Municipal vandalism.
Library Walk curves and tapers in response to Vincent Harris’s two great Manchester buildings – Central Library and the Town Hall Extension – joining St Peter’s Square to Mount Street. A correspondent has sent us some pictures of recent small but significant additions to one of our favourite urban spaces. The elegance of the space, the care of its detailing and the subtlety of its signage have been undermined by these crude signs.
Once again Crouchback reveals the true philistinism of the supposed guardians of Manchester’s civic realm. At the time when a great audit of Harris’s work in Manchester is about to be completed (and when Sheffield has sumptuously restored his City Hall) the shock troops of the nanny state step in to ‘protect the environment’ with their badly designed municipal orders. Most vandalism is thoughtless and spontaneous, but presumably there’s a quality-assured paper trail for this particular example of the genre.
In contrast, further information on Milan’s municipal attitude to vandalism (as distinct from municipal vandalism) are available at
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1220265.ece