Tom Tugendhat: belief

Transcript context

…How is it we ensure we get YIMBY but don’t repeat the mistakes of the 1970s when, say, a Christopher Wren church is destroyed. Look, I think that’s exactly right. You don’t need me to tell you this, but you see the same in New York. The destruction of Grand — not Grand Central, the other one, Penn State — Pennsylvania Street Station was appalling. And you see it in the attempt to destroy — thank God, that was resisted by Betjeman — but the attempt to destroy St. Pancras Station was something that was done, the destruction of Euston Station. We’ve seen some really appalling acts of vandalism. In fact, the king was one of the first people to criticize it in various speeches in the 1980s, and at the time, he was constantly referred to as a young fogey. Now he seems to have been rather more prescient than I think people recognized at the time. One of the things that we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to make sure that we’re building beautiful. There’s a really interesting piece of work being done by a guy called Nicholas Boys Smith on — Create Streets is his project, and it’s about building beautiful. It’s amazing. When you set out beautiful design codes, when you set out buildings that really add to the environment, people don’t object so much. It’s hardly surprising that if you’re going to build some modernist monstrosity next to my house, I might object. If you’re going to build some Georgian villas that add to the feeling of the area, then I may feel that you are increasing the value of my house, not diminishing it. What makes Kent, which is where you’re based, special in the history of England, as you see it?…

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