The Nazi concentration camp survivor Manfred Goldberg was 84 when David Cameron promised a British memorial to the Holocaust. “Last month I celebrated my 93rd birthday and I pray to be able to attend the opening of this important project,” he says on the government website.
That day has been put still further off by a procedural hitch in plans to amend a 1900 act that forbids buildings on its proposed site, Victoria Tower Gardens, a public park just up the Thames from the Palace of Westminster.
It is heartbreaking that few survivors may live to see the memorial’s completion, a situation that has arisen due to the government’s attempt to build it in a green space to which it is ill suited. There is, though, a good way to cut out further delay.
The main problem comes not from the memorial but a plan to construct a “learning centre” – a building that requires a roof, deep excavations, escalators and lifts, and security enclosures, and adds time and cost. A memorial on its own needs none of these things and can be created without contravening the 1900 act, while the need for the learning centre is unclear, given that the powerful and educational Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum London are only a mile away. If Michael Gove, the minister currently in charge of the project, truly wants to make it happen, he should remove from its brief the greatest impediment to its success.
Terminally confused
Once, changing terminals at St Petersburg airport, I was told that the only way to make the short trip was by taxi, which turned out to cost $60. It was a scam, as might be expected in a country ruled by thieves. But, in Gatwick last week, I saw the bamboozling of new arrivals by the range of options offered by ticket machines. How, especially if you are jetlagged and not Anglophone, are you to know the difference between Gatwick Express, Thameslink and Southern trains? The price for getting this wrong is an extortionate penalty fare, which, although administered with due process by uniformed officials, is similar in its effects to that Russian taxi fare.
It is an atrocious but fitting introduction to a nation (see also: water companies, sewage spills) of state-assisted corporate chisellers.
Line of least resistance
In Venice, under the arty-pretentious title of Zero Gravity Urbanism, an exhibition opens about Neom, the project in Saudi Arabia that includes a 100-mile-long new city called the Line.
Its displays of fantastical models look like an unusually well-funded student show, but are actually an exercise in soft and not-so-soft power by a brutal regime that is prepared to displace and reportedly execute people who get in the way of its building plans.
A team photo of architects involved shows an array of formerly avant-garde individuals, predominantly European and American, in a male-female ratio of 23-1, many of whom would once have claimed liberal or humanitarian ideals. All now seem committed to the theory of the 19th-century American HH Richardson: the first rule of architecture, he said, is to get the job.
Blame game
The Conservative MP Miriam Cates recently argued that low birthrates are “the one overarching threat to… the whole of western society”. She blamed this on the “anxiety and confusion” put into young people’s heads by “cultural Marxism”.
A more likely factor in Britain is the difficulty of affording homes suitable for raising families, but putting that right would require some hard decisions by her government. It’s easier to blame a cultural concept.
• Rowan Moore is an Observer columnist
