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Alain de Botton’s ‘temples for atheists’ have a foundational flaw

The Sheet — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:08:43 +0000

Aren't believers just as likely to appreciate a shrine to perspective? And doesn't the Large Hadron Collider qualify as a rationalist temple? De Botton's doctrine feels a trifle holy

Perhaps emboldened by the success of the atheist bus, or his own Living Architecture initiative (in which top architects design desirable holiday homes), or the fact that he's got a new book to promote, Alain de Botton is now proposing a series of temples for atheists to be built around the UK.

"Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?" he asks. "It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals."

Sounds great, Alain. But what are we worshipping?

"You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," he continues. "That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective."

In order to make atheism more attractive, De Botton argues in the accompanying book, Religion for Atheists, its advocates should pick and choose from the aspects of religion they all like. So, yes to a sense of community and civic responsibility; no to persecuting gay people and abusing choirboys. And one of the things we all like about religion, especially De Botton, is the architecture, isn't it? It gets the message across far better than something like a book. Unless that book is the Bible, or the Qur'an, but certainly if that book is Religion for Atheists.

De Botton's first monument will be the "Temple to Perspective", a hollow stone tower located in the City of London, that well-known hotbed of religious fanaticism. Its height corresponds to the age of the earth – one centimetre per million years, with mankind's time on the planet represented by a gold band around the base one millimetre thick. It was designed by a young architect named Tom Greenall, who collaborated with De Botton on the book. Several other possibilities are suggested: a Temple to Love, which looks like a box whose facades are rose windows from cathedrals; a Shrine to Care, filled with little glass figurines of humans filled with blood, and so forth.

They come across like witty art installations, but would these follies – sorry, "temples" – convince any religious adherent to cross over? It's unlikely. And why couldn't a Christian or a Muslim enjoy the Temple of Perspective, just as an atheist can be stunned by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia? Architecture and godliness don't necessarily go hand in hand. The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the beautiful Cathedral of Brasilia and several other churches, laughs about the fact that he has been a lifelong atheist.

What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.

To answer De Botton's original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it's about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.

Steve Rose

How we learned to love the Lloyds building

The Sheet — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:05:46 +0000

Richard Rogers' 'bowellist' creation in the heart of London has been Grade-I listed

Twenty-five years young, the Lloyd's building is still shockingly new. Yesterday it was announced that this hi-tech City of London tour-de-force, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership, has been listed Grade I by heritage minister John Penrose. The youngest to be granted that special status, it joins company with a select band of postwar buildings including the Royal Festival Hall and Coventry Cathedral.

Lloyds is also the first Grade I-listed building designed specifically for change. While listing protects historic monuments from insensitive alteration, the whole point of this late 20th-century reworking of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, crossed with a North Sea oil-rig, is the flexible space it offers, and the promise that, one day, it might be re-arranged as easily as if it had been assembled from Meccano.

The inside-out, or "bowellist", look of the 88-metre high concrete structure, with its external wall-climbing glass lifts, exposed pipework and plug-in, stainless steel clad lavatory pods, is graphic evidence of the way this breathtaking ensemble was clipped together like a giant kit of parts.

Naturally, Lloyds has never been to everyone's taste – too much like an oil-refinery thumped down next to Wren's City churches and Neo-Classical banks clad in Portland stone – and its provocative design is all the more remarkable given that it was commissioned by and for apparently conservative, pin-striped City types.

With its soaring central atrium, the radical, open-plan interior is nothing short of sensational. Even then, it abounds in surprises. High up in the building, a door opens to reveal a complete Robert Adam boardroom of the 1760s, representing most people's idea of what Grade I listed buildings look like. Attitudes to modern architecture have clearly changed.

The biggest change of all since then, however, has been among conservationists themselves: in the 1980s, they tended to see Lloyds as a modern monstrosity. Now they love it.

Jonathan Glancey

This week’s arts diary

The Sheet — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:05:25 +0000

Two new Doctor Whos and a Dennis Potter are found; a Dutch architecture firm show Clouded judgment in their design for twin towers; and does Britain need a new capital?

Two new Whos and a Potter

Archive television fans gathered on London's South Bank last Sunday to witness the BFI's annual showcase of newly discovered shows that had been thought lost, or "wiped". The big news was the announcement of two Doctor Who episodes. More interesting, I thought, was an early TV play by Dennis Potter.

Emergency Ward 9 was broadcast in 1966 as part of BBC2's live Thirty-Minute Theatre series. A riposte to ITV's soap opera Emergency – Ward 10, Potter's play is set in a shabby London hospital ward and centres on the patients: an opinionated old man; a prissy preacher; a cocky businessman. The latter is black, and the casual racism he suffers forms the crux of the play. In 2011, it is shocking to hear the racist language.

The show's producer, Kenith Trodd, told the Diary the play did not feel particularly controversial at the time. "Seeing it now, I was totally amazed by the distance we've come," he said. Of course, it was first broadcast in the 1960s, when millions tuned in to laugh at the racist/sexist/homophobic rantings of Alf Garnett, though Trodd added: "I don't think there was much in that era that was quite as in-your-face as Dennis was in that piece."

The discovery of the missing Doctor Whos means there are now – shamefully – 106 considered lost, rather than 108. The BFI screened The Underwater Menace episode from 1967, with Patrick Troughton as the Doctor and people from Atlantis (incredibly hairy eyebrows, plastic tube headdresses). There were also entertaining adverts, featuring Frank Mumford puppets desperate for VB sweet wine and State Express 555 cigarettes; and a very funny Pete and Dud sketch.

But it was the Potter that stuck. Watching it, I yearned for the return of one-off TV plays. Sky Arts' Playhouse series shows it can be done: why not ITV and the BBC?

Clouded judgment

Those crazy architects, part one. The Dutch firm MVRDV has submitted designs for a pair of towers it plans to build in Seoul4, South Korea, by 2015. Called The Cloud, the towers appear to be exploding in the middle, which has caused offence in the US. On its website, MVRDV issued the following statement: "MVRDV regrets deeply any connotations The Cloud project evokes regarding 9/11. It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process."

A new capital for Britain?

Those crazy architects, part two. One hundred years ago this week, King George V announced that the Indian capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi. In the latest issue of Architectural Review, architect James Dunnett argues it is time to consider moving Britain's capital from London to, er, West Bromwich. It is an interesting essay that can be best summarised by using a direct quote from Dunnett himself: "I have never been to West Bromwich."

Mark Brown

After Liverpool, the capital’s heritage site is being investigated

The Sheet — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:11:12 +0000

Unesco's inspectors are in London following a similar visit to the north west last month over concerns about tall buildings

Liverpool is not the only UK city under threat of losing a world heritage designation, it emerged on Monday

Unesco inspectors will visit London this week to check out developments around the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster.

In a move that is reminiscent of the Liverpool world heritage debate, Unesco is concerned their status as prized buildings of world importance is being damaged by the building of skyscrapers.

Liverpool was warned it will be stripped of its World Heritage Site status if a £5.5bn skyscraper plan goes ahead without "radical" changes, when inspectors visited in November.

The three-day Unesco inspection, led by Ron van Oers, had left Liverpool with clear guidance "100%" that, unless Peel's Liverpool Waters project was radically changed, they will recommend the city be stripped of the World Heritage accolade.

The official inspectors' report will be completed by December 23 and will then be sent to Liverpool council and Peel within two to four weeks.

Peel, having already dramatically reduced the number of skyscrapers, has indicated it is not willing to compromise its Liverpool Waters scheme further. It also reduced the height of the tallest planned building – the Shanghai tower – to 55 storeys.

Ultimate responsibility for the UK's 28 World Heritage Sites falls to the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport.

Heritage campaigner Wayne Colquhoun, who was instrumental in bringing the inspectors to Liverpool, said the fact Unesco were now visiting the capital would reinforce the importance of local heritage concerns.

"If London is threatened, then hopefully people in positions of power that think Liverpool is just a provincial outpost may sit up and take the matter seriously," he told the Liverpool Daily Post.

Unesco has a number of specific concerns about London.

It has warned that the Tower of London could be downgraded because of the negative impact of the Shard of Glass on its panorama.

The 1,020ft-high Shard, a 66-storey office block next to London Bridge, will be the tallest building in Europe when it is finished.

Unesco's World Heritage committee has ruled that: "Incremental developments around the Tower over the past five years have impacted adversely its visual integrity."

Unesco is also concerned about the 43-storey Doon Street tower, which is being built in Lambeth across the river from the Palace of Westminster.

The World Heritage committee has said specific measures to protect the immediate and wider settings and have not yet been sufficiently developed.

Helen Carter

Tiny Tyneside church beats Canterbury cathedral and Gormley in arts competition

The Sheet — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:08:32 +0000

Engraved glass so delicate that frost can change its nature helps scoop top prize for Northumberland. The Northerner's arts monitor Alan Sykes reports

A tiny church high above the Tyne valley has beaten off competition from the likes of Canterbury Cathedral to win this year's Art in a Religious Context award from the charity Art & Christian Enquiry.

The biennial award was made for two commemorative stained glass windows commissioned for St John's church, Healey, in Northumberland, by artists Anne Vibeke Mou and James Hugonin.

Anne Vibeke Mou was born in Denmark and graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2005 before moving to Newcastle. She has shown in Denmark, Prague and London as well as at the National Glass Centre at Sunderland University. Her work for St John's, which lies between Hexham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is a sheet of glass covered with thousands of tiny impact marks made by hitting the glass with a tungsten point, creating swirling, cloud-like forms which can be seen from the outside of the church as well as from its interior. A hard frost can affect her window, giving it an extra layer of depth.

James Hugonin was born in county Durham and graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in 1975. He has shown at the Baltic and Kettle's Yard in Cambridge as well as in London, Edinburgh and Germany. He is shortlisted for this year's Northern Art Prize www.northernartprize.org.uk which opens at the Leeds City Art Gallery on November 25th. His window is made of small rectangles of glass, some transparent and some translucent, mainly red, blue, yellow and green. Although totally abstract, a double helix form can be made out in the patterns of colour.

The two windows were commissioned as a memorial to his parents Julian & Virginia Warde-Aldam by local landowner, Hotspur magazine editor and churchwarden Jamie Warde-Aldam, a relation of the Quaker Robert Ormston who built the charming neo-Norman church in 1860 (at the third attempt, the nave having collapsed twice during the building process). Jamie says:

Everyone in the parish is delighted with the award. Working with James and Anne Vibeke on the project for a year has been a deeply rewarding, educational experience. They both have the highest standards, are meticulous in their respective methods and showed a sensitivity to each other's work as well as for the character and fabric of the church. Without their generosity, patience and friendship, this commission would not have happened.

The prize is worth £4,000, with £1,500 each going to the artists and £1,000 to the church. Other finalists for the award included sculptor Antony Gormley, who created another of his human figures, this time made up of old iron nails, for Canterbury Cathedral, Jonathon Parson's grid-like Cruciform Vision for Guildford Cathedral, Thomas Denny's Transfiguration stained glass window for Durham Cathedral, and Katy Armes' NoThing for Hellington Church in Norfolk. The judges were chaired by the Dean of Chichester, the Very Rev Nicholas Frayling.

Laura Moffatt, Director of Art & Christian Enquiry, comments:

This year's ACE Awards have once again revealed the depth and diversity of artistic practice among faith communities in the UK. Our short-lists included an Islamic Hall of Remembrance and a major new stained glass window in a cathedral, as well as some very high quality works of art and architecture in small rural parish churches.

Alan Sykes

National Trust to open fourth Wordsworth house in the Lake District

The Sheet — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:54:12 +0000

Fire at Allan Bank triggers plan to create a new sort of visitor attraction at the villa which the poet once described as a 'temple of abomination'. He warmed to it later.

The National Trust is planning to make the best of what initially seemed to be a bad job, by opening a fourth Wordsworth house in the Lake District.

Whether the poet himself would have approved is another matter. He suffered endless problems with smoking chimneys at Allan Bank on the edge of Grasmere, and also wrote of it as a 'temple of abomination' when it was built in the middle of his view from Dove Cottage.

Time has long since mellowed the 1805 Georgian villa but in March it was badly damaged by fire. Repairs are now pretty much finished and the Trust has decided to open the house to the public from the end of next March. For years it had been let to tenants although you could, and still can, take plenty of lovely walks in its grounds.

Allan Bank is doubly special to the NT as later owners included Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, co-founder of the trust which has just celebrated reaching the astonishing total of four million members. He was a tireless campaigner who frequently wrote to the Manchester Guardian about such other abominations as Manchester Corporation's attempt to compensate for flooding the nearby valley which is now Thirlmere reservoir, by planting distinctly out-of-place shrubs in the wild landscape.

The Trust is holding a couple of open events at the house on Wednesday 23 November (10am-midday) and Saturday 26 November (1-3pm) to launch a process of involving anyone and everyone in how the house is to be shown. Although currently an empty shell, Allan Bank has evidence of past decoration including what appear to have been stencil patterns in the Wordsworth's bedroom (one of eight; it is quite a substantial place).

Research since the fire has also shown that the walls changed from cream to stone to a yellowy sandstone and then back to cream during the 206 years since a Liverpool merchant, John Gregory Crump, used his 'new money' to construct Wordsworth's abomination. Window frames have been variously black, red and off-white and samples of all the colours will be on show at the open events.

Allan Bank's First curator, Sarah Woodcock, says:

Initially it will be like visiting an empty property when you're buying a house, and we hope that people will come up with all the ideas you tend to have on occasions like that. For ourselves, we are thinking about somewhere which feels open and full of opportunity, and perhaps encourages the sort of reflections which the Wordsworths and Canon Rawnsley had when they were here.

The gardens will be an extra attraction, with evidence in letters that Wordsworth took a hand in designing a special 'viewing tunnel' and placing stone seats at vantage points overlooking the stupendous view. One of the main windows frames the little island in Grasmere whose proposed sale prompted Hardwick to come up with the concept of the National Trust. He left the house to the Trust when he died in 1920, but with a lifetime's tenancy for his second and much younger wife who only died in 1959.

Allan Bank's association with fire and smoke also saw a large wing at the rear of the house burn down in the 1950s. But historically and in terms of the mainetenance budget, this was a blessing in disguise as it wasn't there in Wordsworth's day.

The other two Wordsworth homes apart from Allan Bank and Dove Cottage are his birthplace in Cockermouth and Rydal Mount, down the valley from Grasmere.

Martin Wainwright

Building over budget? Don’t blame the architect

The Sheet — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:05:42 +0000

Costs for the Aquatics Centre for the London 2012 Olympics have soared - it's always the way with public buildings. But it is not the fault of the designers

No one really knows how much a major public building will cost when plans are signed off. The price will rise as surely as the sun does. The Aquatics Centre for the London 2012 Olympics (which was costed at £72m but is currently running at £268m), and the reconstruction of BBC's Broadcasting House (which is now £110m over budget) are national monuments to escalating costs.

So, too, are much older buildings of equal and even greater ambition, such as, the Palace of Westminster and St Paul's Cathedral. And, yet, the age-old cry "blame the architect' is as alive and yelling today as ever. Christopher Wren's salary was halved, unfairly, when the cost of St Paul's soared; he was even accused, falsely, of corruption.

However, when the Scottish Parliament building costs spiralled to £414m (the original budget had been £10m), a public inquiry found poor project management and design changes made by the client during construction to be the main culprits.

And when the British Library was completed in 1998 after 16 years – at a cost that grew to £445m – this was due mainly to design changes and other wrangles largely beyond the architect's control.

The overall cost of major public buildings also includes consultants' and lawyers' fees, the price of land, stamp duty, rising prices of raw materials and any number of financial wells, sinks and boreholes. Architects – believe it or not – are rarely to blame. Sadly, though, no one ever seems to learn from past mistakes.

Jonathan Glancey

St Paul’s has capitalism in its stones

The Sheet — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:59:51 +0000

Occupy London protesters are camped outside a cathedral whose rebirth coincided with the dawn of a new economic era for Britain. So have they picked the perfect anti-capitalist location?

I really don't want to stoke things up – so please try not to read too much into this – but it is arguable that St Paul's Cathedral, currently at the centre of protests against modern finance, is in its very stones a symbol of capitalism. Allow me to explain.

In 1666, the Great Fire of London ravaged a medieval city whose crowning glory was a gothic church that soared over congested wooden houses. The old St Paul's had seen royal weddings, while the bookshops that traditionally surrounded it sold such works as the first folio edition of Shakespeare. When this medieval St Paul's was destroyed, London was bereft. But as we all know, the city's great architect Christopher Wren built a superb new St Paul's with a dome that is the most famous in northern Europe, its perfection a worthy British answer to the Italian architecture that influenced it.

What has this got to do with capitalism? Well, the new church was raised at the very time when Britain's economy was on the verge of a commercial take-off. In the 18th century, London became the emporium of the world as Britain led international trade, built an economic empire through the East India Company, and created new industrial systems. It was a coincidence that London's gothic cathedral was destroyed on the eve of this new age, and yet its resurrection in a bold classical style provided an instant symbol of the new.

The difference between the medieval and modern worlds is self-consciously inscribed in the architecture of Wren's masterpiece. The deep space beneath its dome has an order and clarity that makes you think of Wren's contemporary, Newton, and his rational conception of a universe driven by natural laws that can be mathematically expressed. St Paul's is a scientist's church: it breathes the confidence of a new age of reason. It also communicates a new pride in London. In the middle ages, Britain's capital had been just one among Europe's cities and in no way the most famous or creative. Cities such as Venice and Paris were far more renowned. In the 1700s, London would become Europe's most admired metropolis and St Paul's led the way, giving the commercial city a shining crown.

You see it in every 18th and 19th-century painting that glorifies the capital. Now you see it surrounded by protesters' tents. As it happens, Wren's great building crystallised a lot of the ideas and forces that were to make Britain the workshop and shopping arcade of the world, and London the city where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. Strange that it now finds itself once more at the hub of history.

Jonathan Jones

Flatpacks and footlights: why the UK needs a touring in-the-round theatre

The Sheet — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:49:25 +0000

We at Paines Plough are working on a bold new auditorium that promises to take travelling theatre farther than ever before

For the first time in touring company Paines Plough's 37-year history, we're building our own theatre – albeit one that travels. The Roundabout auditorium is a portable in-the-round space in which we'll perform a repertory of new plays using a single ensemble of actors. It's going to revolutionise the way we tour, enabling us to take a range of different plays to previously inaccessible places.

When we joined Paines Plough as joint artistic directors, it was our ambition to show work more widely than ever before. We've become obsessive about identifying the obstacles to touring and finding ways around them. Roundabout has evolved as a direct response to these challenges, and we hope it will mean a sustainable future for touring on the small scale (which is to say, spaces for an audience of less than 450).

Roundabout will be a self-contained, portable, "demountable" in-the-round theatre. It will comprise 150 seats over four tiers, or 100 seats over three tiers (depending on available space), creating an amphitheatre-style performance space. Think a miniature Coliseum, or Barcelona's Camp Nou. It flat-packs into a lorry and can fit into anywhere, from large theatres to studio spaces, eventually touring to village halls, schools, warehouses and parks.

Until now, we haven't been able to visit certain towns because they lacked a theatre. Or there wasn't a theatre the right size for the play. The Roundabout auditorium requires only an empty space – so anything is possible. In time, we hope to partner with major regional theatres to present work in places that have no theatre of their own.

Why in-the-round? Well, it's one of the most exhilarating ways to watch a play – a true 3D experience. As playwright and Paines Plough trustee Simon Stephens says, "there's no theatrical architecture that challenges or interrogates what it is to be a human being more than theatre in-the-round". With only five permanent in-the-round venues in the UK, few audience members will have sat encircling a play. We hope Roundabout will create a sense of event, and attract audiences like Imax cinemas attract filmgoers.

Another age-old challenge of the small-scale tour is how to replicate high quality production values in a range of spaces. Moving day by day to theatres of completely different shapes and technical capacities means elements of a production inevitably have to give way, while an audience's relationship with the work will also vary. The dimensions of the Roundabout auditorium are constant, so everyone will have a similar viewing experience, wherever they are.

Second, Roundabout features a repertory of plays. Currently we only tour one small-scale show per year which, while popular, is inevitably not to everyone's taste. We want to offer more variety. Venues can programme one or all three shows in whichever way they feel best suits their audience. Plus, working with an ensemble of actors means we are able to tour three plays for the price of one.

Last year we conducted a six-month research project and uncovered a vicious cycle in the small-scale touring network. The amount of top quality touring work isn't consistent, which means audiences don't grow and venues often lose money on staging new plays. Subsequently they can't offer visiting companies the financial guarantee they need, which in turn dissuades companies from touring. The supply is further reduced, and audiences remain underdeveloped; it's a catch 22.

Often, the best work retracts its reach to theatres in major cities, where audiences are in plentiful supply. In many parts of the country, smaller venues book safe bets such as tribute bands and standup comedians, or in some cases close down altogether. (The recently proposed closure of the Arc theatre in Trowbridge is another blow to the small-scale circuit. Locals now face a trip to Bath or Salisbury if they want to see professional work.)

With our partners, Sheffield Theatres, we built a prototype of the auditorium, in which we plan to show three premieres this autumn (plays by Nick Payne, Duncan MacMillan and Penelope Skinner). The theatre is made from sustainable materials and it offers an opportunity to test the architecture, try out the space and pilot the three-play concept. It's a life-size model of the actual auditorium, but will be unable to tour and is not built to last. Instead, it gives us the chance to get every aspect of the auditorium right before building a version that can be taken apart easily and quickly, and will last for years to come.

Then there's the £90,000 we need to raise in order to build the auditorium itself. It may sound like a lot of money, but really it's a steal for a fully functioning theatre that will last for a decade. Most new theatres cost millions, and they're stuck in one spot.

We genuinely believe we can get around the challenges of touring. But ensuring a sustainable touring system requires initial investment; only then can we pave the way for a new generation of touring companies to reach audiences in every corner of the UK.

For ever Egypt – a northern temple to industry is at serious risk

The Sheet — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:47:35 +0000

Has Leeds woken up to the fact that one of its most important historic buildings is in serious danger? The Victorian Society and English Heritage are clanging alarm bells

The threat to British industry's greatest monuments raised by English Heritage is dramatically illustrated by the partial collapse of Temple Mill in Leeds, a vast Egyptian-style monument which became world-famous within months of its completion in 1840.

Launched with a temperance tea for 2000 flax-spinners, whose facilities in the huge building included private bathrooms – cold water free, hot a penny – the building was an attempt at more enlightened employment practices and featured as such in Disraeli's novel Sybil.

Lauded by everyone from Pevsner to Sir John Betjeman, the mill has been listed Grade 1 for more than 30 years, placing it in the top 2.5 percent of the UK's built heritage. It figures both on the English Heritage 'red alert' list and in the top ten Victorian buildings at risk published earlier this month by the Victorian Society.

There is incredulity in Leeds that the city's most famous industrial monument can have reached such a parlous state that one of its 18 beautifully carved lotus pillars has collapsed, bringing down with it a section of equally ornate wall. But the lethal effects of neglect on a vast but delicate structure, which depended on constant use and maintenance, has combined with the bite of the recession on over-optimistic developers.

For all its massiveness, the mill depends on a web of tie-bars which anchor an exceptionally heavy roof of 60 saucer-shaped brick domes, each crowned by a cone of glass, to the Egyptian walls. Inspired by the Pharoanic temple of the falcon god Horus at Edfu, the system included a meadow of grass to preserve moist temperatures for the flax, which was grazed monthly in summer by imported sheep.

The fracture of a tie-bar led to the pillar collapse and left the mill like a 'wobbly table' on its forest of slender iron pillars, also adorned with lotus leaves, which double as drainpipes. Further damage is certain if other ties fail.

Stonework is also broken on the ornate gatekeeper's lodge, an extra adornment which survived when the original chimney, an obelisk inspired by Cleopatra's Needle, became structurally unsound and was demolished in the 19th century. English Heritage lists the building's condition laconically as 'very bad'.

The developers Arndale Properties have begun repair work and use of parts of the building as a cultural centre on the lines of Salt's Mill in neighbouring Bradford, an even vaster leviathan whose collection of David Hockney paintings and World Heritage Site status has been one of northern England's greatest heritage successes. Temple Mill's neighbouring, and flourishing, Round Foundry complex is a model too. But progress has been slow since the last major occupier, a mail order warehouse, moved out in 2004. The clock for crucial and ever-more expensive repairs is ticking.

Martin Wainwright