You can't always choose your neighbours. Great that my new book is on the table at Foyles on Charing X Road. Less great to be rubbing shoulders with the Heatherwick nonsense. 🤣
Many thanks to the KoozArch team which has published the new afterword from Monumental Lies in its entirety: "the author adds a poignant afterword, following the ongoing rise in right-wing nationalism, questionable claims in the name of heritage and in particular, the genocide in Palestine." Pictured here is artist Hew Locke's intelligent but now cancelled project for a counter memorial to a colonialist monument in Ostende. @hewdjlocke Monumental Lies at /library/more-monumental-lies-flag-shaggers-and-gazas-genocidaires
Monumental Lies by yours truly is being billed as “an urgent argument from the frontlines of the culture wars.” It was among the books of the year in the FT and the Art Newspaper.
Now available in paperback @versobooks , the new edition of Monumental Lies features a new afterword responding to the genocide in Gaza, as well as the raising of nationalist flags across the UK last summer and the chaotic politics of architectural beauty in Donald Trump's second term.
“Robert Bevan challenges us to rethink our relationship with our contested spaces, from colonial statues and the physical legacy of fascism, to fake post-conflict reconstructions and ethno-nationalist narratives about beauty and tradition.”
Picture: By Michael Taylor. Operation Raise The Colours, Seacroft Gate, Leeds, (6th September 2025). Wikicommons
Love Letter to the Corinthians
I had a lot of fun in Athens recently meeting Andreas Angelidakis for World of Interiors. He is representing Greece at this year’s Venice Biennale. The artist-architect uses his home as an experimental platform for ideas that embrace the gamut from Plato to RuPaul. His pavilion installation will be entitled Escape Room, a highly political take on identity, nationalism, and on the real and digital worlds. Photography by Giulio Ghiradi. @Angelidakis@giulioghirardistudio
/story/andreas-angelidakis-apartment-athens-greece
I’m really not sure what to make of the new V&A East. There are some thoughtful galleries inside (and a lot of entertaining space to hire out) but its ambition of serving the former Olympic boroughs as a beacon of creative potential for locals seems more symbolic rather than actual. Where are the spaces that make this happen now that the project is much reduced following earlier cuts to its scale? There is much subtly to the internal wayfinding in the vein of O'Donnell+Tuomey’s earlier LSE student centre which gently leads you forward. But the purposely understated handkerchief hemline entrance where it all begins feels more than a little prosaic. Are people really that intimated by a statement entrance? It also suffers from its non-place context. Eastbank and indeed this whole quarter of the QE2 Park fails in city-making terms. It is certainly not urbane– and mostly accessed via an escalator in Westfield. Turn right at the food truck.
A bit tardy with this one. My latest reviews for the Times Literary Supplement looking at Up in the Air, Holly Smith’s survey of high-rise housing from Ronan Point disaster onwards and Historic England’s decade-in-the-making history of the suburbs by Matthew Whitfield and Joanna Smith – England’s Suburbs 1820-2020. Both worth a read although the first misses out some key public housing battles such as in Liverpool in the 1980s and the second draws the definition of suburb so wide as to dilute the otherwise excellent book’s focus. Sorry it is behind a paywall but I can DM a pdf.
/politics-society/social-cultural-studies/up-in-the-air-holly-smith-book-review-robert-bevan
The paperback is in my sweaty clutches! It will be published by Verso at the end of March. There’s a new afterword in this edition bringing us up to date and covering matters such as flag shaggers, Trump’s traditionalist agenda and the cultural evidence for genocide in Gaza.
Hackney Pineapple Text
Awards news. Fantastic to be part of the finalists for a Festival of Place 2026 Pineapples award as part of a team led by@we_made_that for the Hackney Central Town Centre Strategy which is already being rolled out.
Great little exhibition at the AA about French architect Renée Gailhoustet. A communist who dedicated her life to building humane public housing in Paris, she once got into a punch up with fascist Jean Marie Le Pen who broke her nose. Of more than 2000 units she created, some 1500 had unique floor plans. I first came across her work following social historian Eric Hazan’s walk through radical Paris from Ivry to St Denis. Here is my review for the World of Interiors site: /story/renee-gailhoustet-a-thousand-and-one-ways-of-living-architecture
Proud that the WCs at Bruce Grove has been removed from Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register after decades of dereliction. And lovely to work with the team at @dk_cm as heritage consultant to make it happen. Historic England note that it is “now serving the local community as a café, community space and new public toilets and let on a ‘social value’ lease to ensure the site benefits the community.”
The retention of the WC function is an important one in general and also specifically here. The built fabric at Bruce Grove physically demonstrates the expansion in public toilet provision from for Gents only (below ground) to facilities for Women (the later, above ground section). This occurred in the early 20th century when campaigners fought against the ‘urinary leash’ that had confined too many women to travelling only near home. The move of women into factories during the First World War was part of this emancipatory shift. Photograph by @emilyr.marshall
On the way back from Paris recently I made a quick detour to Ypres and the Menin Gate, just restored beautifully by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I wrote about it in the Art Newspaper: /2025/11/08/belgium-famous-menin-gate-memorial-first-armistice-day-ceremony-since-restoration
Next week sees closing statements at the Aylesham Centre planning inquiry where Berkeley is seeking to impose a monstrously out-of-scale scheme with monstrously few affordable homes (just 12 percent out of more than 800 units) on an area of Peckham with a very specific identity and housing needs. I was the expert witness for Southwark Council looking at the negative heritage impact arising from the project, including on what survives (the clocktower wing) of the Jones & Higgins department store. It is all very well for the Starmer government to say we need housing at any cost, but what if that cost is not just our historic and natural environment but a development that precludes the large and important Aylesham site from ever being a place where social housing can be built? It is not the planning system that is the problem (although it has its issues), it is the erosion of public housing over more than 30 years and the refusal to fund more.
