Visit Glasgow, and if you’ve time, after breathing in the Victorian majesty of Buchanan Street, take the tube a few stops west, and stand and wonder at the glory of the Kelvingrove art gallery and museum. And while I’m thinking about art galleries, back in London, would we sacrifice the reworked Tate Modern turbine hall? My own preference is for Victorian buildings, but whatever the aesthetic, the point is: these icons cost money, and whether public or private, it was always money that could have been spent on something else.
Even the Millennium Dome, once cleared of its vacuous Blairist content, has become part of the landscape. The farce of the Dome made us wary of les grands projets, I think; it seemed that we’d lost the ability to build anything of beauty, particularly as it arrived at the same time as the Millennium Bridge. If we could no longer build a bridge across a river without tossing its users around like ninepins, perhaps we should stop building anything at all.
Arguably, the success of St Pancras marked the turning point. You can’t pass through without sensing the grace and magnificence built into the very girders of that sky-blue carapace. Which brings me to the Olympics. Establishing who can jump a fraction of an inch higher than other jumping people is a not bad definition of pointlessness. Coupled with the expense (in the age of austerity, etc etc), I was ready to describe the entire project as a waste of money. But I’m wrong, of course. It’s not the sport itself that matters – it’s the display of human endurance that moves the spectator, the idea that such feats are possible which inspires. And after the circus is forgotten, the site itself will remain, the buildings and parks and swimming pools the physical, enduring legacy of that achievement of human will. The more austere the age, the more we need to fashion the transcendental (the human spirit) into something concrete, to lift us. Look upon my works, and feel joy, not despair.
“What is Britishness?” is the wretched, soul-searching question of the modernist, groping for anodyne words of inclusivity, while simultaneously feeling at best indifference towards our history. That search is pointless, as Gordon Brown found. Britishness is most easily glimpsed through those things we have built – in one sense, it is those things. The Olympics signal a rediscovered ability to build the great objects which define us. Perhaps the critics of High Speed 2 and Boris Island overlook this point: we need to build in order to be.
And not only on the land. Come back to Brighton, and its pier. Why is it thrilling to walk the length of the pier, out over the sea, and why do we mourn whenever one of those structures is allowed to wither away? Because we are an island people. The sea literally defines Britain, and made her great; it’s the source of our power, and anything we build that carries us on to it reminds us viscerally of that fact.
Our power is diminished, of course; no one denies that. But we are about to remind the world of the respect in which we hold another defining landmark of Britain, our monarchy, in the Diamond Jubilee year. Our landscape is filled with monuments to our essential being, and our coastline with the ports and the ships that projected our Britishness into the wider world. So tell me: we can’t afford to build our Queen a yacht, and name her Britannia?
