When I saw the Crawley News on Wednesday my curiosity was piqued by the teaser on the front page which said “Library is branded ugliest building in Britain: page 10” and I was quite looking forward to getting to page 10.
I imagined it was a verdict from some relevent body like CABE or RIBA or a prominent design/architecture critic or authority like Jonathan Glancey. Either way it would be quite an acheivement for a building which has not been built yet.
So I reach page 10 and find that it was just a comment made by a Crawley councillor at a planning meeting. What an anti-climax! The thing about planning meetings is that at least half the members take special hyperbole booster injections before the meetings so that they can come up with such comments.
I can remember discussions about proposed apartment blocks attracting the opinion that the town was gradually turning into East Berlin. That is probably the second-funniest thing I ever heard in a council meeting and I can remember at the time trying to recall whether East Berlin was actually full of 23-unit, 3 storey blocks built of brick with pitched tile roofs, landscaping, 1.5 parking spaces per unit and an attached bike shelter.
So anyway, hyperbole is the language of planning meetings, where a second-storey addition of a bedroom will blot out the sunlight to half the town and a new one-bedroomed house will generate enough traffic to cause gridlock across three neighbourhoods, so I should have expected this.
Having said that, the new Tory intake seem to have introduced an element of understatement to balance it out a bit and I am indebted to the News for listing this little exchange:
Cllr Mortimer: The county want to give us Crawley college mark two. Crawley College is already the ugliest building in the whole of England and that is what they want to give us.
Cllr Bloom: We should mention that we are very unhappy with the design.
By the way, until the concrete shit-hole I work in is demolished I will take issue with any other building being described as the worst in the whole of England! Crawley College (the original building) is merely one of the ugliest buildings in Crawley, and still prettier than Broadfield Barton – even after its magical coat of blue paint.
Try the building I work in, the Legal & General head office in Kingswood. It looks like a cross between a Roman temple and Nazi Prisoner of War camp.
Anyway, anyone who can describe anything outside Birmingham city centre as ‘the worst building in Britain’ clearly hasn’t been there.
What about the office in London Road, by the roundabout near Crawley Fire Station ?!
For me, that’s more ugly than the College, Broadfield Barton and the new Library put together…it looks as though some useless DIY person (like me!) has just finished some bathroom tiling at home, and then set about this office with what was left !
Where would politics be without hyperbole? Every change around here (especially if it’s in the NHS) is destined to bring about the end of civilisation to judge by the letters in our local paper! Are you sure your Tory councillors are real politicians?
Richard, do you mean the place that was going to become our town’s first lap-dancing club, before they ran out of money?
The building I work in is square, made of breeze-blocks with a corrugated iron roof. It has neither heating nor air-conditioning so is cold in the winter and sauna-like in even a moderately warm summer. Still, it has improved from when the store originally opened apparantly as then it had brown and lime green walls and an orange carpet. Don’t you love the seventies?
That must really tempt the customers in. I think we should pay you a visit sometime – I always imagined you working in a nice modern climate-controlled mall.
I’ll see if we can go camping in the Yorkshire countryside next year instead of Dorset.
Owen, it’s the one by the traffic lights on the left – with bathroom tiles as a frontage – not used (unsurprising!) – was that the lap-dancers place ?