Diary – 29 May 2004

I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in their one-way systems and in the architecture of their civic and municipal buildings. By contrast, some of the English town centres seem to have been structured by saboteurs bent on uglifying them. One regularly finds a 21st-century monstrosity built out of giant glass eggshells sitting next to a classic 16th-century steepled church, which is in turn adjacent to a concrete bunker. I thought town councils were particular about the way their towns looked, but after 11 weeks witnessing the lunacy with which town planners have embraced every faint architectural breeze that has wafted through the last four decades I’m no longer sure about that.