which is a good thing over the last 40 years. I'm old enough to remember when inner London was still regarded by middle class parents, like my parents, as a dangerous place to be. We're recording this in Lambeth Walk, just not that far from the Thames. We're actually incredibly central. London sort of physically doesn't feel very central. It feels quite far out actually, though it is not far at all from Westminster. By weird coincidence, this is a bit of London that my mother would sometimes drive through when I was a child in the 1980s to go and pick up my father from work in Westminster and Whitehall on a Friday evening or something. And this was a bit of London through which she would make sure to me and my sister that the doors of the car were locked, notice car as we came through this bit of London because she actually quite reasonably did not regard it as safe. So one of the reasons London has had this renaissance is because it is a great, actually it is a great place to live, to go to restaurants, to go for a drink, to meet people. Too many of our towns and cities are failing to do that. And in doing so, it's not just that less good outcomes for people who live or work there that has, I think, a measurable consequence for our economic vitality and growth. As you both know, doubtless towns have agglomeration effects. People are more productive, they are more prosperous, they do more things in towns because we get the types of conversation we're currently having now, either by design or by serendipity or you get clustering effects. Yeah, fine, we've got teams and Skype and God knows what else. But it's still, actually, you can still find there is something in a physical interaction you have with people that on the whole builds more trust than just having a team school does. That's why occasionally when you currently, when we're starting a relationship with A new client or a new accountability party. We try and sit down for lunch or try and have a proper meeting that we need to get that back. London is doing that. A few other places are, but too many cities aren't.
- [48:21]
Callum Drysdale
And I think maybe I have touched on it, but I really do want to try and get your view on.
- [48:26]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
So sorry if I've kept avoiding your
- [48:27]
Callum Drysdale
questions because we've talked about the Victorians a little bit off the air and how they were big copiers and actually how a lot of the architects were not necessarily elite minded, they were gardeners or they were engineers and thus ornamentation felt a bit more natural. My question for you is what might a new traditionalism look to admire?
- [48:57]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Can you tell the difference between a Victorian Gothic building and Salisbury Cathedral? I bet you can, yes.
- [49:03]
Callum Drysdale
You can, yes.
- [49:04]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Yeah. So if you'll forgive me, Mr. Anglo Futurist, that's a very modernist 1970s way of asking the question. Forgive me, I'm teasing. So when you copy from the past, you do it for the need, you have to do it for the needs of the present, you have to do it with the materials that are available to you today. And you have to do it in ways that will pass current contemporary building regulations or planning rules or whatever it might be. So it is incredibly easy. I mean, you don't even really need to think about buildings properly to immediately tell the difference between Midland bank built in 1890 and a 12th century sort of priory. It's immediately recognizable, even if it's done in stone, the Victorian building, not in bricks, as lots of work which weren't used in the Middle Ages. So I wouldn't hang up on that. Will a rediscovered Anglo futurism, to put it in your terms, will it use patterns of the past? I hope so, because it'd be very hard for it to add up to much if it doesn't. Will it put those patterns together in ways that are recognizably de no jour? I don't think that in itself is important. But will it nevertheless be recognizably from today, not from x hundred years ago? Yes, it definitely will. And you know, the traditional, or you might say the mainstream tradition of architecture was absolutely doing that in the first half of the 20th century. So, you know, look at the department stores on the Champs Elysees or some of the Galleries Lafayette in Paris. Actually look at some of the amazing Portland stone, Edwardian and 1920s buildings on Regent street or Oxford street, including some that are about to get pulled down. They're you know, they're modern constructed buildings. They've got steel frames, they've got. Which are hidden behind the pilasters or the embodied columns going up through multiple stories with spandrel panels against them. They're absolutely meeting ocean new for the day modern needs of big department stores with more light because they're much deeper buildings. But they're doing it in ways that when we look at, if we look at Selfridges in Oxford street today, it certainly, I think certainly to my suspect, to yours eyes, it looks like a classical building. It is a classical building, but it's a classical building built essentially in a modern way and nobody cared because it was doing its job and it looked nice. So we have to get back into not caring about copying patterns from the past and be confident that we will put them together in ways that will definitely be different to things that existed 100, 200 years ago. And in a way, not caring. So I'd say that would be my answer. But just if I mentioned on the Victorians, because I'm pleased you mentioned them. I mean, I think surely the Victorians were the perfect Anglo futurists. I mean they embodied. Clearly there's vaulting confidence for the future. But deploying iron, steel, glass, built to greater capacity than ever been possible before, shamelessly using patterns from the past. You know, I mean, Paxton, who you mentioned, a gardener who created Crystal palace and he was totally self trained, almost entirely self trained. You can see Gothic features in Crystal Palace. It's very clearly a Victorian building, it couldn't be from anything else. My favourite is very little discussed actually is the Royal Albert hall favorite. But I think it's very interesting building the two designers who no one's ever heard of or I've actually, I even wrote them, written them down because I was worried I might forget. Henry Scott and Francis Falk were both engineers, military engineers. Clearly it's. You can do it essentially based on an amphitheater, isn't it? It's great big sort of, you know, circular dome, but with a steel and technically for the time, immensely complicated dome that they were very worried about as they were building because no one had built a dome quite like that before. They were worried it's going to collapse, but it didn't. So here is something built using ancient forms. It's got Etruscan style, frieze going around the top. And yet with the very latest technology by engineers, it's built by engineers, it's not built by architects. And that seems to me the epitome of being confident about the Past and looking to the future, being in communion with both and not really worrying about it. So I think the Victorians, I think, as so often, I think they show us the way, use the past and shoot to the future.
- [53:15]
Tom O
Do I recall in that spirit of a rather ambitious proposal for the palace of Westminster and its regeneration?
- [53:21]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
So one of the. There are many ludicrocities that have been piled into this sort of flying pig barrel of a restoration program, which let's not get distracted until now. It's just too depressing. I'm feeling in a good mood. One of them, just one, is the desire to scoop some of the innards of the building sort of out, like with a giant ice cream scoop and replace it with a sort of Ikea pastiche modernism, as if you're in some sort of 1970s Scandi heaven in the middle of one of the most. Whatever you like or not, one of those gloriously exuberant buildings, which is, you know, the Puget and the Charles Barry palace of Westminster. So they're essentially taking an enormous cost. So I'll modest propose on the side of a rather angry piece I wrote in the Critic of the Times, but if you want to create a visitor center, I think I can see a case for that. I think, you know, you're going to expect more visitors to a modern 21st century House of Parliament in the mid19th century. I think that's a reasonable thing to assert. Why don't we take down the excrescence, which is the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on the site of the old Westminster Hospital, just opposite.
- [54:27]
Callum Drysdale
Awful.
- [54:27]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
It's particular and I just remember it being built and appearing. It's awful. And let's replace it with. I said, I suggested a 15 storey Gothic tower. Here's a point. Every single Gothic tower in Westminster is not medieval. You've got the St Margaret's which is 18th century. You've got the two Hawksmoor Towers on the end of Westminster abbey, which are 18th century, early 18th century, with little classical features in the Gothicism. That's by the by. And then obviously the Elizabeth and Victoria Tower in the palace of Westminster by definition are obviously Victorian. So if you want to worry about context, modern Gothic towers is what Westminster does. Let's do another one. If we knocked down that thing, replaced it with something four or five times as high, which would break every single heritage rule going for that part of town. But if you made it look nice and people liked it, they would not care. Let the readers hear. No one would care. If you prove it. Well, yes, you get rid of the six crescent and actually if you look, you can Google it. They're not that, that prevalent, but they are findable. The, the old Westminster Hospital is actually rather nice building. It was a sort of early, early Gothic, slightly castellated, and they, they created this. I can't remember the precise dates, but they rebuilt bits of it after it existed for X years and because they needed better laboratory facilities as the 19th century wore on. And so they created little towers which they put sort of public convenience or conveniences in, so, you know, extra water tanks and this, that and the other. So again, you know, form and function playing with each other in a way that now would seem quite, quite weird. So let's improve Westminster. And the lovely thing then would be if you're building all these extra stories, you can put homes, luxury homes, conference centres, which is what the QUT center currently is, offices, and use that to pay for the visitor center, which is the notional justification of the whole thing. And that seems to me the right type of ambition as opposed to squandering up to 39 billion pounds. That's not a typo, 39 billion pounds on trying to turn the 19th century palace of Westminster into a 21st century building, which is technically possible, but my golly, it will be ludicrously expensive.
- [56:31]
Tom O
And the inspiration for you here is, you know, clearly Neo Gothicism and Gothicism before it. But I wonder whether there are any inspirations from literature or TV in terms of architecture.
- [56:41]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
My son, God bless him, was hanging heavy during the summer holidays, so I thought I need to give him something to do. And so I asked him actually to do something I had been meaning to do but never managed to get the time to do, which was to look at the architecture and the urbanism of the Star wars films. And we worked out, based on some of Great Street's research and various other projects, we worked out as a schemata of things to look for natural materials.
- [57:03]
Tom O
Actually, when you're speaking earlier about Tatooine with the kind of, you know, white building.
- [57:06]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Exactly, exactly. You know, plant of Hoff. So we, you know, he actually, he worked out, with a little bit of help from me, a series of ways of categorizing essentially fake urban film sets and actually not just towns, but also sort of bases and starships and things like that, and then went through all of the, a subset of Starship Destroyers, Sith Lord type stuff. Went through all the various Jedi and goodies things and then the various neutrons and guess what? All the traditionalist or semi or nearly traditionalist ones were basically on the good side. Think, I mean, think of the Death Star. I mean, this is the epitome of modernism. It's functionless, kills you. And there's no, there's no ornamentation. No starship destroyers have any ornamentation. They're sheeny, they're metal, they're black, they're dark, they're deeply functionalist. So to sort of slightly cheekily answer your question. So Naboo is clearly. Because that is both vernacular and classical. Classical in the way that the set designers have created it. And they've created that because they wanted to epitomize a place that was good and they had some sort of culture because quite rarely they wanted to show that it was a culture and a sort of civilization that was under threat from the baddies. So they gave it a greater degree of classicism than there's just a simple vernacular of other things that get destroyed by the baddies. So I think that's not a bad inspiration to come back to your word, which is a place which is simultaneously of here, but is also speaking with a language that we all instinctively appreciate and adore.
- [58:38]
Callum Drysdale
It's an interesting point you make there about it was an expression of the culture and the Victorian self confidence. The failure to do this is. Feels like a civilizational lack of confidence. The idea that we could not improve upon anything that came before and instead we should render ourselves a museum. And the only thing we're worth doing, we're able to do is add the visitor center on the side rather than.
- [59:03]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Yeah, and that, I mean, and that any. I mean, you know, the very sad, very relevant current example of this is Clandam Park House, which is a National Trust property which burned down 10 years ago. Exactly in 2016. Another actually this is not get distracted into that but. And the National Trust shamefully actually has convinced themselves that to rebuild it is somehow sort of deeply wrong. Now, interesting. Of course, Hampton Court palace and Windsor palace and indeed of course, most famously Notre Dame in Paris burned down so we can rebuild things. But they've got themselves into this vortex of. It is somehow dishonest. And there's literally a word I've seen used in this context. It's dishonest to rebuild an 18th century house. So they therefore have. They're putting some glass and steel over it now again in their own terms that's far less sustainable. We'll use far more embodied carbon because it'll have to be imported. They could have provided. I forget this. Remember, I think they had 60 something million in insurance. That may be wrong. I won't swear to that. All of that could have been used to employ local craftsmen, plasterers, joiners, and thus give an enormous filip to the craft industries and heritage industries that National Trust claims to want to support. But instead they're going to spend it on importing glass and steel because they regard it as wrong and dishonest to rebuild something that's been lost. You could add to it, you could change it, all sorts of things you could do, but they got themselves into a vortex of that would be dishonest. And thus, I fear we're all the losers.
- [60:39]
Callum Drysdale
Is the sort of. I mean, is a triumph in the sense of. It's imposing, it's very modern, but. But classical at the same time is. And this is the question I ask a lot of people, was that the pinnacle of modernism? And then for that we almost got. We got a bit close to the sun and we all went, oh, God.
- [61:04]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
So what was pinnacle?
- [61:05]
Callum Drysdale
As in the sort of vision of who's it? Speer. Albert Speer, who wanted to rebuild in this sort of very classically inspired but extremely modern way?
- [61:17]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Sort of. It's an interesting question. One of the charges that is often made, I mean, we've discussed one of the other charges, which is pastiche by modernist architects of anyone who wishes to play with patterns from the past, is that it's neo Nazi. So literally that gets thrown around. So you'll see perhaps a bit less than a few years ago, you'll see that accusation being made. It's been made against me and I'm not a Nazi. I don't believe in dressing up and invading other countries. Just for pointed out. Please don't edit that bit out. So the style that Albert Speer was using is sometimes referred to as sort of stripped classicism.
- [61:52]
Callum Drysdale
So
- [61:55]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
less ornamented, less decorated, but clearly using the materials and some of the patterns of classical architecture. It was a very popular style about over 100 years ago. So the country where more of this was built and built by the state than any other country in the world is America. So if you look at the. I can't list them off the top of my head, but if you look at the federal architecture that the state was building, the United States was building in the 1920s and 30s, it was pretty similar. And you've got examples in this country, you've got examples in South America and across Europe. That was sort of. That was one of the expressions of classicism in the early 20th century. There were others. So in this country, you also got quite a lot of neo Georgian architecture, which is a bit humbler, a bit calmer, much greater use of red bricks. So, no, I don't think that was the ultimate expression of classicism fused with modernism. I think it's sort of where it was in some of the places things be built in some countries in some ways, but it was a rich and lively tradition that then lost all its confidence mid 20th century. And I think if I was to sort of. No complex movement has one source, but clearly the two world wars were essential to the loss of the architectural tradition. I think not unreasonably, frankly. After the two world wars, people looked at what we'd done to ourselves and said, we need to do something differently. Actually, I would have probably thought that. So I don't actually. I hope this hasn't come over. I actually don't blame. I've never blamed, I think most of the architects. I would blame some who were that first generation of modernists, particularly post World War II. I think it is understandable why when, you know, you've seen Dresden, you've seen Coventry, you've seen what happened in Japan and the nuclear weapons and that we have to do something differently. And then. So I think that moment of loss of confidence in the past is, I think, is entirely understandable, indeed, reasonable, actually a trauma response. Yeah. And I think some of the people who pushed it, you know, so I think there was great dishonesty as well on some of their parts. And. But there are other reasons as well. You know, we invented the motor car. The motorcycle is an amazing thing. It gives all of us the liberation to move around the countryside and the suburbs, you know, as if we were Victorian dukes. But cars aren't very good things in cities because they just. They take up a lot of space and they're quite inefficient and they pollute. So there was a belief that, and this is Corbusier, you mentioned him earlier, that we needed to recreate our cities around the motorcar and that. So that was one of the things pulling us apart. And then also there was a response to what I think we call, we're meant to call these days the Carboniferous Age. Again, it is a fact that late 19th and early 20th century towns and cities were very polluted places and there was a desire, quite reasonably, to escape that. So there was a sense of. And we saw this in the late 19th century with people fleeing the cities for the suburbs and the great expansion of cities thanks to railways, as Prosperous people left the city because they were just coughing up blackness. My father remembers, he grew up in Cambridge. He remembers coming to London as a boy in the 1950s and he'd come back and his collar was black because it was so polluted. So again, you can see it's important to empathize with why that first generation of modernists wished to reinvent the city. I think I have sympathy with that. I just think they were too revolutionary and the cure was as bad, but differently bad to the disease they were trying to heal.
- [65:13]
Tom O
This might be a nice moment to bring things back round to Roger Scruton. I'm going to throw some red meat to our listenership base here. What was it like to work with him?
- [65:24]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I mean, it was. It was very moving in the latter period. So there were sort of two phases to my work with Roger. The first phase, he was chair of this thing that I was invited onto in late 2019 called the building Better Building Beautiful Commission. So he was chair of that and I was one of the commissioners
- [65:48]
Callum Drysdale
that
- [65:49]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
were a little less satisfying in that he was an academic, obviously a writer, a thought thinker, and we were actually writing a paper for the government to be Practical Policy. And I think he perhaps wasn't quite seeing that second half of it as clearly. And I was obviously pushing him at that and we've gone perfectly well. But that was perhaps a little less satisfying when he then came back and we were co chairs. And of course by now he was not well. And so again, for the record, he was outrageously traduced by George Easton in the New Statesman, who interviewed him, selectively quoted, he didn't actually put any words in Roger Scruton's mouth that he didn't say, but he so selectively misquoted it as who was it who exposed it? Neil Murray exposed in the Spectator later that he, quite rightly, he'd been fired, he was brought back. I'd been acting as interim chair and we then worked together and by then I drafted the interim report and we then worked together on the final report. And that was very uplifting and moving and you saw real endurance and perseverance because he was not well. He had a cancer that was going to. Well, actually, it wasn't a cancer that killed him, it was a cold, but it was due to the cancer. And he struggled on, he worked on. And I would go with Samuel Hughes, I think you've had also on your podcast, who's our researcher and our advisor, go down to his farm in Wiltshire and we'd work together for many hours. He would have to take rests from time to time. So drafting and rewriting and I think it's fair to say that he tend to focus on the first half of the report. I tended to focus on the second half. The first half was, if you like, the exposition and the second half was the policy piece. And he'd then go through my policy bits and frankly make them read better than I'd written. And I would go through his bits and make sure they didn't actually contradict what we were subsequently saying in the policy bits. So it was joyful and that may sound an odd thing to say, but he was very kind. He was a very funny man and he's a very kind man. At least he was kind to me in my experience. And he was very disarming in a good way. So I think it's fair to say that many of the commissioners and our advisors at the start of the process were to going, I was going to say scared. That's not quite the right word. They were nervous of him. You know, they had in their heads the bogeyman, the Guardian and then the New Statesman summoned. And he wasn't that because he was a human, he wasn't a sort of, you know, golem, but also because he was very, very funny and charming and he used humor and charm and knowledge to disarm people who were nervous about him. And he had a brilliant trick which I've tried to emulate subsequently. When someone came up with something long and complex and possibly unhelpful, he would ask them to write a two page memo on it and sort of come back with it, which is a good way of closing down a possibly unhelpful intervention and making the person go away and write something which could then be constructive.
- [68:40]
Tom O
Well, I suppose we've got to let you go, Nicholas, but it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show.
- [68:44]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
Thank you very, very much for inviting me. It's been a total pleasure and it's been great to be up in space and enjoy the view of the moon through your thatch roofed pub.
- [68:51]
Tom O
Well, we look forward to building many towns and cities on the moon with you in charge of the design.
- [68:57]
Callum Drysdale
Thank you listeners. And if you would like to know more about Nicholas's work or even sign up to the summer school that he described. Nicholas, where should people go?
- [69:09]
Nicholas Boyce Smith
I think if you look at the Crate Streets website, I think you can probably find that via the Google Gods or the Great Streets foundation website, you can find all the links to our research, to our work and to our summer school. If you own land, you know, ask us to come and help replan it for you to make it more valuable, more beautiful and more attractive and more popular. We're always happy to help.
- [69:29]
Tom O
We endorse this message.
- [69:30]
Callum Drysdale
We endorse this message. We would like. Well, we would like Tom's flat to be more valuable. Well, thank you, listeners. We will sign off here. And don't forget to subscribe on substance that.