Tom Barry writes:
Anyway, Will Wiles has a couple of interesting pieces on the whole
shenanigans, which remind me very much of the Routemaster rubbish or the
rows about tall buildings in London:

Hmm, he seems to huff and puff a lot, and seems guilty of exactly the
same sort of rhetorical excess he charges the arch campaigners with (he
stuffs so many loaded words into each sentence that at times it seems
almost a parody). Basically, though, his argument seems to come down to
"you can never go home again, so stop trying."

Probably true, but I think it's equally silly to try and deny people's
undeniable sense of comfort in remembering the past. It's OK to look
back sometimes.

Despite his use of the pejorative tag "heritage industry", I think the
real appeal is to a wider public sense that politicians and the
architectural establishment _did_ go too far in pursuing their dogma,
and that even if it's too late to undo those huge changes physically,
they're not forgotten, and not really accepted. To some degree it's an
act of revenge.

When he says "Whatever they might claim, neither campaign is
forward-looking. Both see present-day London as a suitable venue for
revisiting battles that were lost more than half a century ago," there's
a sense of someone crying (fearfully) "Stop! We _won_; you're not
allowed to do that!" But, of course, they can do that. What goes
around comes around...

Maybe the reconstructed arch will be a tacky pastiche, or maybe it will
actually be something cool that will become a new icon. Who knows, it
depends on the actual object, not on the history.

[He also tries to throw in some kind of weird guilt-trip about "small,
young practices struggling to find work", but let's face it: the public
doesn't care about architectural practices.]

-Miles

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