'The dubious appeal of ESG investing is for dupes only'

Some months ago I took a deep breath and moved my pension from a traditional pension provider into an investment fund. I wouldn’t call myself a skilled investor. I didn’t look very hard at the options, but before choosing which fund to put my money in, I did glance at the biggest investments within each of the available funds to see what where the money was going. I was shocked when the first fund I looked at had for its largest single investment British American Tobacco. I couldn’t believe it. Instead, I chose an ESG (ethical, social, and governance) fund, that invests only in companies with these goals. Was I wrong? According to the FT, I am “a dupe”. 

In an opinion piece in the FT, 24 August 2020, entitled “The dubious appeal of ESG investing is for dupes only”, Robert Armstrong gives some reasons for rejecting ESG investing. In so doing, he reveals some of the values at the core of the Financial Times.

 Why not invest in ESG funds? Because, according to Mr Armstrong:

1. They do not provide “adequate” returns
2. They provide cosmetic, rather than real change
3. Behind ESG and stakeholderism lies a dangerous idea: Shareholders’ economic interests and the social good always harmonise over the long run.

Armstrong’s argument is that since economic interests and social good do not always harmonise, there is no point in seeking for them ever to harmonise.

First, let's confirm the terminology. “Stakeholderism”, also referred to in the article as “stakeholder capitalism”, is defined in Investopedia as follows:

Stakeholder capitalism is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. ... Supporters of stakeholder capitalism believe that serving the interests of all stakeholders, as opposed to only shareholders, is essential to the long-term success and health of any business. 

Mr Armstrong has a PhD in philosophy, so you would expect him to know how to argue a point. He is also chief editorial writer, so you can assume he offers a fairly standard FT approach. Here he argues that companies ultimately make decisions for shareholders, not stakeholders, and this commits them to making short-term policies. As he memorably states:

 it is obvious that shareholders’ and stakeholders’ interests can conflict. If they did not, there would be far fewer lay-offs announced and far fewer oil wells drilled.

For some perhaps unconscious reason he describes drilling an oil well as a necessary short-term activity for a company. I know it is a common phrase, used without thinking, but drilling an oil well is the very thing that investors in ESG companies hope will not happen. We don’t drill oil wells any more, Mr Armstrong. I would suggest the goals of ESG investors (certainly my goals) are as follows. I want companies to carry out their activities for the long term. I mean by that a sustainable activity, not one that results in the destruction of the planet (the example of Rio Tinto destroying a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal cave in Australia to expand their iron ore mine springs to mind). Perhaps Mr Armstrong regards that destruction as an understandable and necessary short-term activity that companies will do.

In any case, he states, we have “democratic action and the rule of law” to fall back on, in case companies misbehave. Although nobody lost their job at Rio Tinto after this environmental disaster, so perhaps there is no law against destroying cultural heritage. In any case, the law is usually a few years behind the latest commercial practices. Perhaps that explains why the FT regularly reports on the activities of tobacco companies and praises them when their profits increase – see, for example, “BAT beats profit forecasts as US stimulus bolsters sales” (30 July 2020). The “US stimulus” they refer to is government unemployment support during the coronavirus pandemic, which “has meant smokers have not been forced to switch to cheaper brands, smoke less or quit”. Perhaps if you follow Mr Armstrong’s principles, than companies like BAT should carry on doing what they do, and continue being one of the biggest dividend payers in the FTSE 100. You would be a dupe to think otherwise. 

Postscript: about a week later, the Chief Executive of Rio Tinto was sacked. 

The English Terraced House (Stephan Muthesius)

At the very mention of the word “house”, I start asking questions. After all, houses are quite close to our hearts – we all grew up in a house. How does a house influence the way we live? Do people in big houses and in bungalows lead different lives? One of these questions that I ask whenever I see a new housing development is, why is there a preference today for detached and semi-detached houses over terraces? In some places today (Oxford and Cambridge) terraced houses are wildly fashionable, in other places (Hartlepool, Newcastle) they are slums to be removed and all traces obliterated.

So I turned to Stephan Muthesius, The English Terraced House (1984), with great anticipation. Will it answer my questions?

Sadly not. But is it fair to condemn a book so full of detail simply because it doesn’t ask the same questions you ask? Well, I think so. Especially because this book not only fails to answer the questions I had, but often fails on its own terms. Mr Muthesius has written about 100,000 words, so he should have space to answer some at least of these questions. And one question I have is why a book on the English Terraced house uses the American term “row house” when the book doesn’t consider American examples. 

Instead, what we have, although wonderfully detailed, is rather complacent, and uncritical. For many people, the horrors of industrialisation are revealed most starkly by row upon row of grim terraced housing imposed without feeling on Welsh valleys or Peak District hills; but there is little condemnation here. 

By concentrating on the English terraced house, the author fails to compare and contrast to determine what is distinctive about English development. It would be good to understand why so 19th- and early 20th-century housing in Danish towns is mainly flats, compared with terraced housing in England. Worse, he accepts without question many general assertions about things English that have no place in a scholarly essay: 

Architects and planners from abroad still come to study the English set-up, as they have done for the past hundred years. We have those better dwellings because we seem more capable of a more judicious, small-scale kind of planning than other countries.

 Notice the imperceptible shift from the third person to “we”. Muthesius doesn’t mention that his own father was one of those “architects from abroad” who became an evangelist for the garden city in the early years of the 20th century. This is another problem with The English Terraced House. Muthesius senior wrote about “The English House”, not “The English Terraced House”. Much of what Muthesius writes about – speculative development, building controls, the ‘ideal’ family dwelling – is not restricted only to terraced housing. The debate, and the results, were about housing generally, including many different building types. In fact the garden city development at Letchworth include few if any terraced houses. But all this is rather incidental to Muthesius, who devotes much more space to small-scale changes in style within the terraced house, as if it were unconnected with other types of accommodation. For the detailed information we are grateful, but it only represents a part of the story. There is no mention of the systematic development by Oxford and Cambridge colleges that led to the creation of much of the housing of those cities. 

I grew up in a terraced house in a suburb (Orpington) that pretended to be part of the garden city movement. There was a garden in front, a garden at the rear, and a small green area between our house and the other side of the street (with a sign saying “no ball games”). The fact that it was a terraced house was not really the point; the houses could have been detached or semi-detached, but the values would have been the same.   

The terraced house was a regional phenomenon. Although it is found in other countries, it appears to be something characteristic about the England and Wales (I don’t know enough about Ireland to judge), at a particular historical period, say between 1800 and 1960. Terraced houses are still being built, but far less frequently today. 

Does the book define its terms? I can find no definition of “terraced house” in it. It is a house adjoining others, with access only from the front or from both front and rear. They often (but not always) have access from front to back via a passageway, which is typically shared between several properties. 

One key implication of the terraced house is that it was typically built to minimize cost of development by sharing some of the outer walls with neighbouring properties. In other words, the terraced house is the result of a large-scale development rather than an individual builder creating one building at a time. One implication of the terraced house, in other words, is speculation. Muthesius does include speculation in the index, but the passages on speculation are few and unsatisfying: “it would be pointless even to try and give an account of all major speculative developments”. Why? For example, the pattern of some building in North Oxford makes much more sense when it is understood that the Oxford colleges parcelling out the land provided it to speculative builders in lots that could be bid for, which accounts for the variety of buildings in some streets rather than homogeneous development.

In fact, I find Muthesius’ book maddening for three reasons:

First, its accretion of detail without providing signposts to interpret it. The book is poorly organised. Page numbers are placed on the inside of pages, near the gutter, rather than the outside where a reader can see them more easily. Colour plates are scattered unsystematically through the book, so the reader has to hunt without a signpost. The index appears to have a reference for every proper name in the book, with no indication of major or minor references.

2.   Secondly, there is a failure to quote sources for many of its statements. References, where given, are often inadequate as a source. Here are some examples, the first three all from page one, none of which has an attribution:

Most town walls had lost their importance by the 16th century, and there was no need to squeeze into a narrow area within these walls, as there was in so many continental cities.

 

The leading “estates” in the country were often the most important developers of “estates” of houses in the towns. The use of the same word in both contexts is significant and seems peculiar to the English set-up.

 

The suburb developed early in England.

 

Work on the building site was generally well paid. [p28]

Finally, the book focuses on architectural detail when the real interest of terraced housing is not so much the architecture (much of it repetitive, low quality and lacking in innovation) as the social and political environment that led to this kind of housing being built. Plus, there is a more recent angle. The author seems almost unaware of the phenomenon he was participating in himself, as a lecturer living in Norwich in the 1970s, and choosing to occupy an older terraced house rather than a more contemporary house (a decision that might even have been slightly bohemian for its time). Today, in Cambridge, some of the most desired housing is to be found in poorly-built terraced housing largely for railway workers off Mill Road near Cambridge Station. How did terraced housing become so fashionable? The book doesn’t answer this question.  

4.     There are no references in the index for “housing association” or “council house” or “social housing”, but there are over 50 index references for “brick”. This suggests a sense of priorities many of us don’t share. Could the state raise standards and provide beauty?

To be fair, the merits of the book are many. There is a wealth of detail. This is a useful book to refer to. Many of the illustrations are fascinating and documents in themselves. Muthesius is clearly very well read on 19th-century books on housing, such as J J Stevenson, House Architecture (1880), and T Webster and Mrs W Parkes, An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, 1844. There is no denying their contemporary validity as primary sources.

But ultimately, at the end of the book, Muthesius returns to the issue that clearly concerns him most. Can the terraced house be an art form? Not according to Ruskin, Morris, and Unwin, who “condemned millions of houses with their countless items of craftsmanship belonging to the polite vernacular - if such a formulation is permissible” [p256]. Ultimately, such a question is meaningless today, as the industrialization of building led to a mechanical standardization, which is what we for the most part live with today. As with many other aspects of this book, it is an answer to the wrong question: We don’t read a book on terraced housing to worry about if it is art. Perhaps another book might address how local authorities attempted to bring beauty to the working-class house. But not this book.

Learning more about local villages

I am a perpetual tourist, I can't help it. I can’t stop visiting places near to where I live. I live in Cambridge, and today on the bicycle I was visiting the wonderfully named Shudy Camps, a small village of some 300 people just ten or so miles from Cambridge. The village appears to be a rather odd collection of clusters of buildings, rather than just one central area. But that's about all I was able to gather from passing through it. Yet Shudy Camps is the site of a major Anglo-Saxon burial site, dating from the 7th century, with over 149 burials. One of those burials was a woman, buried in her iron bed, a remarkable discovery from an excavation in 1933, )although the same type of bed burial was also found elsewhere in Cambridgeshire just up the road at Cherry Hinton). 

How do I know all this? Not, for once, because I can find out in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia entry for Shudy Camps is just five sentences. No, I have in my hand a pamphlet – small book, more like – that tells me in remarkable detail the archaeological history of each village in this part of Cambridgeshire. It is called Archaeology of Cambridgeshire, and comprises two volumes; Shudy Camps is in volume two. I discovered these volumes being sold off by the Cambridge local studies library for £5 each volume. The first two volumes don’t cover all of Cambridgeshire, but I’ve never seen volume three, and I don’t think it was ever published.

 

For each village, Taylor gives an outline of the growth (and decline, if relevant) of the settlement, showing fascinating details about individual houses, in their historical context. For many of the villages, there is an excellent annotated map, full of information that could only be gained from someone with Taylor’s experience (she was County Archaeologist for 21 years). By comparison, the relevant entries in Pevsner’s Buildings of England are limited only to a few buildings, and lack much of the context that makes the articles so fascinating. The Victoria County History, where it exists, is full of detail, but you cannot see the wood for the trees. Next to no maps or illustrations. 

Map of Balsham, Cambridgeshire, from the Archaeology of Cambridgeshire (Taylor, 1998)

With those maps, Alison Taylor achieves something that many major UK publishers failed to do, which is to create some effective integrated publishing – the text and illustrations complementing each other on the same page. You wouldn’t think it so difficult to do until you try it. In contrast, Wikipedia for small communities tends to be anecdotal, full of trivia, and frequently praising local details (“The Holy Trinity Church [at Balsham] holds two services every Sunday and communion every Wednesday. The church also plays host to two yearly concerts by the village choir.”)

Instead, Taylor analyses. Simply by looking at census records, Taylor is able to tell a story for each village. Shudy Camps, for example, had 85 tenants recorded in 1279, which grew to 418 people in 1831, since when it has declined. Which leads to lots of questions: why the increase? Why the decline? For one village in West Cambridgeshire, Knapwell, Taylor identified that the entire axis of the village had moved to follow the movement of the main road through the village, from east-west to north-south.

Sadly, I don’t think there will ever be a third volume. The finances of local authorities have been challenged so drastically by central government cutbacks that such discretionary expenditure is unlikely ever to be possible again. I cannot imagine Reading Borough Council, for example, ever again publishing a guide to a Terry Frost exhibition at Reading Art Gallery, which took place in 2009 (the guide cost me £1 in the Gallery shop).

After reading Unsheltered

Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century naturalist and correspondent of Darwin, one of the improbable heroes of Kingsolver's fiction title Unsheltered [photo: public domain]

Some months ago I wrote about Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Unsheltered while in the middle of reading it. Now, finally, I have finished it, and here is a revision and update to my thoughts. To be honest my views are rather confused and contradictory, so I’ve labelled the thoughts into sections: what I liked, what I didn’t like, and what I noticed (but am neutral about). Spoiler alert, I give away details of the plot below. 

What I liked 

• Both the modern and the 19th-century tales are about the loss of shelter: Greenwood Thatcher and Willa both move out of their former home.
• The fearsomely intricate plotting: the entire book combines two separate stories, one chapter for each century.
• But the cleverness doesn’t end there. My partner very cleverly pointed out the book begins and ends with a little baby. The book opens with the mother’s suicide, leaving the baby alone and, well, unsheltered. The book ends with the same baby learning to stand up. The baby represents the new generation. The baby’s mother represents the old generation: materialistic, unconcerned with the environment, and committing suicide (no future for that kind of world view). The child, under the new management of Tig, the environmentalist, will grow up with a new vision, rather than remaining with her father, the financial trader (no future in that, either, at least not in this novel).
• The incredibly artful plotting, so that each chapter title is the final word or words of the preceding chapter.
• The capture, in all its horrific detail, of sibling rivalry (between Tig and Zeke) and how appalling it is
• The incredibly naturalistic micro-detail. By this, I mean that every sentence of the book is artfully composed and full of believable detail. For example (from chapter one):

He [Landis] should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked. 

Why mention “legally blind”? We have been told the dog was old, but not that it could barely see. And, of course, if the characters are jaywalking, there is clearly no traffic problem. The text is constantly artful, and draining.

What is Kingsolver’s world view? She is quite like Tolstoy: everything is grist to her mill, so she brings in her reading on whatever subject is of interest. It is indicated by the three books she recommends in her acknowledgements. The contents can be seen pretty clearly from the title of one of them: The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, The Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. That sounds like it echoes Tig's world-view. Another of the recommended books is The Book that Changed America, by Randall Fuller, about the impact of Darwinian evolution on contemporary America. That would be Thatcher Greenwood. It’s rare for a fictional work to have a kind of reading list at the end.

What I was neutral about

The sheer, overwhelming proliferation of detail. Whether is it Greek swearing, or the details of changing nappies, or how to treat an elderly man with dementia, or the details of how (or how not) to get tenure in academia. 

What I didn't like

• All that detail [Yes, I know this is the same point I just made in the section above]! It was impressive but overbearing. This was a novel I could only manage in small doses, otherwise I would have drowned in all that detail.
• The heavy-handed and trite plotting. The novelist includes as an essential part of the structure  for Willa and her daughter Tig to be arguing about the environment. They are too nice to argue that much! Truth is, adult children don’t typically get involved in stand-up slanging matches with their parents, but it provides for the novelist a way of expressing the debate about the environment. Rather clumsy plotting, I think.
• Likewise, the debate about Darwinianism versus evolutionism is clumsy (as I wrote in my last post). Mary Treat is an impossibly perfect character: a infinitely calm naturalist with infinite patience. Too good to be true.
• Similarly heavy-handed is the way Zeke, the financial trader, simply disappears when he hears his baby has been appropriated by Tig, his sister. In my reading of the world, financial traders like Zeke don’t disappear quietly. Yet in this novel the transfer of the baby seems to be the accepted and unquestioned order of things at the end.
• The heart-on-sleeve sincerity that is only possible in novels, which are not the real world.
• The transfer of real-world arguments to the fictional universe, which means that Kingsolver can take the parts she likes from her reading and create a good or bad ending as she chooses. Real life isn’t like that. At the micro-level, the characters are believable, but at the macro-level, the plot just doesn’t hang together.
• I drowned in the minutiae, the sheer proliferation of detail, that left me begging for mercy like a fighter on the ropes. There was so much detail, and the novel was so naturalistic, that I wondered: can any novelist hold so much detail in their head? At the same time, I realised that because of the detail, there could be no true closure at the end of the novel. Life would flow on, and I felt the book could have finished effectively at any point in the last hundred pages. And yet the final sentence does, improbably, offer a happy ending, unlikely as it may seem.

To be honest, I’m no closer to a balanced judgement than I was three months ago. Exasperating and enthralling in equal doses. 

Whaley Bridge in the Peak District: 100 feverish years

To be honest, the idea behind the holiday was simply to get away from home. The Peak District was conveniently close, and  a house picked almost at random simply because it was available brought us to Whaley Bridge. The house was chosen for the view, and it certainly had a spectacular view, positioned as it was a few hundred feet above the town itself. This is how we arrived at our destination without the slightest idea of what the town might be like. 

Whaley Bridge is a small town on the Goyt river, which forms the border between Derbyshire and Cheshire. We never actually saw the bridge; there didn’t seem to be much evidence of the river in the centre of town. Whaley Bridge looks like many other small towns in the area: small-scale urban, a Co-op, a fish and chip shop, several charity shops, a small station on the line from Manchester to Buxton. Most of the buildings were of the typical dark stone found in the Peak District (to be precise, Whaley Bridge isn’t part of the Peak District National Park at all). Houses were rather small, and there was little to see that was at all remarkable. 

But Whaley Bridge soon revealed a rather different image. From our house on the hill, it was evident that there is little flat land in the area. A walk into town was easy going down, but a ten-minute strenous exercise to get back up the hill again. On the first day, with constant drizzle, we followed the path just to see what was there. Down by the river was the first shock: an old railway bridge, which seemed to be in the middle of the town. 

 

This bridge was the start of the Peak Forest Tramway, an industrial railway moving goods to and from the canal up into the hills. When you turned round from this bridge, there was a very uninspired new housing development (the Woodbrook Housing Estate). The only difference between these new houses and the traditional terraced housing in the town was a few inches of space between the houses, as if detached houses provided clear evidence of higher status for the owners; plus, of course, the almost obligatory glass-roofed conservatories, breaking all the insulation provided for the houses. 

The estate would not be worth mentioning were it not for one sign at the entrance: Goyt Mills, 1865. This was the site of the former textile mill of Whaley Bridge, with 200 looms when it opened. What a sad contrast! 

A few yards further on was more evidence of an industrial past, but this time intact: a grand stone building, the Transshipment Warehouse of 1801, which, even without its third storey, is still a very impressive monument to the industry of the day. The Warehouse was used to transfer goods from barge to rail and vice versa. 

But the biggest discovery was still to come. About half a mile down the canal spur to Whaley Bridge is the Bugsworth Canal Basin, a complete inland port, gloriously restored to something like its former state, with flyovers (from the early nineteenth century!) for the rail trucks carrying the goods. You could imagine from the scale of the site how many canal boats would be loading and unloading here. A curious incidental detail was that the nearby village changed its name from Bugsworth to Buxworth in the 1930s – perhaps evidence of a shift towards euphemism, and the present-day mania for naming streets with bland and inoffensive titles. 

That short walk was quite a revelation. Whaley Bridge does not rank as a major tourist site, and yet here were some of the most significant industrial remains in the Peak District. How did all this arise? 

Well, despite all the usual sources stating that there are Roman and earlier remains and that the bridge is “ancient”, the earliest reference to Whaley Bridge appears to be from 1597, an enforcing order to repair the bridge. If there was a community there, it must have been very small. But in 1791, an advertisement was placed in the Manchester Chronicle, offering for sale land at Whaley Bridge, for the establishment of industry, stating that “children and grown-up persons are mostly in want of employment”. In other words, present-day Whaley Bridge is largely the result of speculation from the time of the industrial revolution. At various times in the 19th century, Whaley Bridge had coal mines, quarrying, textile bleaching and printing mills, lime kilns, and even a gunpowder factory! To give an idea of the scale of the activity, there were 21 people employed at the station in various roles. 

Leaving aside for a moment the appalling labour conditions during the Industrial Revolution, it is astonishing to think that such a small place can have become such a hotbed of innovation for a hundred years, and then somehow to have reverted back to the pleasant but insignificant town of today. The only sign of interesting activity in the present-day town I noticed was the Footsteps Bookshop. “Bookshop” is a bit of a misnomer; it turned out to be more a community centre and coffee shop, although as I visited people were bringing in bags of books – the sort of bookshop where your value as a book donator was more the size of your bag than the quality of the books. Footsteps is run by a community trust, and looked lively and well populated. 

What to make of Whaley Bridge? My understanding of the town was greatly helped by the admirable Whaley Bridge in the mid-Nineteenth Century, a pamphlet published in 1978 as a result of an extra-mural class run by Manchester University. But even that excellent publication, based on analysis of records, didn’t answer the fundamental question, for me. Did Whaley Bridge just have a hundred years of feverish activity, almost by accident? Just because there was a good source of water? How does innovation like that happen? Did the industrial innovation have any connection with the town, or was it simply imported, only to disappear as the industry moved away?

How did terraced housing become so desirable?

Earlham Road, in the Norwich Golden Triangle (By Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0)

A week ago I visited an area of Norwich dubbed The Golden Triangle, with Unthank Road at its centre. For the most part, the area consisted of largely undistinguished terraced housing, if considered purely in architectural terms. But there were indications everywhere that the inhabitants liked living there. Looking at visible indicators as you wandered around, this was a very successful community. One of the local parks, Heigham Park, was very lively with many different groups co-existing: people walking their dog, teenagers playing frisbee, parents with young children. There was a community noticeboard that gave details of how money had been found (I believe donated) to repair the leaking pond. The park itself was not just grass; it comprised several recognisable areas, each with a slightly different identity.

As for the streets, there were plenty of signs of life: posters in the windows for Black Lives Matter, and drawings supporting the NHS. Lots of plants in the front gardens. There were trees in the streets to provide something for the eye. There were lots of people walking about and chatting. This living community begged the question: did those terraces enable the community, or could that community have grown up anywhere? In England, there are similar areas in Cambridge, in Oxford, Bristol, and Sheffield (to my knowledge). Why do some areas of terraced housing just look run down, while others thrive? 

I remembered reading Stefan Muthesius’ The English Terraced House (1982) many years ago. Here was a book that celebrated the terraced house; would it give me an answer to the magic of communities? Would it explain the interaction between buildings and people?  I returned to Muthesius’s book with eager anticipation. Does this book capture something of the distinctiveness of the terraced house? What about the myth of the East End of London, the distinctive sense of identity and belonging that many residents claim was lost when they were rehoused in new developments such as Harlow New Town? Of course it is unfair to critique a book by an architectural historian for not describing community. But one of the intangible yet very real aspects of architecture is that the built environment and community can, perhaps, interact.

Sadly, the book doesn’t appear to consider this aspect. The book is arranged thematically: layout, energy, sanitation, improvements, plan, façade, decoration. Only the last chapter appears to look at the people who lived in these houses, but even that chapter is more about class differentiation in style, rather than communities. There is no entry for “community” in the index.

You could say that it is not the job of an architect to describe how buildings are used over a hundred years after they are built. My feeling is just the opposite. I remember architects getting very interested in the idea of “defensible space”, creating a built environment that did, or did not, create a feeling of safety and well-being to the people using it. Some benches in parks and on streets are regularly used by people walking by; others are never used. The interaction of people with their environment, although a challenging subject, is perhaps the most important of all for an architect.

Muthesius writes, in the Introduction to the book, “Most of what is said and illustrated in this book is common knowledge.” That may be, for people who live in terraced houses, but it seems to be common knowledge that can be lost when new housing development takes place. Yet Muthesius’s focus is elsewhere: “Our attention needs to be drawn to the individual features, as well as to the story of the type of house as a whole.” Does it? Does the presence or absence of a central staircase make much difference to that community in Norwich?

At the time the book was written, 1982, the terraced house was low in the pecking order for domestic property. Muthesius writes, in the Introduction: “We do not just inhabit these houses because we cannot afford newer ones, but also because we still approve of them, at least in general terms.” For areas such as the Golden Triangle in Norwich, people pay a premium  over similar properties elsewhere in Norwich: what is it that they are paying extra for? It’s not the quality of the brickwork, or the effective building design. On the contrary, many of the terraced houses are dark, have small rooms, and inadequate space for a kitchen, without major redesign.

Most desirable was a detached house with garden. Today, however, terraced houses are among the most desired and most over-priced. Take Cambridge’s Mill Road area, for example: there are streets where a poorly built terraced house will sell for substantially more than similar properties outside this desirable area. This high valuation has nothing to do with the quality of the building; it is the community and proximity to peers that is all-important. Is this considered in the Muthesius book? I don’t think so. It looks as though his book predated the dramatic change in fashion that made some terraces desirable. We will have to look elsewhere to find a book that considers both community and architecture: the approach of John Grindrod look like a good start: he describes not just the buildings, but talks to the people who designed them, as well as the people who lived in them (Concretopia, 2013, and Outskirts, 2017, for example). In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy my pleasant wandering around the parks of the Golden Triangle.

How to reveal yourself with words

The 1968 Buckley - Vidal debate

Jahan Ganesh is one of the Financial Times centre-page commentators: these are, for the most part, the most respected figures writing for the newspaper. They represent the voice of the newspaper, a little more measured and dispassionate than the news reporters, and for the most part, worth reading for their reflections on political events.

Does Jahan Ganesh belong in this elite group? He clearly thinks he does; he writes with the assurance and stylishness that makes you feel this is someone who went to a high-ranking public school followed by Oxbridge. Never use an expected word in a sentence. As a result, his style is so elliptical that you sometimes have to parse each sentence a couple of times to work out what he means.

Today’s column, How conservatives lost the culture war, is about the perennial battle for hegemony between left and right for much of the last 75 years. He uses the analogy of a televised debate between the archetypal conservative William Buckley and the radical, if not quite liberal, Gore Vidal, in 1968. This debate was made into a film in 2015, and has recently been the subject of a recent book, The Fire Is Upon Us, by Nicolas Buccola, reviewed in the TLS on May 22 2020. Ganesh doesn’t mention this book, but no matter, since the Buckley-Vidal debate is well known from several sources.

Which side is Ganesh on? And what does he believe in himself? Perhaps it’s not fair to ask such a straightforward question of a this highly stylish writer – he describes the Buckley-Vidal debate as less "kinetic" than the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations. In other words, much of the point is to parade the style, rather than to reveal the meaning, and perhaps as a result I am really not quite sure, at times, of Ganesh’s viewpoint. Ganesh writes for the FT as the thinking man’s conservative, providing some kind of intellectual justification for at least some of the misguided actions of the present government. Here is how the ostensible message of the column becomes rather murky.

Ganesh’s argument here is that the conservative forces have lost influence since 1945 in many ways, most recently last week’s US Supreme Court judgement to solidify LBGT rights in law. He then goes on to analyse why the forces of conservatism failed in the battle against liberalism. The conservatives, in his opinion, made two mistakes (always a good thing in political columns to include a list; it makes your thinking appear more organised). First, they sided with free-market economics (you could call it neoliberalism, but unfortunately that word has been so widely used as to lose much of its original meaning). Here, he correctly points out that the value-free economics espoused by neoliberals removes much of the social justice idea common to more traditional conservatives:

Capitalism is miraculously good at lots of things. Fostering stable communities, a sense of national belonging and deference to the sacred are not among them.

If correct, this reasoning invalidates much of the conservative thinking Ganesh describes, quite apart from bringing into question many of the actions, if not the rhetoric, of the present government. Secondly, he points out that the political victories of the right have not been matched by equivalent cultural victories. There is no triumph of the right in Hollywood, nor elsewhere in the media. Ganesh comments:

The best the right did was to set up parallel bodies, such as Fox News, and even these often address true believers.

But by now I begin to question the conservative right that Ganesh describes. Fox News does not, I think, contribute to the any cultural hegemony of the right; it is too divisive and offensive to ever achieve any genuine consensus. Is this a real conservativism in which he believes, or the populist parody offered by Trump, which reveals its hollowness as soon as a genuine moment of crisis occurs, such as the Floyd killing? If all the right has achieved in the media in the last 75 years is Fox News, then we are in a bad way.

Finally, Ganesh appears to show his true colours. He points out that universities remain resolutely liberal, for the most part. He states “Conservatives resent the infusion of universities with critical theory and other relativist lines of thought. If it matters that much, the burden is on them to clamber into the arena and compete”. Which conservatives is he describing here? The same conservatives who created Fox News? The handful of academics who have nailed their right-wing political colours to the mast are a very small and cantankerous group: Scruton, Minford, and others. I don't think anyone would describe them as forming a coherent body of conservative thought .

Ganesh’s final recommendation can hardly be taken any more seriously than the determination of Stendhal’s perpetual adolescent Julien Sorel to turn his back on the enlightenment and to embrace the forces of reaction in the most uncompromising, and unrealistic, way possible. You enjoy the posturing, but you don’t take it at all seriously. Ganesh might write about the right, but I don't for a moment think he genuinely believes any of this stuff. At most, he might encourage a few Talleyrands.