Originally published November 2021.
It’s not often that I agree with Donald Trump, but on one thing he is surely right; the UK’s new American Embassy in Nine Elms was a “lousy deal”. From Grosvenor Square to Nine Elms was quite a downgrade.
The building looked rather good in the architect’s CGIs, but the actualité looks like a child’s plastic toy for which the adjective cheap might have been invented. Eero Saarinen’s Grosvenor Square embassy has been listed, but one would have difficulty imagining a similar destiny for the current building, though stranger things have happened. Apparently, when the first plans went in front of the Wandsworth Planning Committee, there was a large area surrounding the building labeled ‘kill zone’, which didn’t go down particularly well….
Perhaps I’m being unfair. There are many worse buildings in Nine Elms – most of them, in fact. Some – particularly next to the New Covent Garden flower market – are a packed mass of towers, built only feet away from one another with little sense of place or an attempt at architectural excellence or the creation of open spaces that have made the area around King’s Cross such a great example of urban regeneration.
When the so-called Linear Park, that is due to run down the length of Nine Elms, is finished maybe it will give Nine Elms the lungs it needs, but the scale of the new towers is likely to make it a man-made canyon where the sun will struggle to shine.
The rot set in early with the St George’s Wharf Tower – nodded through by John Prescott – which now dominates the view up and down river for miles. No elegant planes of glass, subtly reflecting light as in the Shard, this is a phallic monster with all the delicacy of a Lego sledgehammer. The Versace Tower – billed as the ultimate in luxurious living, with an interior that will be in the best possible good taste – is an absent-minded pile of shapes set between three lanes of traffic and multiple railway lines. Have any of the buyers actually seen it? How could all this have happened?
“Developers making a quick buck selling to unsuspecting Asian buyers on the basis of CGIs”
Gerrymandering by the Wandsworth Conservative council is one uncharitable explanation. A mayor with a short attention span is another, but that didn’t stop him becoming prime minister. Developers making a quick buck selling to unsuspecting Asian buyers on the basis of CGIs and a stretched definition of prime must be one answer. London will have to learn to live with it as these are residential buildings now held in multiple ownership, not offices that get torn down every other generation and rebuilt. The Nine Elms we now have is here forever, unfortunately.
A friend of mine lost his father recently. When he was going through his father’s papers he came across his own school fees from the 1970s. He took these and accounted for inflation (he is a trained accountant) to see what the real rise in private school fees has been over the past 50 years. A year at a private boarding school now costs around £40,000. The equivalent then (in today’s money) was £12,500. So in real terms the cost has gone up by over three times. How come? An arms race in facilities is surely one. Pension and staff costs another. But three times? It does explain how doctors and other professionals earning ‘normal’ salaries were able to educate their children privately back in those days. Now you have to be a Chinese software billionaire, work 80 hours a week in the City or be the lucky recipient of an inheritance.
One of the unalloyed joys of the modern age is digital music. You can download anything you want and either buy it or stream it on Spotify. You don’t have to buy a turgid album to get to the one or two songs that you like. You can arrange them in any order you choose. There are no scratches or hiss and the quality remains as good as when you first acquired it. Any idiot can become a half-competent DJ. You can send any song you like to anyone instantly – and you don’t have to haul around anything physical other than a smartphone and a pair of headphones. What’s not to like?
Something, clearly, as there is still a market for vinyl and, extraordinarily, cassettes. Vinyl I can only sort of understand. I get the album covers and the remembered pleasure of peeling the plastic off a new purchase and the gleaming virginity of the shiny black surface. After that it was furred up needles, scratches and the slow slide downhill, particularly the last inside track that wore out faster than the outside. And I don’t miss the carrying boxes. The aficionados of vinyl insist that there is a ‘warmer’ sound. Is that really worth all the downsides?
But cassettes? Cassettes? These were truly the devil’s work with only two merits: they were small and mobile – music came to the car and on holiday. Other than that they were awful: the hiss and the countless minutes spent rewinding or forwarding only to find you had gone the wrong way; the muddy sound and the way the the tape sooner or later jammed in the mechanism and often broke; the search for a hexagonal pencil or biro to wind the tape back in; the plastic cases where the hinge inevitably broke; and the album art reduced to an insignificant thumbnail. CDs were an aural joy when they arrived, but all the downsides of portability and slavery to the album remained.
Yet apparently cassettes are making a comeback. With whom? Surely no one with a memory would ever go back to them. It can only be the same sort of people, under the age of 45, who join the Hillman Imp Club, filled with the odd desire to feel what the 70s were like. The world is a big place filled with odd people and surely some of the oddest must be cassette nuts.
