Highway To Heaven

‘ACOLYTES and supplicants of Tony Blair many not have their own religion yet, but in the meantime they can always do as He does and worship the car.

Nine out of ten of us now live in our cars

Forget the idea that rail is the future and that we’ll all be circumnavigating the word in ten minutes on super space jets, and know that the car is now more popular than a chauffeur at a Labour party conference.

So it is with little surprise and great pomp that we look to the Guardian’s cover and discover the identity of Britain’s best new public building.

The annual Prime Minister’s Better Public Building Award has been previously won by the Tate Modern, London, and among this year’s considerations were the “bagel” headquarters of GCGQ, a refurbished Trafalgar Square and a new medical school in Glasgow.

So to the winner. And the winner is…the A650 Bingley relief road.

The award from the Commission of Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) is in recognition of the structure’s wonderful dotted white lines and neat tarmac.

As Paul Finch, chairman of Cabe and one of the competition’s judges, says in the Independent: “As a society we are accepting the need for roads, but in a sense civilising the road and car by making them respond to the landscape.”

Hear! Hear! Amen to that. So now we see. But if you don’t, here’s Mr Finch once more, this time back in the Guardian.

“This is an award for building, the verb, not buildings the noun,” he explains.

Or bollocks the adjective and not bollocks the noun, as many would have it…’

Posted: 29th, October 2004 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink