I was out and about this afternoon, and just before disappearing into the Embankment tube station, i.e. when I thought I’d snapped all the interesting snaps that I thought I would be snapping, I snapped this:

That agglomeration of hideousness is basically the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where they play classical music.  Beyond it, just across the road, is the National Theatre, which is done in the same lumpish style and of which a few lumps are also visible.  I was looking back over the river from the downstream half of the Hungerford Bridge footbridges.

What has happened to those stairs, which is very recent I should add, is, I think, a harbinger of things to come.

London contains lots of award-winning concrete monstrosities dating from around the 1970s.  See also: Guy’s Hospital, which also features in the above picture, top right.  I think that’s Guy’s.  (Yes.) Destroying all these award-winning monstrosities will be difficult, and very expensive.  But, in the meantime, tarting them up amusingly will now be very easy.  All that was required was the passing of sufficient time for the architects and architectural award-awarders who awarded awards to the creators of these award-winning horrors, and all the politicians who said yes to them, either because they were weak and were bullied, or worse, because they really liked them ... basically a generation of twats ... to die.  While the twats who allowed and who built and who enthused about and who gave awards to these things were around, any attempt to brighten them up would be greeted with barrages of bullshit about the Architect’s Original Vision being all important and inviolate, blah blah.  Basically, these were people who spent their twenties living in and often designing concrete monstrosities during the war (by which I mean WW2), for things like coastal gun batteries.  Many of them had great fun, what with them being in their twenties and all, and came to love such things.  Ooh, they then said, let’s make a Brave New World by making people live in gun emplacements.  Like I say, twats.  But now the twats are dying the fun can begin, and begin it has.  I certainly hope it has.  (I live in hope.)

I have many pictures of London concrete monstrosities, and must make a point of taking many more, before all have had their fancy new make-up applied.

Michael J, who is passing the time chez moi, taking tea, says that this brightening up process has pretty much been done in Eastern Europe, where this particular style – called, and what is more, here in the UK anyway, called by the people who did it, “brutalist” – was even more dominant, and where the twats responsible because powerless long before they died.