British style poppy for November 11.

[Highland Logan]

I believe it was Prince Charles that made the remarks about how the luftwaffe had merely left piles of rubble and it was the British social housing authorities themselves who had really uglified those areas?

Brutalism

The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete", a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings. The term gained wide currency when the British architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1966 book, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, to characterize a somewhat recently established cluster of architectural approaches, particularly in Europe.

Brutalism has some severe critics, including Charles, Prince of Wales. His speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated Brutalism, calling many of the structures "piles of concrete". "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe", said Prince Charles at the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's annual dinner at Mansion House in December 1987. "When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."(1)

(1) Glancey, Jonathan (2004-05-17). "Life after carbuncles". The Guardian (London). 2010-04-27.

[Pleater]

Hmm - a rather let them eat cake attitude.

My aunt Freda shared a house with her mother, two brothers and four sisters, plus a couple of lodgers, until she married and was delighted to have a prefab to move into when she married.

Until I was two years old (1953) I lived in that house with my parents, and all my mum's family - and the lodgers - and then we moved to my other grandparent's house and my brother and sister were born there.

Eventually (1958) we were able to move into a newly built council house. For a few months I even had my own bedroom.

I bet Prince Charles never had to share.

Anne the Pleater :ootd: