Britain redisovers its architectural heritage

Theodore Dalrymple:

Yet matters have improved greatly in the last few years. Acts of official vandalism are rarer, and when attempted cause a public outcry. Citizens have formed groups to protect what remains of their heritage and no longer stand by watching the destruction of whole townscapes. Old buildings are routinely adapted to new purposes (as civilized people have known how to do for centuries) instead of being treated as impediments to progress or to traffic. Victorian buildings are cleaned up instead of demolished, and the architectural detail beneath the grime has come as a revelation to many who previously might have held the Victorians in contempt. London’s remaining Victorian railway stations have been modernized, keeping their basic features, so that the elegance and beauty of the ironwork is obvious to all. St. Pancras station, a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture, has been lovingly (and, admittedly, expensively) restored and made the terminus of the train to Paris. Fittingly, the concourse has a statue of the poet Sir John Betjeman, whose protests helped save the station from demolition and replacement—perhaps by something as ugly as the new Euston station, a few hundred yards up the road, which took the place of the magnificently neoclassical original Euston station. The open space around Euston, probably not coincidentally, is as dirty as anywhere in London: people vote with their litter.

Not only has the official vandalism been much reduced; architecture and urbanization have considerably improved. Cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester have undergone something of a revival, though it is too late to save the parts of them destroyed in the frenzy of self-hatred, utopianism, social engineering, and financial corruption that I have described.

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