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Mark Somerfield

Built Heritage Consultant

For many years I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with a poem by Philip Larkin entitled ‘Going, Going’. Written in the year of my birth (1972) , it was a commissioned work that was meant to evoke an image of England that was rapidly disappearing, under the weight of ‘split level shopping, bleak high-risers, concrete and tyres’. Whilst it pines for an old England that has been seemingly lost (if indeed it ever existed), it neglects the cultural force of what replaced it. Larkin often played the game of despising Modernism, whilst deploying its devices, neatly camouflaged in his deft prose. England has changed, and in some cases for the better, and Modernism, whether you like or loath it, left us with a plethora of great things that were never meant to be so. Growing up in and around Birmingham, with its unique mix of the old and the new, it was buildings such as the New Street Signal Box (Bicknell and Hamilton), as well as Madin’s Central Library (demolished 2016) that made ‘Brum’ my kind of town (as Telly Savalas once famously put it), despite its excess of ‘concrete and tyres’. However, at times such as these, when our parliamentary cycle goes into overdrive, I always think of Larkin’s apt description in the poem of the governing class as a ‘cast of crooks and tarts’. This week we all get to decide whether we want them to continue to create the ‘first slum of Europe’ as ‘old Larks’ saw it, or something radically different, something that could be forged out of old England, and not just the misplaced nostalgia for its supposed loss! #heritage #conservation #architecture #modernism #birmingham #election2024 #thefabricofplaces

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