A Surveyors’ Triptych:

3. Bad Government Building

So, we hit the road – myself and Robert Blyth (who else?). We had to get outta Manchester, where even the best architecture seemed like old friends (the stifling, gossip-mongering kind). I helped Bob look beyond bridges, to good government buildings, and he expanded my horizon beyond our home city.  

We started, unlike many architectural projects, with Rochdale and its Victorian Gothic spire (admired by Hitler, did you know?), passed Salford’s brutalist civic centre extension, and alighted upon Trafford’s neo-classical mansard. Next was a waltz through Lancashire, revolving around Blackburn with Darwen’s Italianate columns. Then it was onwards east towards the Peak Distract, past Buxton’s clocktowered chateau.  

Eventually of course (inevitably of course) we found ourselves in London, open-mouthed before Parliament’s scaffolding, wraparound plastic and workers moving purposefully like ants. I sighed with disappointment but Bob was practically knock-kneed – he had a thing for properties in transition, like actors getting dressed on stage in the opening of a Brecht play (plus, we were standing on Tower Bridge at the time, at its crux point Bob insisted).  

“Go on then, how much?” I teased. 

“How much for the Houses of Parliament!?” 

Bob opened his mouth, closed it, muttered under his breath like an incantation and twitched his hands like a puppeteer. After a few minutes, he was still. 

“£1” he said, nonchalantly.  

“A lb of what?” 

Bob frowned a smile (difficult to do), in equal measure irritated and amused by the question. 

“A lb of rain, of course.” 

Of course. There and then, in the capital drizzle, I resolved to become a valuer.  

Given Bob’s history, there was only one logical stop after London: Paris (a lb of champagne); after Paris, Madrid (a lb of sangria); after Madrid, Berlin (a lb of weisse bier) – a theme developed; as did a headache. We travelled, valuing and falling in love (which really amounts to the same thing) with great government buildings. We took photos – some (sweet) with us as moon-eyed tourists, some (elegant) without. By the end of our journey, we’d have a fanboy photo album to cherish and the makings of a niche coffee table book. We were just debating whether a Bob-shaped appendix (not a euphemism) of city bridges would complement or detract from our tome when the phone rang for the first time. 

It was Ukraine. Someone in its highest echelons of government had got wind of our project and wondered (with Putin’s approval, we were assured) if we would come to value the parliament in Kiev on an all-expenses-paid trip. Bob led us to the heart of the Berliner Bridge of Spies, where once east met west, and a decision emerged: we would go, as long as we were given free reign.  

Mere days later (for we had it on good authority that this was an architectural emergency) we were gazing upon Kiev’s lit dome while a gaggle of “government officials” (who looked uncannily like Russian security guards) gazed back at us. Fearing our findings would have international repercussions, we meditated on the Verkhovna Rada for a full twenty four hours before revealing what had dawned in our hearts after twenty four seconds: this good government building was worth a lb of Kalashnikov (alas, recent events, which have proven us prescient provide no pleasure). The officials puffed their cheeks and mopped their brows. Wasting no time on niceties or negotiations, one dressed all in black except for a pair of blue and yellow sunglasses escorted us to the airport in a tinted limousine. From the glovebox, he produced a Kalashnikov and a blade of what looked like diamond. 

“You need exactly one lb?” the man asked. 

“Yes,” said Bob who, unlike me, seemed neither flustered nor afraid. “You understand this is a sale and leaseback arrangement?” 

“I do,” said the man, with the solemnity of a wedding vow.  

A few incisions and a weighing scale later (appeared from under his seat), the deed (literally) was done – we (somewhere along the way incorporated as Blyth Spirit Ltd) had our lb of Kalashnikov and Ukraine had a signed conveyance. 

I stood, loosely, in the airport, events simmering my mind. 

“I didn’t realise we were guns for hire, Bob.” 

“Gun,” Bob corrected. 

“Where to next?” 

The phone answered for us: Kazakhstan (a lb of Beshbarmak – which soaked up the alcohol marvellously); Estonia (a lb of verivorst). Latvia (a lb of pea stew – I couldn’t pronounce the local name but had a real affinity for it, hailing from Darwen myself where the delicacy is pea pie). Former Soviet republics were the first to fall for our arrangement (to anger Putin? on his instruction?). Then London, and its maverick government, came calling. Next were African states, headed by Angola (a lb of oil), tailed by South Africa (a lb of gold). Even the EU relented eventually.  

It was around this time that, borrowing from Google, we adopted our first company motto: don’t be political. Which was just as well because, when we published our first annual accounts, the world could see how we’d valued its government buildings and some countries were none too plussed. Our accountant wasn’t either – exasperated, she didn’t know how to add the lbs together and complained that all the parliaments we had collected were liabilities rather than assets. But we’d anticipated criticism in our company statement: couldn’t citizens of the world see that we were stewards of good government buildings – we would fix the world’s defects, there would be no more leaky roofs or crumbling plaster – and that our sale and leaseback arrangements made everyone winners? Boris could say whatever he liked in the Houses of Parliament as long as he paid us rent i.e. a ninety-ninth of a lb of rain over ninety nine years. 

As a symbol of our apolitical stance, we decided to move our office to the centre of the world – but, when we went to register our address at Null Island, off the coast of West Africa, we found it was made up of one lonely buoy (“Soul buoy”) and could not accept post. Greenwich would have to do.  

At home in Greenwich, over an evening sampling our spoils, we realised that owning the world’s government buildings meant not just owning their stones and mortar, but owning their very ideas. Weary from globetrotting, we conjured a new project: this time, the world could come to us. One building to rule them all…  

Enter James Smith – can you meet a more English man? Indeed, he called himself a “Native Englander”, which I presumed meant he was racist but Bob corrected me – James believed himself (and his buildings) to have Viking blood. At any rate, we didn’t hire him for his self-deprecating, good sportsman ways; we hired him for his dream logic architecture. The way he linked one room (which is really an idea) to the next was a step beyond Gaudi, even – if Gaudi’s buildings looked alive, James Smith’s looked asleep and dreaming.  

Smith took a mere month (most of it meditating) to build the first transition – the centre of the building, in the Perpendicular Gothic style of the Palace of Westminster, gave way to the Neoclassical façade of the Palais Bourbon, through a corridor made of Anglo-French relations. How can a corridor be made of politics? Come and see for yourself. The corridor floored Bob who, unlike his bridges, could not find its heart because, according to him, its entire structure was centre. Bob awarded it cent quarante-quatre points, a holy number indeed, and there was plenty more where that came from. 

We three wizards decided that this parliament of parliaments would effectively be an NGO. While the halls would surge with power, no decisions would actually be made. It would be a government building filled with dreams, not teeth, built on the philosophy of bureaucracy as aesthetic.  

However, to fulfil its aesthetic promise, we needed people. What are government buildings without their officials, blank-faced and bustling, swapping papers like a makeshift market? But people (even civil servants) have opinions. And opinions must be balanced. We hired the ex-director general of the BBC to keep her beady eye on bias; naturally, she needed a team and, naturally, its members were English and middle class, decanted from Salford’s Media City and London’s Broadcasting House.  

By this time, our parliament of parliaments (Parliament Squared?) had several limbs, stretching from the Parliament of Budapest to The Hague through the Capitol beyond the Great Hall of the People, all connected by corridors constructed from international relations – I passed one made of trench warfare, another filled with diktats. Everywhere I ventured, I found marks of the BBC: leftover cucumber sandwiches, half-drunk porcelain cups of Twinings, once even a tardis. I soon spotted a government official wearing a bowler hat, another a tuxedo, another a deerstalker. They (oh, who do you think, Manchester Architectural Guild led by Robin Balustrade) began to call Bob, James and I “Little Englanders” and our ground-breaking brand of architecture “the New Colonialism”. Like a Midas from the Midlands, everything we touched turned to England.  

There was a temporary reprieve from criticism when a mask (that is the collective noun?) of anarchists took occupation of the north-west-eastern wing (the building plans by now were unfathomable to all but surveyors with the biggest clipboards imaginations). Yes, they may have been singing the Sex Pistols and wearing Vivienne Westwood, but several were clearly immigrants – for a brief moment, English was not synonymous with racist. Until, the beebple (as the BBC people were now known), in their televisual wisdom, “balanced” the anarchists with a bunch of skinheads firmly from Burnley.  

The Guardian said we were co-opting world architecture – it called for a new global copyright to be passed and applied to heritage buildings everywhere as soon as practicable. The Times claimed we’d cut England’s Green Belt by ten per cent. The Daily Mail, after a lengthy description of what we were last seen wearing, called us heroes but questioned if our planning permission really extended to the fourth dimension. 

How large was our parliament? And had we really built beyond 3D? The truth was, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t find my way out! I’d never seen our exterior. I didn’t know how many days I’d spent inside and, unlike a prison, I didn’t even have a wall of one’s own to tally. Dawns bled into dusks. North bled into South. West became plural. Bob and I communicated via Teams (so 4D had wifi, then). James was permanently Busy. According to the beebple, around the world, populations were protesting, town halls were falling. While our ideas of the world’s parliaments proliferated and spread like dreams, their concrete realities fell. Our accountant called with good news – apparently the negative of a liability was, somehow, an asset. We were rich. We were lost. 

The Ukrainians rang again. Its government was now homeless and heard we had a spare wing. The beebple didn’t stop them coming in but they did invite their opposite. After the Russians, came the Americans, came the Japanese, came the… 

Soon, there were so many politicians, you couldn’t tell the difference between the real and the aesthetic bureaucrats – they moved much the same. The beebple lost their grip and decisions began to be made – as always, mostly in corridors. We had created the setting for a world government. Build it and they’ll come. One building to bind them all… 

I pass through so many corridors – so many hearts, as Bob would say, romantically – I no longer know the difference between dreams and reality. If there’s a moral to this story, I feel its somewhere in the (Viking?) underbelly of our building. For now, our new company motto will have to do: ne estu angla (in Esperanto, don’t be English).