This weekend witnesses a re-opening ceremony and a concert attended by heads of states as well as by the US president-elect Donald Trump — if not by the Pope who believes his presence might be a distraction. On Sunday, there will be a celebratory mass. Accompanied by TV cameras, Macron has already walked through and up the renovated cathedral. Addressing some 1,300 craft workers he said: “The shock of the reopening will be as great as that of the fire.”

It is hard to disagree. In the words of the late Kenneth Clark — “Lord Clark of Civilisation” — Notre-Dame is “not perhaps the most lovable of cathedrals”, yet its scale and geometric rigour, its long and dramatic history, and its sheer presence on the Île de la Cité have made it a magnet for countless millions of people of whatever faith or none from around the world.  For Parisians, and the French at large, the cathedral fire was nothing less than a national tragedy. Notre-Dame is a symbol of the city, an architectural and ecclesiastical patroness for the country even.

And yet, watching videos and studying photographs of the interior of the restored building, it seems as if hundreds of years of history have been somehow disinfected and washed away. Notre-Dame nouvelle seems so very shiny, so antiseptically bright, especially with its glistering procession of gilded electric chandeliers. Strangely, given the construction of its great nave began almost 850 years ago, it appears all but brand new. Those scrubbed walls and vaults. That gleaming floor. Those vibrant colours: reds and lapis lazuli blues.

While unsettling, this sense of the revamped Notre-Dame being more of a grand civic hall than a place of worship makes a certain sense. Since the French Revolution, the state has pretty much owned Notre-Dame, lock, stock and spire. Its fortunes and its appearance have oscillated with the swings of the political pendulum.

In 1793, Catholic worship in Paris was banned. The philosophical reasoning had been long in the making. “Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian religion in horror,” declared Voltaire. “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” railed Denis Diderot. These writers died before the storming of the Bastille and the ministrations of Madame Guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, yet their influence on the course of late 18th-century French politics and culture was profound.

The mob in their Jacobin caps stormed Notre-Dame. Early 13th-century statues of 28 Kings of Judea adorning the west facade were wrenched down and decapitated. The baying anti-clerics mistook them for kings of France. The interior of the cathedral was looted and then used, among other secular purposes, as a wine depot. In November 1793, a pointedly paganistic Festival of Reason was held in the nave.

“Religion,” the Franco-German philosopher Baron d’Holbach had written from his apartment in the Rue Royale, “has ever filled the mind of man with darkness and kept him in ignorance of the real duties of true interests.” This darkness would be dispelled by the bright light of Reason, although at the time there were no gilt electric chandeliers to do the job on behalf of French philosophy and the Revolutionary state.

Soon enough, Notre-Dame was auctioned off to a building merchant. This ignominious sale was cancelled by Napoleon Bonaparte when, seizing power in 1799, he disbanded the Revolutionary government. The dynamic young general had Notre-Dame redecorated for his coronation in 1804. Not that the new French emperor had any great love for the Church. While under construction in the style of a Graeco-Roman temple, Napoleon decreed that the vast new church we know as La Madeleine should be designated the “Temple to the Glory of the Grand Army”. Even with Napoleon defeated on the battleground, exiled, dead and gone, plans were made to complete the Corinthian temple as a railway terminus. It was finally consecrated as a Catholic church in 1842 when Louis Philippe I was on the throne.

It was during Louis Philippe’s reign that Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was published, sparking a popular call for the conservation of medieval architecture and, especially, the cathedral itself. From 1844, the architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus were charged with the complete restoration of Notre-Dame, while France underwent another revolution with the appointment of its first president, Louis Napoleon, in 1848, and crowned emperor four years later,. Funded by the government, the restoration project symbolised a remarkable turn in the cathedral’s fortunes. During the July Revolution of 1830 that had brought Louis Philippe to the throne, the damage caused to the building was so great that Parisian officials had seriously considered demolishing it.

Suggested reading

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Whether Revolutionaries, kings, emperors or presidents, Notre-Dame has certainly been something of a plaything of French rulers.. The top-down handling of the cathedral is perhaps a reflection of French cultural politics. It is a French way of doing things that has not gone away. Ever since 1958 and the birth of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, French presidents, as embodiments of “the spirit of the nation”, have used architecture and its conservation as a conspicuous political tool.

Think of all the “grand projects” of successive Fifth Republic presidents. There was Georges Pompidou’s modernising Centre Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Musée d’Orsay, and François Mitterrand’s Louvre Pyramid. These buildings established their cultural credentials, their largesse and semi-regal power, and aligned them with the very kings, queens and emperors republicanism had overthrown. Their names are attached like stone plaques to these cultural monuments. Now, there’s Emmanuel Macron’s championing of Notre-Dame.

Arguably no one did this better than President de Gaulle, who left matters monumental to France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. Novelist, art philosopher and genuine wartime Resistance hero, Malraux is the kind of minister of culture we may never see again: Not only cultured, but brave too. An agnostic, he believed in aesthetic spirituality —that through the artistry of its design and construction, a secular building can convey a sense of the numinous, while in churches visitors can experience this same spiritual feeling without professing a faith.

Significantly, Malraux gave the oration at the 1965 state funeral of the architect Le Corbusier. It was held not in Notre-Dame but in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, the museum founded by the Revolutionary government in 1793 to display great works of French art including those confiscated from the nation’s churches. An atheist, Le Corbusier designed the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. A building of great originality, its lyrical profundity haunts the hillside on which it stands. Under its shell-like roof, it shrouds an interior lit as if by some latter-day angel.

If this hillside chapel close to the Swiss border has a far greater sense of sacred mystery than the restored Notre-Dame in Paris, perhaps this should be no wonder. It is not a grand state monument. It is not presidential. This, for better or worse, and for all the heroism and craftsmanship involved in its reconstruction, is the fate of Notre-Dame. Of course, the freshly unveiled cathedral will be popular with the crowds and congregations, who will throng here from this week. Certainly, it is wonderful to hear its bells ringing across the Seine again. It just appears to be that little bit too political, too civic and, spiritually, a little cold. But that, in the end, is its purpose. Whether or not the restored Notre-Dame is enough to save or redeem President Macron, or to allow him to rise like a phoenix in years to come, is another, quite secular, matter.

With dyspepsia gurgling through the room, the Prince recharged his guns. “Not only did they wreck the London skyline in general. They also did their best to lose the great dome in a jostling scrum of office buildings, so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce — like a basketball team standing shoulder-to-shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.” The French and Italians would never dishonour their finest buildings in this manner. Can you imagine office blocks imprisoning Paris’s cherished Notre Dame or Venice’s shimmering St Mark’s?

​​In a subsequent BBC interview, Owen Luder, the now-deceased former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, took issue with the Prince’s speech: “I think it was most unfortunate and embarrassing… I lived through the Blitz, no comparison at all. I really resent that.”

More from this author

Must we always demolish the past?

By Jonathan Glancey

Luder, designer of bold and controversial raw concrete Brutalist buildings that characterised the “comprehensive redevelopment” of many of Britain’s town and city centres in the Sixties and early Seventies, lived to see the most distinctive of his own buildings well and truly blitzed. The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth: opened in 1966, demolished in 2004. Trinity Square, Gateshead, whose multi-storey car park featured in the Michael Caine gangster film, Get Carter: completed in 1967, razed in 2010. Derwent Tower, the 30-storey concrete housing block in Gateshead, known locally as the “Dunston Rocket”, was forcibly brought down in 2012. The problem was, as Mick Henry, leader of Gateshead’s Labour council, articulated at the time, “people did not want to live here, and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone”.

As a result, ​brutalist buildings have often led dramatically foreshortened lives. As for the new buildings Prince Charles witnessed sprouting in and around the City of London, these continue to rise and fall and rise again, ever taller, and at increasingly breakneck speed. As they compete to scrape the London sky, gaggles of new City towers strip the streets they rise from of life and light and human scale. The tallest of all proposed to date, 1 Undershaft will, if given the final go-ahead by the Corporation of London this summer, reach the absolute height limit (1,016 ft) imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority.

The questionable architectural quality of the new City of London skyscrapers aside, it seems very odd indeed to witness earlier City office towers being demolished when they are no older and indeed even much younger than Luder’s Brutalist car parks and shopping centres. In its latest form, 1 Undershaft, designed by Eric Parry Architects, threatens to be not just uncomfortably high, but ugly and even silly with a roof garden sticking out over and above the street like some decolourised Rolling Stones’ tongue. What works, in vivid lipstick colour, for a rock band’s album covers and T-shirts fails in what should be a dignified, if spirited, city street.

Suggested reading

Christopher Wren: godfather of the technocrats

By Wessie du Toit

Assuming it does go ahead, 1 Undershaft will take at least four noisy, disruptive years to build. And it will demand the sacrifice of St Helen’s Tower, formerly the Commercial Union building, a deft 28-storey Mies van der Rohe-style curtain-wall tower, designed by Gollins Melvin and Ward (GMW) and dating from as long ago, in City terms, as 1969. At 387 ft, this building was the very first in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s. It formed part of a considered modern composition, in company with GMW’s 10-storey P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) building. The P&O building, in turn, was demolished at the grand old age of 39, its place taken by Richard Rogers’s 43-storey “Cheesegrater” office tower.

Meanwhile, the City of London has also approved plans for 55 Bishopsgate. This up-and-rising 935-ft skyscraper (given heights for the building vary), “inspired by nature” and promising “world-class sustainability performance”, will replace a post-modern office block designed by Fitzroy Robinson so venerable that it dates all the way back in the smog of time to 1992.

Given that buildings are currently responsible for approximately 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, it does seem odd that so much effort should be going into demolishing ever younger buildings to build ever taller ones in their place. It’s strongly reminiscent of the Eighties in Tokyo, when land values were so inflated that developers tore down brand-new buildings to erect even bigger ones on the same sites to make even more money. But an even more reckless model lies in Las Vegas: closed in 1990, the entertainingly space-age Landmark Tower rising from Paradise Street, and looking for all the world like an architectural escapee from The Jetsons, was blown to smithereens. It had taken eight years to build — from 1961 to 1969 — yet vanished in a trice in a spectacular cloud of smoke, dust, dynamite and debris. Tim Burton used footage of the demolition to comic effect in his 1996 sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks!

While the architecture of cities evolves and sudden events such as war, earthquakes, fires, IRA bombs and Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks prompt unwonted change, the wilful destruction of ever younger city buildings in pursuit of extreme financial gain is as unsettling as it is destructive, wasteful of energy and a snub to earlier generations who have designed and built for us. Buildings have become disposable commodities: a fact I think that most of us find hard to accept.

Was it ever thus? In The Face of London (1932) Harold Clunn, a London shipping agent and an indefatigable chronicler of the capital’s streets and buildings, describes how he stops to stare at the robustly challenging St Mary Woolnoth. It’s an early 18th-century Baroque bulldog of a church — from the outside; geometric serenity within — designed by an architect considered since to be one of the greatest these islands has yet produced, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

What Clunn couldn’t understand was why, when so many other churches had been demolished for the greater good of London, St Mary Woolnoth remained stubbornly in place. Particularly as it occupied “perhaps the most valuable site in the whole city”. “If every building with a claim to antiquity is to be suffered to exist for perpetuity,” he wrote, “where is the space to be found in the course of time to allow for any future progress in the world?”

Here was a man with faith in modernity. Shortly after the Second World War, Clunn wrote London Marches On (1947), in which he considers the Luftwaffe’s Blitz a blessing in disguise, allowing the city to replace slums with sanitary new blocks of flats while raising bravura new commercial buildings of which he was a devoted fan.

A short walk away from the ever less enchanting streets of the City of London, you can find the old Huguenot chapel, built in 1743, on the corner of Spitalfields’s Brick Lane. In response to social change, it became a Methodist chapel in 1819, a synagogue in 1897 and, in 1976, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). None of us, I think, expects London or any other city to be pickled in aspic. Life moves on. Yet who  can look to the City skyline and say with a Harold Clunn-like assurance that the relentless demolition of young buildings in favour of bigger, more demonstrative machines-for-making-money is a good thing?

Camus had accepted a lift from Lourmarin, the picturesque Provençal village where he had bought a house in 1958 and where his family had spent the New Year with Gallimard’s. His wife, Francine, and their twins returned to Paris by train from Avignon. Camus and the Gallimards took to the road with Floc, their Skye terrier. This was the era before autoroutes. The drive north through rural France was along the tree-lined Routes Nationales, with an overnight stop at the simple, Michelin-recommended Chapon Fin inn at Thoissey near Macon and lunch on the 4 January at the Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste, Sens, where the party ate boudin noir aux pommes de reinette and shared a bottle of Fleurie.

Gallimard was a highly experienced driver and, at Camus’s request, nursed the 200km/h Facel Vega at no great speed towards Paris. Quite what caused the fatal crash —  possibly a mechanical failure — no one quite knew or knows. Ever since, the beautiful twin rows of trees that have so characterised and even defined great stretches of rural France, planted in a programme to improve trunk roads throughout the country from the late 1730s, have been accused of murdering motorists, motorcyclists and Nobel prize winners alike. Found guilty, they have been chopped down on a Reign of Terror scale. Where there had once been three million of these roadside sentinels, today there are fewer than 250,000.

Suggested reading

The French Left is celebrating too soon

By Christopher Bickerton

Few politicians could be more pleased with this result than Jean Glavany, agriculture minister from 1998-2002 in Lionel Jospin’s “Plural Left” government. In 2001, the death of a young motorcyclist in Glavany’s Haute-Pyrénées constituency prompted biker gangs to attack 168 trees with chain saws. In the aftermath of the accident, Glavany said that roadside trees were to blame for 799 deaths in the previous year alone. “We must not hesitate”, he barked, “to cut down the trees when it is necessary.” Conservationists replied that the answer was not to accuse the trees, but to address the causes of the crashes: speeding, drink driving, mobile phone use, poorly timed overtaking and sheer fatigue.

Over the past fortnight, I drove much the same route as Camus and the Gallimards from close by Lourmarin before diverting north of Paris to Calais. For one who has cycled and driven along these roads over many years, the loss of the trees along the old Routes Nationales is devastating. Their disappearance is matched by the increasing hollowness of villages and small towns along the way: berets have long been ousted by logo-emblazoned baseball caps, burgers and pizzas are on offer at every turn, Gitanes dangling from lower lips are a thing of a Camus-distant past. While Lourmarin, like so many Provençal villages, is a tourist “destination” today, villages off the tourist beat are increasingly shopless, shuttered and all but silent for most of their deep-sleeping days. The Chapon Fin inn at Thoissey and the old Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste at Sens have vanished, too.

It’s not just that many former residents have upped sticks for hopefully more rewarding lives in French cities, but that so few people stop by them on road trips whether for coffee or lunch or to pick up baguettes, olives, ham, cheese and cherries because there is nowhere to do so. Nowhere to buy a baguette? Mon Dieu. Reason enough for rural protest. This sorry pattern is replicated through great swathes of France. True, rural depopulation is nothing new in this big country, but the extent of it today is alarming.

You can choose to scythe through France on your way to the south, the sun and the sound of crickets along autoroutes largely oblivious to the small towns and villages on either side of 130km/h carriageways. If, though, there is a clue as to what might be happening around you, it comes in the guise of motorway toll gates. In recent years, these have been automated and are now staffless. Do those who once took your cash (comment?) now work in petrol stations on the edge of towns? Probably not. These are increasingly automated, too. So, you can drive from Calais to Provence without needing to meet or address anyone, or having to speak French, until perhaps you check in at your hotel.

Driving through the Massif Central, Auvergne, Burgundy and Champagne is an extraordinary experience. Such beautiful countryside; such a wonderful stock of handsome buildings. And yet, it seems all too often that neutron bombs must have fallen throughout rural France leaving its fabric more or less intact, but its population evaporated.

Despite numerous journeys through rural France, I have never knowingly met or conversed with a fascist, although I suppose very few people today in most of Western Europe would admit to being one. The impression the mainstream media gives — French and British alike — is of a rural France in thrall to “hard-Right” politics. What I have met is a sadness, a frustration and an anger nurtured by the powerlessness people of all ages feel as their countryside is stripped of life, their way of life. The very life promoted by tourist boards and the rose-tinted travel pages of newspapers and magazines. But when the political parties and the tree choppers of Paris appear to care little or nothing for their situation, how can the people of rural France not turn to political parties which say they are on their side? How can they not despise Emmanuel Macron whose security forces took out the eyes and blew off the hands of protesting gilet jaunes?

Suggested reading

Marine Le Pen's favourite far-Right philosopher

By Theo Zenou

In this month’s French election, 37% voted for Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s “hard-Right” Rassemblement National (a larger proportion than that which voted for Keir Starmer’s triumphant Labour Party in the recent British election). It is easy to imagine support for RN growing in coming years. If Paris and the Left wanted to derail its opponents, and if it had sufficient common sense and humanity, it would aim to bring work and life back to rural France. It would see people as more important than automatic machinery and superficial technological efficiency.

Although Camus’s Lourmarin housed outsiders — artists, writers, summer holidaymakers — it was a working village in the old sense. The novelist’s best friend there was the blacksmith César Marius Reynaud, whose family had run the business for 400 years. Camus kept a donkey, rescued from Algeria. The only animals I saw in Lourmarin were well-groomed dogs, hopeful pigeons, basking cats and the occasional lizard.

Of course, things change. Imagine, though, government schemes that gave, for example, generous tax breaks to local start-up businesses and to companies happy to have staff working away from their main offices. Imagine cross-country railways with greatly improved services, which, outside the exclusive realm of the superb TGVs, are sparse in much of France. Imagine new types and forms of rural employment fusing hi-tech communications with craftsmanship and husbandry. Imagine, most of all, young people being offered the opportunity to live and work in beautiful parts of profound France. With good communications, this could yet be a dream for many.

For now, the mainstream parties’ and media’s lack of genuine concern for rural France is, at best, a political car crash in the making.

Imagine, for a moment, Catch 22 reset in England at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cargill, asking the same question, might hear the name John Betjeman in response. First published in 1958, Betjeman’s Collected Poems has sold well over two-and-a-half million copies. It remains in print 40 years after his death. “I made hay while the sun shone,” he said. ‘My work sold.”

Barry Humphries, in 2006, recalled generous lunches in Smithfield with Betjeman and friends, among them Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Osbert Lancaster, “and, not seldom, an Anglican priest or two”. At Coleman’s Chop House (long gone) on Aldersgate Street, “we would all tuck into roast beef and Brussel Sprouts and drink more champagne. John always insisted on paying, which was just as well. His Collected Poems was a bestseller, and his masterpiece, the poetic autobiography Summoned by Bells, was a huge popular success, in spite of a few sniffy and envious reviews. John was fond of exclaiming, with great merriment and that high, exultant cackle that his friends remember with such heart-rending affection, ‘Thanks to the telly, I’m as rich as Croesus!’”

Serendipitously, T.S. Eliot taught the young John Betjeman English at Highgate Junior School. This was 1914-15. Beyond the classroom, Eliot was writing his epoch changing “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Nine-year-old Betjeman presented Eliot with his handwritten The Best Poems of Betjeman. Years later, the two profitable poets, the profound Modernist and the popular Traditionalist, became friends.

Suggested reading

Philip Larkin was a filthy genius

By Nicholas Harris

Where, though, Eliot received rightful and even reverential critical praise especially from schoolteachers and university tutors, Betjeman, however successful in terms of book sales and appearances on the telly, was labelled superficial by TLS readers. They worshipped Eliot, though even though he too could also be the populist, his enchanting, lyrical Old Possums’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), conjured into “Cats”, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hugely successful musical.

Betjeman’s tentative brush with Modernism was short-lived. In 1929, he was appointed Assistant Editor of the Architectural Review. To keep up with the times, and the fads of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, his mercurial and brilliant editor, he joined MARS (Modern Architecture Research Group). One of its members, Maxwell Fry, who went on to work with Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and with Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, had no difficulty seeing through Betjeman’s ill-fitting Modernist disguise.

“The key to John Betjeman’s character”, snorted Fry perceptively if priggishly, “is that he’s a journalist and a Fleet Street man – and a popularist – and vain … an enemy of Modernism… As far as I was concerned, he was a bloody nuisance.”

Or was he a complex character, brimming with contradictions? In between writing articles, among them “The Death of Modernism” in 1931, and laying out pages of the “Archie” in the most old-fashioned and shocking types he could find,, Betjeman and Hastings wrote, Fry said, “weird letters to sex papers full of Freudian hang-ups. Freudianism was all the rage then”.

Sex and Betjeman’s painful relationship with his father, Ernest Betjemann (note the double ‘n’), provided the profound sense of guilt and sadness that, insinuating its way through its so-easily-recitable verses, was to make his poetry far more than charming whimsy. Ernest had hoped John would join his cabinet-making firm and take it on after he retired. John had no intention of doing so, telling his father as much and selling the beloved family business to Puddlefoot, Bowers & Simonett & Sons, ivory and ebony merchants of Kennington Lane, in 1938, four years after Ernest’s death.

Betjeman had already hurt his father, dropping that second “n” from his surname after his bullying at school during the First World War. The double “n” was too German for comfort. “Betjeman’s a German spy/Shoot him down and let him die.” He had caused further sadness by going down to Cornwall where his parents were on holiday to tell them he had failed his degree at Oxford. He recalled his father in a fine poem “On a Portrait of a Deaf Man” and in another, “Norfolk”, which ends in “unkept promises and broken hearts”.

His relationship with women — he had a wife, a long-term mistress and a secret lover on the go late in life — produced poems that can seem absurd even to loyal fans. Those big, domineering and sometimes quite grotesque Amazonian “gels”. Those jolly hockey-stick types on bicycles and in Sussex tea rooms. The svelte “mistress” with “more than a cared-for air/ Than many a legal wife” he lusts after in church. Sometimes, though, he is more lyrical. In “A Russell Flint” he writes, “I could not speak for amazement at your beauty/As you came down the Garrick stair”, and in “Youth and Age on Beaulieu River”, of Clemency the General’s daughter, sailing on the Hampshire water, “Soft and sun-warm, see her glide -/Slacks the slim young limbs revealing, /Sun-brown arm the tiller feeling -/With the wind and with the tide”.

There is, though, something unlovable about Betjeman as he writes to Margie Geddes, a rekindled old flamem, after she invited him to a literary luncheon. He replied: “I would love to come to Jersey for the nice fee and also the pleasure of seeing you.” But there is also here despite the guilt and sadness, an indication of Betjeman’s great strength. He was motivated by place. In his poetry he embraces Bootle and Camberley, Pontefract and Cheltenham, Croydon and Slough, Trebetherick and Harrow-on-the-Hill. The “Index of Places and Counties” in Collected Poems occupies five pages of small type.

His London childhood — a densely woven tapestry of trams and tea rooms, churches, dairies, laundries, coal depots, chapels, Home & Colonial Stores and cathedral like main line stations dispatching named steam trains over viaducts and through complex junctions to all points of the British compass — fed young Betjeman’s poetic imagination. So many sensations, such a profusion of special places.

This heightened sense of place only grew as Betjeman spread his wings whether on childhood holidays to Cornwall (an abiding passion) or through the historic buildings he encountered the length and breadth of these islands, each belonging to a particular somewhere — as buildings once did — with a name, lyrical or blunt, that made place, as if inevitably, into poetry. Ryme Intrinseca, Fontwell Magna, Diss.

Betjeman could be saccharine, sarcastic, silly and snobbish. But also unexpectedly profound and passionate. And this is perfectly captured at St Pancras, where his statue gazes up at the epic span of William Barlow’s great train shed framed by George Gilbert Scott’s gloriously Gothic Midland Grand Hotel. The inscription reads: “And in the shadowless unclouded glare, Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where, A misty sealine meets the wash of air. / John Betjeman, 1906 – 1984, poet, who saved this glorious station”.

That same year, a French mining engineer, Albert Matthieu-Favier, drew up the first more or less convincing plan for a Channel tunnel. Carriages would be drawn along an oil-lamp-lit passageway, stopping to change horses at an artificial island halfway between Calais and Dover. Imagine, though, this tunnel in the hands of Napoleon — or in Palmerston’s time, Napoleon III. Before you knew it, Boney’s crack Cuirassiers would be sabring their way through with the massed ranks of the Grand Armée marching behind.

Fears of invasion were to confound plans for a Channel tunnel for decades after Lord Palmerston’s death in office in 1865. It was, though, all smiles, champagne and jointly cut ribbons on 6 May 1994. On that day, Queen Elizabeth, a fluent French speaker, and President François Mitterand, champion of the costly and impressive French “Grands Projets” — the Louvre Pyramid, Opéra Bastille, Musée d’Orsay and the new Bibliothèque nationale de France among them  — declared the Channel Tunnel open.

Politically, technically, financially and culturally, the digging of the “Chunnel” had been a profound achievement. Britain, said the press on both sides of the crossing, was no longer an island. After a thousand years of squabbling and fighting, the glorious French and the perfidious rosbifs had sued for permanent peace with a high-speed railway line. A 25p Royal Mail stamp commissioned for the occasion, designed by George Hardie of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin album cover fame, depicted a happily stylised lion and cockerel shaking paws and claws over La Manche and its new undersea tunnel.

More from this author

Michael Gove's Cambridge folly

By Jonathan Glancey

The Queen, dressed in red, travelled from London to Calais on board a brand new 16,000-hp Eurostar train, packed with VIPs, cantering at a stately 80mph, while President Mitterand rode in an identical anguilliform train from Paris, scything through Picardy at 300 km/h, poppies almost in bloom. The two trains met nose-to-nose on the same platform. The Queen returned to Folkestone with President Mitterand sitting alongside in her stately Rolls-Royce Phantom VI adorned with a St George-slaying-the-dragon radiator grille mascot and shoehorned into a stainless-steel Eurotunnel car “ferry”. Madame Mitterand and the Duke of Edinburgh followed in a Citroën, a case of quel dommage or vive la difference. One says potatoes, vous dites pommes de terre.

It had been a memorable day, TV new channels that evening and newspapers the following morning indulging the story. In other news that month, Israel withdrew from Gaza, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president of South Africa, Four Weddings and a Funeral was released and John Smith, leader of the Labour party dropped dead. Away from the glare of the media, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown met for dinner at Granita, Vikki Leffman’s fashionable new Islington restaurant, to agree on which of the two would be the first New Labour premier.

New Labour were happy to inherit the privatised rail network of the Major government before them. But the same could not be said for Margaret Thatcher, who regarded it was “a privatisation too far”. As Baroness Thatcher, spruce in broad-brimmed hat and pearls, she was nevertheless also borne to Calais on the Queen’s train to see the Tunnel opened in 1994. And with fervent talk of the renationalisation of Britain’s motley railways today, it is extraordinary to think that, unlike Mitterand’s Grands Projets, the Channel Tunnel was a privately financed venture. Construction costs may have risen by 80%, from a planned £2.6 billion to £4.65 billion (in 1985 prices) before the Tunnel was complete, yet, unlike the financially incontinent HS2, it was completed successfully within just a few years.

Suggested reading

British Rail must take back control

By Iain Martin

From the beginning, the project revelled in its cosmopolitan continentalism. Freight locomotives, ferrying container lorries fetching and carrying what is now a quarter of all physical exports to and from Britain and Europe, were named after writers and composers: Molière, Émile Zola, Jane Austen, Debussy. But the names also served as a reminder of when cross-channel travel had been a far more precarious affair. One of those class 92 freight locos, Charles Dickens, had a more morbid symbolism, a reminder of the Victorian author’s fateful journey of 9 June 1865 through Kent on the boat train from Folkestone.

Dickens, his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother, were on their way back to London from Paris. The 14-coach train departed Folkestone at 2.38pm. Half an hour later it was running at 50mph when the driver spotted danger ahead. With the locomotive thrown into reverse, speed was down to 30mph as the train approached the viaduct over the River Beault towards Staplehurst. Engineering works meant the track had been lifted. The boat train derailed, coaches tumbling into the river. Ten passengers were killed, 40 injured. Climbing out of a window, Dickens rushed to the aid of victims. He also managed to rescue the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend he had been working on before the accident. Although physically unhurt, Dickens was scarred for life.

But that catastrophe aside, there had been several ways of getting from London to Paris pre-Tunnel. It must have been fun to choose between them. The Golden Arrow, a Pullman from Victoria connecting with the Flèche d’Or at Calais. The Night Ferry and its exotic French sleeping cars rumbling through south London. The Silver Arrow — train, coach, plane and Flèche d’argent train from Le Touquet. Then, ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off) ferries from 1953, and Hovercraft car ferries between 1968 and 2000. But from 1994 and even more so from 2007 when the superbly renovated and reconfigured St Pancras station, opened by Queen Elizabeth, took over from Waterloo International, Eurostar and Eurotunnel were the most obvious and smoothest way to go. In 2009, Eurotunnel shareholders were paid their first dividend.

And unlike other costly follies of the era — the Millennium Dome for instance — the Tunnel remains a rare example of an infrastructure project that did broaden horizons for the millions of people who used it. How special it was, when passenger trains began running through the tunnel in November 1994, to ride so effortlessly and so very quickly from London to Paris or Brussels. City centre to city centre it was faster than flying, more stylish and more relaxing. True, the British side of the track was slow-going then. But with HS1, the new line that, from November 2007, allowed Eurostars to insinuate a brilliantly engineered way through north Kent at a full 186mph, the route became preternaturally fast. Such was the speed that cars and lorries heading in the same direction along parallel autoroutes appeared to be accelerating flat out in reverse gear. And for foot passengers, it could mean lunch and an afternoon meeting in Paris; London that same evening. Parfait.

The Covid panic hit the operation hard. It has since got back up to speed. Now 30 years on, it remains a symbol of what can be done, of how transport infrastructure can be a marvel. In comparison HS2 is an embarrassment. Unlike the Channel project and HS1, it fails to stir the imagination. With the cancellation of its northern route, all it can offer for £100 billion or more is the possibility at some unspecified future date of a train from somewhere in London (Euston, Old Oak Common?) on a disruptive route to Birmingham in 52 minutes rather than the existing 66 minutes.

How might we revive the spirit of 1994? What about a truly high-quality cross country railway system connected to an equally impressive Northern network? What about the linking up of “Chunnel” trains, as was originally proposed, with other British cities? A revival of the idea of Nightstar sleepers through the tunnel? Car-carrying trains speeding through the Channel Tunnel to the South of France? And, of course, as the late Queen would surely have approved, dedicated carriages for dogs to travel by Eurostar with their human companions? All cordiale suggestions welcome. Palmerston be damned. The Channel Tunnel, 30 years on, deserves to be celebrated.

Might “Govetown”, an ambitious “new quarter” of Cambridge proposed by Michael Gove at his all-purpose Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, be his very own Fatehpur Sikri? He imagines 150,000 new homes here in the next 20 years of the quality and “gentle density” of Marylebone, Clifton, Toulouse and Utrecht. But Cambridge is already challenged by a lack of water. And the Government by lack of voters.

Quite why Cambridge needs to build at least three times the number of new homes than even its own planners would like to — the City of Cambridge currently only comprises 53,000 — is a hard question to answer. Gove’s aim and that of the Cambridge Delivery Group, a new government team set up to “advise on and drive forward the government’s vision”, is to “supercharge this scientific and economic supercluster”. In other words, as Cambridge’s hi-tech and bio-medical sectors are thriving, let’s jump in and see how much bigger these can be grown, fattening government coffers along the way, rather than investing in towns and cities in real need of “levelling up”.

Numbers aside, a civilised Marylebone-like extension to Cambridge would certainly be an infinitely better proposition than the ever-growing, car-dependent, jobless, shop-less, medical and civic-free sprawl now wrapped around the city like some tectonic boa-constrictor. But quite who would be willing to pay for such high-quality streets and buildings, though, is an unanswered question hanging over the Case for Cambridge.

Perhaps Gove’s authors took a cue from one of Cambridge’s most famous academics: “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” This is Wittgenstein, of course, who, working as a consultant in the late Twenties on the design of a new house for his sister in Vienna, had a newly completed ceiling in one room removed and raised by 30mm to give it perfect proportions.

Suggested reading

Welcome to Britain's prefab nightmare

By Wessie du Toit

But when Gove’s similarly rarefied homebuyers move in, can they expect such attention to detail? When, for instance, they turn the elegant taps in their splendid kitchens, will they expect water to flow? It’s not such a silly question. Water is not a given here. There are no local reservoirs. Cambridgeshire water comes from underground chalk aquifers supplying rivers, including the punted Cam, as well as homes, colleges and the recondite labs of “Silicon Fen”. There is a plan for a reservoir north of Chatteris in the Fens, but this is subject to public consultation and unlikely to be completed before 2040. And there is another for a pipeline from Grafham Water, one of England’s largest reservoirs, 25 miles north-west of Cambridge.

If Govetown were a less ambitious proposition in terms of numbers, it might be built and supplied with just enough water. Here, though is the rub. “Our water scarcity issue”, Stephen Kelly, Chief Planner for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils, has told Building magazine, “makes it slightly indulgent to try and meet the country’s housing need in a place that doesn’t have any water”, especially when the Environment Agency plans to cap water abstraction licences in Cambridgeshire in two steps in 2030 and 2040.

But Govetown is flawed most of all because it conflates the possibility of a new “urban quarter” of hi-tech, high-income Cambridge with solving the nation’s need for millions of new homes. If these are to be built properly, rather than rushed up in unsuitable locations, including Cambridge, simply to meet pie-in-the-sky government targets, they need to be part of a genuine policy of “levelling up” towns and cities the length and breadth of the country. New housing must be a life-enhancing part of new and revived industries, supporting opportunities, education, jobs, wealth creation, health and welfare, and integrated transport networks. They must be a part, too, of places with true centres, or hearts, with all this implies in terms of delight and of the only wealth that truly matters: life. And, certainly, they must not just be plonked down, isolated, on fields, meadows, flood plains and former airfields. Think of how in the 1840s the Great Western Railway set up its workshops in rural Wiltshire. With so many skilled jobs on offer, Swindon prospered and grew, with new homes arriving in the wake of its economic ascendancy. In time, Great Western built a system of education and healthcare — a precursor of the NHS — demonstrating along its metalled way how a progressive new town might be formed and prosper.

Suggested reading

Will Britain ever build beautiful?

By Fred Skulthorp

If the Case for Cambridge is a product of both wishful thinking and a squintingly focused political imagination, it is also case study of governmental as much as spatial sprawl. Stephen Kelly, whom we met earlier, leads a shared planning service of 140 or so professional and technical staff managing what is already enormous growth — 61,000 new homes — across the Greater Cambridge area. But Kelly’s team was not invited to join Gove’s Case for Cambridge discussions. Now a new governmental body, the Cambridge Delivery Group headed by Peter Freeman, Chair of Homes England, a national body with a “crucial role in delivering the government’s housing, regeneration and levelling up priorities”, will set up a dedicated “Growth Company for Cambridge as the next step towards a Development Corporation”.

The Growth Company’s remit will be to enable and accelerate developments, to establish a “Cambridge presence and brand… including a website”, to “identify… solutions to complex constraints” and to discuss the future of East-West Rail, that is the Cambridge to Oxford railway line hacked to pieces by Lord Beeching in the Sixties, and along which many thousands of  new homes will surely sprout in years to come as trains return. It is hard not to think that all these fast-breeding official bodies talking 19 to the dozen about “delivery” — once the preserve of milkmen — seem a little remote from the earthy processes of pouring concrete and laying bricks.

My own experience of housing and planning ministers and the expert bodies and quangos they have spawned, from Mrs Thatcher’s governments onwards, is of a “passionate” commitment to architecture and planning that has tended to burn out before you could say Perpendicular Gothic, Milton Keynes or “the next election”. So many ambitious politicians and well-paid experts hanging on to their coat tails, so few buildings. I have been shown plans for a Barcelona-style “Greenwich Village” (all tram-adorned boulevards and New Labour café culture), for Gordon Brown’s Eco-Towns, George Osborne’s Ebbsfleet (a Garden Suburb, of 150,000 people), Nick Clegg’s vague new garden cities, and some administration or another’s Thames Gateway, a Cockney Siberia intended to smother the Essex marshes.

The supply of and demand for new housing have been out of kilter for decades. Where, until the Eighties, there were four key methods by which houses got built — private housebuilders, housing associations, local authorities and New Towns — only the first two, with very mixed results, remain at work today. Gove appears to be harking back to the halcyon days of New Town Corporations. These were certainly effective in terms of getting homes built. Idealistic, too. In September 1948, a year before the Essex New Town got under way, Lewis Silkin, Clement Attlee’s Minister of Town and Country Planning addressed a packed local public meeting. “Basildon”, he proposed, “will become a city which people from all over the world will want to visit.” Really? No, not really. Yet the New Towns were built. Today, especially with high levels of immigration, Britain will need something like five new cities the size of Birmingham even before Govetown is, if ever, completed.

Given the problematic scale of the British housing question, is Govetown just a case of re-arranging deckchairs on a sinking ship? Not quite. Yet the intense focus on Cambridge seems, at best, overwrought, and the advisers as misinformed as the architects and planners of Fatehpur Sikri. And where Akbar rode out and away from his short-lived dream city, surely Gove can only follow.

The demolition of Wrexham Police station, a distinctive and assertive 10-storey concrete tower dating from the mid-Seventies took place at 08:30am on Sunday 1 November. Online footage shows the building tumbling over as if swatted by a giant hand. The event will feature in next year’s season of Scrap Kings, a TV show in which “the nation’s kings and queens of destruction . . . bang, blow, smash and crunch their way around the UK.”

Let’s hope that together with local politicians everyone in the Welsh market town is happy when, after the crunching rubble is cleared, a new Lidl supermarket, a drive-through coffee shop and 151 car parking spaces emerge from the ashes.

More from this author

It's the end of the line for Britain's industrial heritage

By Jonathan Glancey

One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Although unlisted, the Wrexham Police headquarters was an interesting building. Designed by a team led by the Denbighshire County Architect Eric Langford Lewis and opened in 1975, it fitted into a canon of British civic buildings of its era labelled “Brutalist”, its offices spreading up and out from a central concrete pillar — the tower’s service core — to reach a height of 140ft. This was the tallest new building in Wrexham since the completion of the tower of St Giles, the town’s glorious Tudor parish church 500 years earlier. The police headquarters ought to have been fashionable by 2020, as such Seventies architecture can be, and converted, perhaps, into a hotel or workspaces and laboratories for hi-tech start-ups or whatever the collective local imagination might have in mind for Wrexham’s future.

A local petition hoped to protect the nine-acre building site from becoming the home of just another supermarket — Wrexham is brimful with them — but the prevailing official view was evidently Jenrickian. Will, though, the new Lidl supermarket be a better and more beautiful building than the smashed Seventies police headquarters?

Suggested reading

The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

Aside from an unease about the lack of imagination shown in Wrexham, my wider concern here is with politicians and cultural commentators who find the architecture of the generation or two before them hard to understand, much less to like, and thus to protect and renovate for the future. Much the same is true, of course, of music, fashion, art and design.

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19^th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble.

When Jim Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, went to 10 Downing Street with fellow ‘Save the Euston Arch’ campaigners, “Macmillan listened, or I suppose he listened as he sat without moving and with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact he said nothing except that he would consider the matter.” With official apathy over the matter on the parts of the government, the London County Council and the British Transport Commission, Macmillan let the wrecking balls get to work.

What, though, could have been going through the Prime Minister’s mind? This, after all, was the same Harold Macmillan, who as a wounded young captain on the Somme waiting in a foxhole for rescue, read Aeschylus in Greek for comfort. Why the tragic gap between Aeschylus and the Greek Revival Euston Arch? Because, I think, Macmillan and those of his generation, especially following the destruction caused by two world wars, wanted to escape at least part of their Edwardian and, at root, Victorian hinterland.

It was Macmillan’s Conservative government that championed motorways, high-rise mass housing and tall commercial buildings on the London skyline alongside the destruction of unfashionable 19^th century architecture.

Suggested reading

It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

St Pancras station and that great Victorian dragon of a building, the Midland Grand Hotel that fronts it, only just escaped demolition after determined battles by conservationists resolute after their failure to protect the Euston Arch. However, even John Summerson, the distinguished architectural historian, refused to support St Pancras. Why? Because, I think, St Pancras was a reminder of what, in spirit, had been a coal-fired Victorian childhood. The old order needed to change yielding place to the crisp, rational, white and new.

While John Summerson was making his mark, at the same time as John Betjeman who helped lead the fight for the Euston Arch and St Pancras, Harold Clunn wrote The Face of London (1932) in which the author praised the ambitious new commercial architecture of the capital. As for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s early 18^th century Baroque church of St Mary Woolnoth this was little short of a modern scandal. How could such a building out of keeping with the style and scale of modern streets be allowed to occupy a City of London site worth a million pounds and ripe for redevelopment?

If, as Robert Jenrick argues, new buildings will have to comply with design codes “so that local people this time around can decide what they want these buildings to look like which are so central to their lives”, there will be no contemporary equivalent of daring Hawksmoor churches, much less soaring Gothic cathedrals nor, of course, police station’s like Wrexham’s.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

I wonder what if Wrexham had followed Preston’s path, realising that architectural fashions change but tend to return to favour. In the meantime, we should think much harder than politicians seem to have been able or willing to do in recent decades and not so much to demolish what we don’t like at one particular moment, but to build more intelligently and caringly than we tend to do in the first place.

And then your eye is caught by long, disciplined rows of red brick buildings, a little ragged and battered, under Welsh slate and glass roofs looking like some mighty abbey complex lacking only a crenellated and pinnacled tower to complete the subterfuge. This, though, once the most important gathering of buildings in Horwich, is no half-remembered ecclesiastical foundation, but what remains of the partially abandoned and largely uncared for Horwich railway works.

Founded in 1884 and closed a century later, Horwich Works was the pride and joy of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. This was the “Business Line”, its frequent and tightly timed trains linking an intensity of industrial towns and cities from Liverpool to Manchester and eastwards to Halifax, Bradford, Leeds and Doncaster.

Suggested reading

When will we tackle the housing crisis?

By Liam halligan

From 1889, most of the glossy black locomotives sprinting the railway’s trains through chains of Pennine tunnels were built at Horwich. They took shape in the most impressive of all the many buildings at the railway works, the Erecting and Repair Shop. This, until the wreckers went in recently, was Horwich’s holy of holies, a truly magnificent industrial building, 1,520-ft long, 118-ft wide and formed by a top-lit nave separated from a pair of aisles by rows of lofty cast iron piers.

When finally abandoned, the haunting Erecting and Repair shop had the look and numinous air of some ambitious Romanesque abbey church. Of course it should have. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Britain’s railways were a religion of sorts. They attracted hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The Great Western Railway, the High Church of Britain’s railways, named one its most famous classes of copper-capped express locomotives after saints and planned to name its proposed Pacific locomotives after cathedrals.

Which unholy owner or authority would even think of demolishing the sanctuary of historic Horwich? On your bended knees, Bolton Council. In 2006, the council gave outline permission for the redevelopment of Horwich Works. The proposal, since given a green signal, was for a 150-acre sprawl of 1,700 new homes. On their way up today, these appear to be standard new housing estate “units”, brick boxes, that is, guaranteed free of architecture and local character. The same type can be seen anywhere in the country whether at Halifax, Harrogate, Horwich or Huyton. And these are just Lancashire and Yorkshire towns that happen to begin with H.

Suggested reading

How Birmingham changed the world

By Paul lay

Because the thousands of people living in coming years at “Rivington Chase” are expected to need access to the M61 motorway, for commuting — once life returns to normal after the pandemic — and to the enormous Middlebrook Retail and Leisure Park, a £12m link road is to be driven through what survives of Horwich Works to reach the new houses. And this has meant — you might have guessed — the demolition of the Erecting and Repair Shop. As to the fate of its attendant buildings, a part of the dilapidated Horwich Loco Industrial Estate for the past thirty years, the ghost of Sir John Aspinall only knows, although there is little cause for optimism.

As a dynamic 35-year old, John Aspinall, the new Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, and later General Manager, took on the task of completing Horwich Works. Here, set across 247-acres, and alongside streets of new terraced housing named after distinguished British railway engineers, among them Stephenson, Gooch, Webb and Brunel, were a wheel shop, bolt shop, spring smithy, boiler shop, foundry and forge and the erecting shop with its overheard travelling cranes. Over there was the railway’s own cottage hospital, gym, 1,100-seat dining room and, all importantly, the Mechanics Institute (since demolished) where skilled working men learned the latest in engineering and technology.

The first handsome red brick building on the way into the works was Rivington House (a survivor), where Aspinall had his drawing office and laboratories. The entire works, powered by gas and electricity of its own making, was threaded through by a 7½ mile narrow-gauge railway, its trains steaming in and out of and in between the regimented rows of hard working sheds fetching and carrying tools, parts and personnel.

Suggested reading

It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By niall Gooch

Britain’s brightest young engineering talent made a beeline for Horwich, attracted by Aspinall’s innovative and and purposeful regime. Among them were four future Chief Mechanical Engineers of the Big Four railways that swallowed up companies like the Lancashire and Yorkshire after the 1923 “grouping” of the nation’s mainlines. These were George Hughes and Henry Fowler (both LMS), Richard Maunsell (Southern) and Nigel Gresley (LNER) of Flying Scotsman and Mallard fame.

Like Aspinall, Gresley had been apprenticed to the London and North Western Railway under Francis Webb at Crewe before moving to Horwich. At the 1919 dinner held in Crewe Works for former Webb apprentices, these two huge talents sang the Crewe Works Song together:

Last night I lay a sleeping
There came a dream to me –
I stood within a Steam Shed,
A marvellous shed to see.
The walls were clean and spotless,
And smoke troughs white as snow,
And not a spot of grease was seen
Upon the pits below.

 O Loco Men! O Loco Men!
Shout loud for well ye may –
‘Twas the Blessed Steam Shed of Paradise
We all shall see someday.

 One famous Horwich apprentice took off in another direction. This was Alliot Verdon-Roe, to whose aviation company founded in Manchester in 1910 we owe the RAF’s Second World War four-engine Avro Lancaster bomber and the Cold War Vulcan delta-wing jet. During the two world wars, Horwich Works made, among other materiel, artillery shells, field guns and tanks.

Given this distinguished history, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Bolton Council would more than cherish the site of Horwich Works. The council did agree to a Conservation Area Management Plan in 2006, yet this seems to have evaporated since then like steam through a safety valve. As local residents have noted, the Loco Works conservation area must be one of the only conservation areas in the country in the throes of demolition.

Suggested reading

Let the state demolish bad new buildings

By Peter Franklin

Such lack of vision. If the local council and all who work for and with it had only thought of re-using this great building complex imaginatively, it could have been the hub of forward looking industrial enterprise and housing living up to its past. The buildings could have been transformed into workshops, laboratories, test centres, hi-tech offices, spacious and beautiful homes, shops, a clinic, a school, a contemporary technical college. New houses, at all prices, could have been of designs living up to those of Aspinall and Gresley.

People living here might have walked to work, shopped within minutes of their front doors and be proud to live in a place visitors would come to see, a Northern Powerhouse, as exciting and as moving any towns or cities boasting great architecture. Abbeys. Cathedrals. Innovative industrial and scientific complexes.

Instead, they have been given suburban sprawl, what will surely be congested roads and, at Rivington Chase, little more than a folk memory of a Horwich of industrial might, invention and skill.