Nicholas Boys Smith has an interesting Critic piece on the restoration of the Palace of Westminster, interesting because it highlight how poor we are at major public projects.
A sense of palace
It’s apparently beyond us to fix one of the world’s greatest buildings
The creation of the modern Palace of Westminster after the medieval palace’s destruction by fire is a Victorian epic; a three-part novel of Dickensian satire, Trollopian industry and Disraelian hutzpah. It is one whose final success we are unable to match today despite greater wealth and technological resources due to failings of ambition and ability to execute.
It's a subject about which I know very little, but the whole piece is well worth reading as it fits so well with a whole raft of current failings.
Besides this history of purpose and beauty, ambition and delivery, the saga of modern Britain’s inability to restore the Palace of Westminster is frankly pathetic. It is the quintessential exemplar of “Broken Britain”, of a state no longer able to conceive sensibly ambitious plans or execute them effectively, of a state so focused on posturing and process that it has forgotten about common sense and outcomes.
