Why nobody should care if you're offended

If you find this offensive, you're the one with the problem

At the weekend, thousands of people took part in protests after a woman who was breastfeeding in public was photographed by an anonymous individual, who then posted the picture on the internet, labeling her a “tramp”.

Most people have responded in the appropriate manner – also condemning the anonymous coward – although some have suggested she should feed her child in a toilet.

Well, yes – you’d eat your dinner in a public bog too, wouldn’t you?

I detect a common sense deficit.

It’s not clear who took or posted the picture and comment – and in many ways, it’s not the point.

Whoever they are, they’re an anonymous coward – simple as.

It’s not guaranteed that they were male, either.

As the BBC report of Saturday’s protests noted:

Be offended – be very offended

“Cydney Davis, who organised an event in Milton Keynes, said she had also encountered negative comments while breastfeeding.

“I was in a restaurant and I was asked by an elderly lady to use a blanket because it was disturbing her eating,” she said ...

“I asked the lady if she’d like to eat her dinner under a blanket instead. She just walked away and very quickly finished her meal and left the restaurant, but that was her choice.”

Full report

Male or female, these are people who spend their lives looking for something to be offended about.

And it is the perfect illustration of why there should never be any form of law against offence or any idea that anyone has a right not to be offended.

You have a mother who, finding that her infant is hungry while she’s out shopping, discretely finds a place to feed the child.

There is nothing more natural in the world.

Yet someone thinks it’s bad. And on the basis of the quote above, they’re not alone.

‘Oh, get out of my face with your nasty, natural behaviour!’

Presumably they can’t see titties without thinking about sex – either in a prurient or a puritanical manner.

Tramp? (A Poem for Emily Slough) is a perfect riposte to their cretinism.

Offended people burning books and CDs, Pakistan

But we’re on an increasing path toward pandering to anyone and everyone who wants to be offended – not least in terms of religion, where it seems that believing in some form of a god or gods has to be treated as though it were a special gift.

And since any and all gods have proved singularly incapable of showing their own indignation at anyone saying naughty things about them, their followers have to step up to the mark and show their own offense.

In 1989, we had Muslims burning The Satanic Verses (a brilliant novel that I very much doubt any of them had bothered to read) and in 2001, Christians burned Harry Potter books (‘it’s witchcraft, I tells thee!’).

Hands up children – who else burned books that they didn’t like?

Then there are the cartoonists who have been murdered for depicting a particular flavour of supposedly divine being.

In 2004, Sikhs rioted in Birmingham because they objected to Behzti, a play by a Sikh writer. The play was closed.

In 2005, Christians sent death threats to the BBC when Auntie decided to screen Jerry Springer: The Opera, after being stirred up by Rupert Murdoch’s rag the Sun and the equally odious Daily Mail, both of which will condemn others taking offence but whip it up when it suits their own agendas.

How odd that the offended in that case never seem to have objected to the Jerry Springer show itself, and the entire range of similarly vile, 21^st century freak shows that exploit people’s problems for profit.

In 2008, Waterstones in Cardiff cancelled a poetry book launch by Patrick Jones, calling it “prudent” after a campaign by Christian Voice, which also called on the chain to stop selling the book because Jones is critical of religion in general and writes about that.

Offended people burning books, USA

In February this year, there was an outcry at London’s South Bank University when non-religious students advertised the secular society with a poster depicting a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster version of Michelangel’s iconic Creation of Adam fresco.

Initially, the student union claimed that Adam’s genitals were the problem – too small, perhaps? – before admitting that the posters were removed on the grounds that they caused religious offence.

If god is the creator of everything, you wonder how we ever got a sense of humour.

And only last week, BBC3 caved in when it cut a scheduled question on Islam and homosexuality from a programme that was being filmed at Birmingham Central Mosque.

The chairman of the mosque said it was unhappy about the planned question; the BBC said that the mosque had never raised any issues, but had received threats late on. It subsequently emerged that the same mosque chairman is a senior official in The Islamic Party of Britain, which thinks gays should be executed.

Offended people burning books, Berlin

Whatever actually happened, the decision was effectively censorship – and particularly ironic given that the programme was called Free Speech.

There’s the political-religious variety of offence too: take arch-Zionists, who seek to shout down any criticism of the state of Israel by accusing its critics of anti-semitism. And everyone knows how offensive that is, so people retreat from the subject out of fear of being thus tarnished. Which is, of course, entirely the point.

Mind, on a positive note, one thing managed to create common cause between Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders in Israel in 2006, as they set off in joint squealing at the idea of World Pride being held in the area.

One rabbi in the good ole US of A (which has no shortage of its own intolerant religious bigots) threatened ‘blood on the streets’ over the issue. The parade didn’t take place.

According to news agency Agence France-Presse, one “radical” Jewish group started handing out leaflets around Jerusalem, offering a 20,000-shekel (£2,659) reward to anyone who “kills a sodomist”. The police did nothing.

So, girls and boys: now you know how to stop something that offends you being discussed or taking place. Squeal and threaten, whether it’s with violence or taboo labels. And when in real doubt, offer to pay someone else to murder people or campaign in political parties that want gays executed.

Strange how none of them seem content to rely on their god sorting it all out in the afterlife, isn’t it?

In a further irony: in recent years we’re seen the obscene demonisation of disabled people in this nation of ours – yet those who choose to believe in something for which there is not a single, solitary shred of evidence have to be treated increasingly with kid gloves.

And the issue of offence is not just about those with tender religious souls who need to defend their god.

We also have increasing numbers of situations where people are imprisoned for posting unpleasant messages in social media.

Since when did we start jailing people for saying something that we don’t like?

Yes, some of it can be very nasty indeed, but jailing people for it? Really?

How many times can we now read of police looking into what someone posted on Twitter?

It’s quite simple: the police should only look into something if there is a real and serious physical threat, or if a pattern of behaviour occurs that could constitute bullying and put a vulnerable person at risk.

Bad taste isn’t a crime. Yet.

Thank the gods that don’t exist. 

More widely, should we censor groups that we don’t like?

If someone wants to say that they dislike gays or black people – let them. If they want to say that their invisible friend is a bit cross about something, let them.

As long as someone is not spreading material that is directly intended to incite criminal behaviour, then no – we should not censor them.

And yes – that means that fascists and religious fruitcakes alike have their right to free speech too, because that’s what free speech means, not just allowing those who doesn’t offend you personally to have their voice.

At a time when more and more of the mainstream media is owned and controlled by people who have no interest in promoting serious public discourse but only their own agendas and assorted lies; at a time when we are more spied on than ever; at a time when government is using the law to gag vast swathes of organisations across the land – at such a time, we need to defend any idea of free speech more and more vigilantly.

And giving in to cretins and cowards who go looking for something to be offended by is only the way onto a slippery slope.

After all – who knows how long it then becomes before we cannot, for instance, openly criticise whoever is in No 10 or the police or any other institution?

Angela Lansbury lights up London

Dame Angela gets into the spirit of things

The West End has not seen crowds queuing outside a stage door as they are at the Gielgud Theatre for many a year, according to some.

In which case, they clearly didn’t see the crowds waiting to catch a glimpse of Daniel Radcliffe or Jude Law after The Cripple of Inishmaan and Henry V respectively.

But it says an awful lot about the star billing of Dame Angela Lansbury that the crowds outside the venue for Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit have been so large that barriers have been required.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Coward’s farce features a writer, Charles Condomine, who invites a medium to his house for an evening, as part of his research for a new novel.

Unfortunately, although he, his wife Ruth and their neighbours, the Bradmans, are set for a good, sceptical giggle, the séance goes awry when Madame Arcarti actually brings forth the ghost of Elvira, Condomine’s dead first wife.

Since nobody else can see or hear her, he initially passes his own startled reaction off as a bit of a wheeze, but Elvira has a plan of her own in mind.

Suffice it to say that mayhem ensues.

This revival is an unalloyed pleasure. While Lansbury is the big name here, there is not a weak member of the cast.

Although most of the names may not be household ones, the rest of the cast is stacked with experience – apart from Patsy Ferran as the maid, Edith, for whom this marks her professional debut.

She is, though, absolutely wonderful, and shows both great comic timing and skill in physical comedy.

Simon Jones and Serena Evans as the Bradmans make the most of the most limited roles in the piece, while Jemima Rooper as Elvira, Charles Edwards as Charles and Janie Dee as Ruth are all wonderful.

And then there is Dame Angela herself.

I booked primarily because of this opportunity – it’s 40 years since she last graced a stage in her home country; little less than the time since I was taken to the cinema to see Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Her performance then as Eglantine Price, a sort of prototype Harry Potter, gave me enormous pleasure at the time and has continued to do so down the subsequent decades.

There have been films and TV and theatre aplenty since then. She has ranged from Cold War villainess Mrs Iselin in  The Manchurian Candidate, to light-hearted detective fiction writer and crime solver Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, to starring in Broadway musicals from Mame to the original version of Stephen Sondheim’s chamber opera, Sweeney Todd, to voicing a tea pot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

Why wouldn’t you love her?

Anyway, she doesn’t disappoint. Great presence, exemplary timing and wow, delightful physical comedy – at 88!

Her Arcarti is a deliciously dotty early hippy – who quaffs martinis in seconds and is addicted to cucumber sandwiches.

Bedknobs & Broomsticks: my falling-for-Angela moment

Director Michael Blakemore, who directed her in the same role on Broadway in 2009 – for which she one of her five Tonys – does a magnificent job here.

Coward’s comedy relies on absolutely perfect timing – and that’s what we experienced.

Blakemore has also made a subtle but very effective decision not to have the cast speaking in the sort of overly clipped tones that one associates with the writer himself.

Yes, it’s all proper Home Counties accents, but that does mean it has a touch less obvious theatricality about it.

And a final note of praise for the design and costumes by Simon Higlett, Bill Butler and Martin Pakledinaz. Goodness – the gorgeous lilac velvet number worn by Ruth in the opening scenes is almost enough to make me renounce my inner beach bum!

Blithe Spirit may be light as a feather – it cheered audiences up throughout most of WWII – but goodness, life is far too short to be perpetually serious. And laughter is a wonderful medicine.

Since Lansbury – along with that other British National Treasure, Julie Andrews – has been labeled ‘high kitsch’ by some who, presumably, consider themselves as being part of a cultural elite, I conclude here with a link to footage from the 1987 Tony Awards, together with Bea Arthur, reprising their duet, Bosom Buddies, from Mame.

After all, if Dame Julie is ‘high kitsch’, there can be no doubt that Bea qualifies too, and if I love them all and that makes me a lover of ‘high kitsch’, then so bloody be it.

And that clip is a perfect example of why any snobbery over such entertainment is totally misplaced.

* Blithe Spirit is at the Gielgud Theatre, London, and is now booking until 7 June.

Never felt more like singin' the Blues

Vincent and the boys enjoy the win

Three days down the line and I’m still singin’ the Blues – the Blues in question being Manchester City, who triumphed in the League Cup final (or the Capital One Cup Final if you insist on the sponsored version) at Wembley on Sunday afternoon.

Yes, I know that it was ‘only’ Sunderland (which is massively unfair on them), but it was a match taken seriously by both teams and by both sets of fans and which, for those reasons alone, brought prestige back to a competition that, in recent years, has suffered because some clubs have treated it as a sideshow to the main events of the title and the FA Cup.

We last won it in 1976 – 2-1 against another North East team, Newcastle, with goals from Peter Barnes and a memorable overhead kick from Denis Tueart: I still have the press cuttings in a scrapbook.

That was a victory that marked the end of the good times, though, followed as it was by a silverware drought that lasted until the FA Cup final of 2011.

With last season’s FA Cup final defeat by Wigan all too fresh in the memory, the Black Cats’ goal on 10 minutes did nothing to soothe nerves.

It’s a good thing that I have short hair because otherwise I’d have been tearing it out for an hour.

‘No, no, no – not again! Please no!’

I arrived in good time and took my time wandering up Wembley Way, sampling the atmosphere. No silly jester hat this time – it was probably why we lost in May.

Superstition plays a role on such days: coffee in my ‘City ’til I die’ match day mug first thing in the morning is an established ritual.

Up in the gods to watch the gods

This time, with yet more rain promised and greyness already evident, I attired myself in navy cords, a hooded sweatshirt and a home shirt (Zabaleta on the back). This is not a particularly fetching look for anyone of my shape, but since I was determined to wear colours and since I’d already tried the shirt underneath a hooded sweatshirt look for the Barcelona game (which we lost) I wasn’t repeating that mistake.

Then for the City dog tags, the earring and the two rings – one of which, a 1970s enamel crest on a stainless steel band – was given to me as a Christmas present by friends at Fairfield High School for Girls, which just happens to be up the road from where the current stadium is.

That one has enormous sentimental value – I refused an offer of a tenner for it some years ago, when a tenner would have been very welcome – and only comes out for the really, really big games.

A baseball cap (Champions’ League) topped off the ensemble – as I said, no wearing that blue and white jester hat again – together with a Capital One Cup Final scarf that I’d picked up at the Etihad a couple of weeks ago, since it was cheaper than anything that the stalls on Wembley Way could offer.

The atmosphere was brilliant – none of the pessimism and doubt that City fans were feeling last May even before we made it into the stadium.

The only real question on people’s lips was whether Manuel Pellegrini was right to opt for Costel Pantilimon in goal rather than Joe Hart – a slightly odd thing to be asking when Roberto Mancini’s dropping of Pants on the morning of the Cup Final (and then sending one of the junior coaching staff to tell him) had almost certainly been one factor in what happened that day.

If you’re going to operate a squad – and with so many matches in so many competitions in a single season, you have to – then you don’t drop players when they’ve got you to a final.

Anyway, once inside the stadium, a pint of Tetleys was slowly imbibed while gazing outside.

At one point, a Virgin Pendolino sped past in the near distance, on its way north. It reminded me of all those trips I’d made in that direction, glancing to the right as we passed Wembley and uttering a silent prayer that I’d eventually get a chance to see City play there in a final for a proper trophy.

Mike Doyle with the League Cup in 1976

And here I was, on a third visit to the stadium in four years – the second for an actual final.

But however much this is a new incarnation of the Blues, the history remains.

In the fourth minute, in honour of former skipper Mike Doyle, who lifted that last League Cup in ’76, fans stood to applaud the man who died in 2011.

And nicely done by Wembley for putting up a picture of him on the big screens too.

Then, at the end, as I was leaving, people were taking it in turns to ring a very special bell outside.

Helen ‘The Bell’ Turner was a lifelong City fan who sold flowers outside Manchester Royal Infirmary, raised loads of money for charity, and carried a school bell with her to all games, where she rang it with a vengeance.

She stood behind the goal and would chat with ’keeper Joe Corrigan, giving him a sprig of heather before each match.

She was so much a part of the club that she ‘rang out’ the final game at Maine Road and, when she died in 2005, there was a minute’s silence for her.

And back on that League Cup Final day in 1976, memorable pictures attest to her joining the team on their lap of honour with the trophy.

Mike and Helen – just two indicators of how City has ‘no history’, according to some who resent our recent change in fortunes.

Anyway, back to the present – or the rather more recent past, as it is now.

Sunderland’s goal – well taken by Fabio Borini – came six minutes after that tribute, and I spent the following 60 minutes in hair-tearing mode, screaming at the team (and occasionally the ref) and frequently with palms pressed to brow in anguish.

Asa Hartford and Helen the Bell with the trophy in '76

Logic stated that, unlike last season’s FA Cup Final, the opposition had scored early and time was on our side, but logic and emotion are not necessarily the best of bedfellows.

Everything changed, though, inside two second-half minutes.

The Engineer claims not to have said much more at half time than ‘stay calm and patient’, but his charges came out a different team.

And 10 minutes into the second stanza, up stepped Yaya Touré to curl home a miracle shot (at my end of the pitch) from all of 30 yards out.

Then, just a minute later, Samir Nasri gave us the lead with another spectacular strike.

Not, of course, that it was ever going to be comfortable.

Moments of looking fragile at the back were only finally put to bed when Jesús Navas made it 3-1 on 90 minutes.

What a friend we have in Jesús.

Especially on a Sunday.

Now the celebrations could really begin.

Oh, the joy of seeing Vincent Kompany lift a pot at Wembley!

Most of the Sunderland fans stayed for the presentation and afterwards, as we were all slowly trooping out of the stadium, we applauded them and they applauded us.

They’re fantastic fans and helped create a really marvellous atmosphere: a credit to their club and their city.

Not that you’d have got that impression the night before from Tory MP Robert Halfon, who tweeted in disgust that they’d ‘taken over’ Covent Garden and turned it into a “cesspit”.

How dare those dreadful northern oiks come down to the Big Smoke to wreck your night out, eh Bobby?

The public-school educated politician has since apologised for calling Sunderland fans “scumbags”. He, however, remains a plonker.

I joined friends for a spot of post-match partying – although, in ridiculously middle-aged style, I was still home by 9.30pm.

It had been another day of sharp emotions: of dramatic highs and crazy lows.

But goodness: after all the years where what we mostly worried about was whether we could avoid relegation – and goodness, I shed a tear or two in those times – and where, more than once, we rescued defeat from the jaws of victory, how wonderful to be there, at Wembley, to see the Blues lift a serious trophy once again.

And on Wednesday night, I’m pleased to report that my voice has recovered.

Well ... almost.

Still life in the photographic age

Peppers, 2010

When you’re sitting inside on a gloomy, wet weekend and you don’t know what to paint or draw, the answer may be nearer at hand than you imagine.

Still life is a gift for anyone wanting to paint, draw or even photograph – and as a genre, it has a remarkable capacity to make some mundane, domestic items look interesting.

With origins in ancient times – there are still life paintings on the walls of Egyptian tombs – still life as a genre reached a pinnacle in the 16th and 17th centuries, not least in the hands of Flemish and Dutch artists.

Mind, that could be taken to read that nothing after that period was much cop, but you only need to look at the vast number of still life paintings by Cézanne to realise that that was not the case.

And modernity didn’t ditch the still life, but simply found new ways to represent it, from Braque’s Cubist canvases on, while photographers have also realised that you can do great things with everyday objects.

With just a simple, single light source, you can even create a picture that conjures up those classic paintings of yore with their rich, velvet-dark backgrounds.

The Ukulele, 2010

The vanitas, as a sub genre of still life, also has a place in today’s world, although we probably wouldn’t see it in quite the same way, while there have been plenty of street artists who have executed superb Trompe-l’œils – the sort that aim to make you think you’re about to plunge off the pavement and into a vast hole that’ll send you to Dantean depths.

From a personal perspective, it was photography that led me into still life – although I’d regularly drawn, in painful detail, single objects when studying art at school.

But what makes still life work is the arrangements you use and not simply how you paint or photograph any objects.

It pretty much goes without saying that fruit and flowers were popular subjects for still life paintings, and they remain so.

Food has also often been popular – no, ‘food porn’ isn’t as new as some might imagine.

The history of representations of food in art is itself interesting. In the case of those Egyptian tomb paintings mentioned earlier, they often featured food, which was believed to transform into the real thing in the afterlife, thus providing the deceased with sustenance on their journey.

Pears, 2009

But later in Western art, many paintings featured food in a moral sense – as an indicator of something related to sin and its dangers.

Some of those paintings are hilarious, since they seem to have been executed with a sense of great irony.

When the food looks beautiful and the partying in the background shows everyone having fun, it’s difficult to believe that the artist was entirely convinced that he was painting all this to show that it was all bad.

One is rather inclined to believe that the ‘moral’ aspect of such paintings was really just an excuse to represent interesting subjects such as food or even partying – just as early landscapes were painting around religious subjects, which themselves finally diminished and diminished until we were left with entirely secular representations of the world around us.

You could extend this argument to the vanitas sub genre: after all, you might be saying that good food and wine and music mean nothing when it comes to the final reckoning of death, but if you’re doing so in a way that shows off your skills as an artist to an incredibly high degree, then an element of pride seems rather to have crept in to the equation.

Still life has, historically, been considered as one of the poorer relations when it comes to the painted subject, but it has always been popular with buyers, and when you consider the roster of artists who have painted still lives, then it’s hard to see that as much other than a form of snobbery.

Glasses, 2013

After all, when you can list a roll call of the likes of Rembrandt, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso as creators of still life works, it’s rather difficult to maintain an idea of the still life as artistically inferior. And van Gogh’s Sunflowers remain some of the best-known and most loved paintings in the world.

These days, a certain snobbery exists about photography – or more accurately, about ‘Photoshopping’.

The advent of cameras had a huge impact on the path of art history, as they removed a sense of painting as being the only way that you could visually record images for posterity.

Once that had gone, it freed artists (as opposed to photographers) to look for ways to represent other elements of life than the straightforward figurative image – for example, the Fauves trying to convey an emotional response to a scene rather than present a photographic record of it.

Cup and saucer and stripes, 2010

And now photographers are altering their images too to create something beyond what the lens cannot capture.

Yet alteration of an image on a computer is not new – photographers used all sorts of techniques in the developing lab to create different effects – and it’s really only an issue if you are seeking to present a photographed image as a true record of something, so in reportage, for instance, or in terms of the moral argument about digital alteration presenting ideas of supposedly ideal, but impossible, bodies.

But even a sub-editor’s crop of a picture for the page is an act of alteration – a choice made for all sorts of reasons, not least the purely practical, but also involving the aesthetic, the political and many more.

Otherwise, alteration of digital images is simply another part of creating a final picture.

The still life may never have enjoyed the status of the genres above it – history paintings were at the top of that particular tree – but, unlike those, it has remained a constant throughout art history and one could even suggest that the most modern installations to be found in contemporary art are themselves little more than large, 3-D still lives.

Truffle, 2010

The photographs that I’ve posted here are all examples of modern, photographed still lives.

Some have been worked on heavily – others not.

But briefly:

Pears is one I shot in 2009, quite early into my experiments. It uses two proper fruits and a glass one. The latter is from Isle of Wight Glass – my mother has been buying me pieces as presents for some years and it’s very lovely stuff. A small mirror underneath the three pears provided the reflection, and it took a fair amount of Photoshop work to achieve the finished effect.

The Ukulele also took a lot of post-production. It’s sepia tinted but, I think, holds within it the suggestion of a story.

You might, by now, have sussed that I do rather like dramatic light.

Peppers is nothing short of food porn – and why not? Like most of the rest of these pictures, it was shot on a desk, with a single Lidl-bought lamp for the lighting, on a black t-shirt to give me the basic background, which was then deepened and smoothed out on the computer. I keep meaning to turn this into an art poster. The translucent quality is something I’m particularly pleased with.

76 Trombones, 2012

Cup and saucer and stripes was not set up, but grabbed when I was waiting in an apparently bland meeting room to doing something else. It seems to me to illustrate perfectly how you can get an interesting photograph from something that you’d barely imagine could look so good. There’s also almost no processing involved.

Truffle, on the other hand, was both carefully lit and carefully processed to give the reminder of that ‘old’ look. It also involved a number of components and a more complex composition.

76 trombones is not, of course, a single trombone – let alone many. But it made me think of Robert Preston and The Music Man for what should be obvious reasons. It’s unique among this selection in that it was shot with an iPhone when an entirely unexpected opportunity materialised. And yes, it’s highly processed – right down to the spot colour, which is not an effect that should be overdone, but works well here.

Glasses was grabbed during a shoot that had nothing to do with glasses, but is an example of how you can shapes and patterns and textures in the remarkably ordinary. It isn’t actually a black and white image – that’s just how it came out in colour.

So there you are: if you fancy a spot of painting or drawing or photography and you’re stymied for a subject: have a look around: you may be surprised at just what will make a good subject.

• All photographs © Amanda Kendal

Save us from faux architecture

The Brunswick Centre

An elegant ramble into Bloomsbury yesterday evening for a tonsorial tidy up brought me alongside the Brunswick Centre – now fashionably rebranded as The Brunswick.

This icon of the concrete brutalist style was designed in the mid-1960s by Patrick Hodgkinson, based on studies by Leslie Martin, and was built between 1967 and 1972.

It differs from many brutalist buildings primarily in having been whitewashed, which gives it a slightly gentler appearance than, say, the National Theatre.

Back in the 1990s, I resided there for 18 months, so can say from experience that it is a perfectly decent place in which to live – the brutalism does not brutalise or oppress.

Gherkin reflections

I continue to appreciate its intriguing lines and forms: it’s expanse, seen against a blue sky (yes, rare I know) is bold and varied and not at all intimidating.

Indeed, if there’s any personal mystery for me, it’s why such a building still upsets some people so much.

Mind, that could take us right back to the National Theatre, which was designed by Sir Denys Lasdun and Peter Softley, and built between 1963 and 1976.

For all the criticisms of it – including the notorious denunciation of it being like a nuclear power station from that self-proclaimed guardian of our country’s architecture, Prince Charles – it found perhaps rather unexpected fans.

Of all people, that archetypal old pastoralist, Sir John Betjeman, wrote to Lasdun declaring that he “gasped with delight at the cube of your theatre in the pale blue sky and a glimpse of St Paul’s to the south of it. It is a lovely work and so good from so many angles ... it has that inevitable and finished look that great work does.”

Camden Town Hall

I have always liked the National – again, lines and angles: shapes that draw you in, that reflect light and absorb shadow to create yet further angles and planes.

These buildings seem to me, even now, to represent a bold and clea/n and optimistic future: I cannot see in them anything to depress.

What is depressing is Paternoster Square and its ilk: both desperately banal and simply desperate – the latter, in its weaning effort to placate the likes of Charlie Windsor and to somehow blend in with Wren’s magnificent cathedral next door.

Yet all it does it to conjure words such as ‘faux’ and ‘pastiche’, just as does Charles’s vanity town, Poundbury, which even includes pre-bricked-up windows designed into the new-old buildings.

Against Wren, they look all the poorer. I’d have given the space over to the likes of Richard Rodgers or Norman Foster and said: ‘go for it’. And then you might have got a world-class, iconic building.

Instead, it’s every bit as bad as those ghastly supermarkets that attempt to ape an old-fashioned look in their attempts to con people into believing that what is inside has some sort of culinary authenticity.

Kemble Tower

But the prime question remains: just why are so many people so apparently intimidated by buildings that divert from suburban convention?

None of this is to suggest that all modern buildings are brilliant, but it’s errant nonsense to suggest that they’re all bad.

And concrete brutalism is no different.

There’s a fair old amount of it around: the Barbican in London is but one more example – another immensely successful one, with its public spaces, water features and gardens giving it a sense of calm amid the wider City.

The Lloyd's Building

That wider City is a fascinating place to ramble if you’re remotely interested in architecture. In a small area, it possesses at once everything that is worst about British modern buildings and everything that is best.

In one tiny area, we have Norman Foster’s glorious ‘Gherkin’ – an elegant, spiraling tower – and his Willis Building, another monument to the power of glass and steel.

In the same area are Richard Rodgers’s Lloyd’s Building and now his new ‘Cheesegrater’, soaring into the sky above.

As architectural competitions go, this is really very good.

On the other hand, only a short distance away is the ghastly ‘Walkie-Talkie’ building and, just over the river, in an isolation that highlights its inappropriateness, the Shard, which now dominates every view over the area.

Willis Building (Lloyd's, to the right)

And for a different take, there is Broadgate, with more of those pretend columns and mock, mock invocations of classical styles.

Why the fear of the new?

The old and the new can coexist and compliment each other perfectly.

The British Museum – now graced with Foster’s magnificent inner court that surrounds and covers the original Reading Room, and soon to see an extension by Rodgera – is one such example.

The new UNISON building on Euston Road, which has sensitively incorporated the old Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women into a new structure, is another.

Architecture is ultimately about living and about our wider aspirations.

To desperately try to remain living in the past limits us all.

And to pretend that modern architecture, when done well, cannot hit the heights, is clearly the folly of rather limited minds.

• All photographs © Amanda Kendal