House style
Sir: How quaint that Simon Jenkins writes ‘working class’ without irony (‘Who do you Trust?’, 30 October). He must be among the very last to do so. But then he is chairman of that stultified repository of selective memory, the National Trust. I wonder why he thinks ‘working class’ means stupid.
Jenkins, of course, struggles under the terrible burden of always being right. But let’s see if a little astute correction might deflate the bubble of embracing self-love he so very complacently inhabits.
Any event-organiser knows that free drinks (and possibly live sex plus public executions) will get the attendance numbers up. It’s easy. But there are higher goals than mere numerical popularity.
Jenkins’s programme of bringing ‘life’ to National Trust properties lacks intellectual rigour or historical method. He rejects scrutiny and study of buildings in favour of patronising vulgarity. Children dancing? Oh, for goodness sake! Sick bag.
There is a very clear definition of what is ‘low-brow’. It’s an appeal to vicarious contact with celebrity, an inability to conceptualise and a need for gross and immediate gratification. People who understand architecture accuse Jenkins of Disneyfication. Jenkins says Disney is an excellent model. But Disney trades in brainless simulacra, trashy and slick versions of things that never were. There is nothing authentic about Disney. Imagine explaining Jenkins’s inflated caterpillar to James Lees-Milne.
Soon, in the Jenkins version, the ‘working class’ will drive to Knole, get a burger on entrance and watch a tableau of Sackville-West indiscretions set to a disco beat. This will be a travesty. And Simon Jenkins will be smug about it.
Stephen Bayley
By email
How to spot a floozy
Sir: I admire the spirit of perversity in Tanya Gold’s article (‘Only prigs wear mini-skirts’, 30 October), but she shouldn’t be allowed to get away with saying that women who dress like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey are the real ‘sex monsters’.
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