C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 5 ‘The Ombudsman’s investigation found that council officers did not seem to understand the description of the buildings in the listing; did not apply the legal definition of a listed building and so did not require an application for listed building consent; did not address themselves to the appropriate national planning policies and guidance; and did not notify English Heritage and the national amenity societies. ‘The reports on which the planning area committee made its decisions were deficient. In particular, the report on which it decided to approve demolitions and conversions of the listed buildings failed to correctly identify the buildings that were listed; to explain the general presumption in favour of preserving listed buildings; to clearly explain the proper tests for the committee to apply as set out in national Planning Policy Guidance 15…’ From the report of an ombudsman’s report of an investigations into actions by Darlington Borough Council ‘Planning officers have a role to play in kick-starting the economy, and in this case they have failed and failed abysmally. There are still those within the planning system who see their role as being totally divorced from the wellbeing of the economy. They see their job as just ticking boxes, interpreting policies and quoting policies and don’t think they’ve a role in generating jobs, giving people a livelihood or generating economic growth.’ Northern Ireland planning minister SammyWilson criticising his planners’ refusal of a planning application for the Aurora development in Belfast (a tower of apartments) partly on the grounds that its design did not fit in with the character of the site and surrounding area. ‘WHENTHE [second world] war was declared he signed up, using his connections to wangle his way into seeing action despite being listed “unfit for service” (he was shortsighted, and deaf in one ear; but, as a sympathetic general said to him: “There’s not much whispering in the Army!”)’ From the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of conservation architect Richard Tyler From Smooth and Rough by Adrian Stokes (1951) A WOODEN chair connected me with the tree-branches on the terraces. The only other furnishing of the white room was a spider’s web hanging from the ceiling in an angle of the walls. I thought of it as the relic from an operation, a part of the body which, when active, had caused pain: now, almost transparent filaments were independent remainders of tumescence and of darkness. Every state had become the surface, unified and tested by surrounding things. Confined to the room I was free: all roots were with me in the whiteness. I resembled a traveller who crosses frontiers without the impediment of luggage, without need of a ticket or changed money. I stood at the window. The country was divided by stone walls. Towards sunset the day before, every twig had been discernable, each with syntactic meaning to the eye. I had gazed through sun-lit undergrowth and trees on terraces at a white house, over hill distance to the clear mountain contour. I had reflected on this reversal of the mind’s self-glancing situation whose undergrowth is dark, lying well behind the eyes, whose contact is clear with thin horizons only; whereas in the panorama before me the simple shapes of the distance had clearly served as finish to the nearby threads. A church clock had struck, soothing, it seemed, the separated noises of the town, submitting afresh the sublime sweetness of reason which I saw embodied in houses among olive terraces and vineyards. Many bells in perspective of sound from many villages had proclaimed the weight and calm of measured things... Two smooth paving lines stretch along the centre of the cobbled road, pick up spaces between the houses’ apertures as well as the rays of eaves. Each slit of each shutter resounds with divided darkness; both light and dark are capped by the thick-edged tiles upon the roofs. Near the base of a church, rotund stone courses express smoothness on the walls above, thus uplifted from the cobble ground. These units or members invite touch. Some of the houses are stepped with broad ledges near the base, one with an alcove between the ledges for a shrine. Faces and washing show at windows; an invalid is recumbent on the ledge just above the cobbles. A Venetian red wall joins the two houses, the wall to a garden seen between iron gates. The pillars support terracotta basins holding cacti plants, an entry to more rooms of the outside, to inner things of the surface, to a loggia raised upon three shallow steps. Midday bells announce culmination of stature in the non-volcanic air. The day, unspecked with afterthought, is set out: the candid buildings epitomise statement, drawing the past to the light through the form of simultaneous affinities in shape and colour. Passers-by dramatise the combed coherence of the houses just as, conversely, a strutting and curtailed peering of hens in a run demonstrates the quarrelsome feathered stench and the disorderly architecture of an improvised fowl-house. The inhabitants, they, I, build ourselves in rivalry with these surfaces. For the moment of swift action we shall have looked to the balcony-boxes of geranium. There is actual building in progress: workmen plaster the sides of apertures. The roof is complete since a fir sapling has been tied to the top of a scaffoldpole. The compact green is fiery above the planks and building particles; an emblem of vitality, a sign of finish wrenched from the soil.
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