Architectural Assistant Mair Hughes, talks to James about the gatekeeping of architectural history and standardisation of the curriculum at the end of the 19th century, castles and cathedrals with dubious origin dates, Le Corbusier and all manner of shocking architectural myths. ↓ ↓ ↓Here is the link for this week’s product https://nutrahealth365.com/product/libido-boost/
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And I'm feeling both excited and a little bit sad.
The reason I'm excited is because I've got this amazing event coming up.
It's called James and Dick's Christmas Special.
Can you guess what it involves?
That's right.
It's James and Dick on a stage, just chatting the usual rubbish, but with an intimate audience.
And it will be surrounded by drinks with a cash bar.
Woodfire pizzas will be available.
You have to pay for them, but I think you'll want to feed.
And most important of all, you will be surrounded by like-minded folk.
I mean, that's the real point of these events.
Obviously, Dick and I will probably say some funny things.
And by the way, I don't think I'm going to record this event, so it's like, be there or miss it totally.
Um...
There'll be a cash bar.
I've insisted on a cash bar this time after the disaster at the last event where people went to a pub and found it was card only, which is a bit off-brand.
It's going to be in Northamptonshire.
You'll get the details as soon as you buy your ticket.
My big worry is that tickets are selling out quite fast.
There are not that many.
It's not like one of my big London events, and you're going to...
These intimate ones are probably more fun in a way, because you get more access.
I don't know, something like that.
Anyway, lots of the usual suspects are coming.
Oh, and Dick's Band!
Dick's Band Unregistered Chickens are headlining.
There'll probably be other special guests too, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not promising.
But anyway, if you want tickets to this event, which is on the 30th of November, that's a Saturday, So you can make a weekend of it, if you like.
Book somewhere and have a nice weekend in the Northamptonshire countryside.
I'll let you know hotel recommendations and stuff.
If you want to come to this thing, it's on the 30th of November, Saturday.
Starts at 5pm.
You can get tickets at my website, which is jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash Christmas 2024. Tickets, 25 quid.
I think that's...
That's it, yeah.
Get in there before tickets sell out.
Seriously, I mean they are selling fast.
We've already sold a course of it.
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Pod.
Maya Hughes.
Hello.
It's been too long.
It's been a very long time.
I've earmarked you for this, for a podcast, for ages, because I know that you have secret knowledge.
I mean, well, I know that's secret.
Well, not really, no.
No, but you do.
You know stuff.
Yeah.
Which I've been dying to do a podcast on for ages, and I've never found anyone who...
And I remember when you were on my Telegram channel, which you've rightly left because it's a complete waste of everyone's...
It's a waste of life going on Telegram.
It really is.
It's just not productive.
You used to say some really interesting things, and I remembered this.
And I said, look, I want you to talk about some of this stuff.
And you sent me this...
A list of suggestions of things that you might...
If we've got time, we're going to talk about them.
I'm so excited.
Can I just read them out?
And so just to remind you, what you said is...
I don't know what I'm committing to now.
You said, some architectural ideas we could talk about.
The gatekeeping of architectural history and standardisation of the curriculum at the end of the 19th century.
Brackets.
And the same textbook being used for the next hundred years.
this is a good one castles and cathedrals supposedly the same dates i wonder what that means architectural myths rising damp dry rot double glazing and this is a good one destroying evidence deliberate and more subtle Older buildings hiding behind newer facades.
Le Corbusier, humans as battery hens.
Masons, Tartaria.
Ville et le Duc turning Carcassonne into a theme park.
How do any of these sound?
And then you add another one.
You say, World War II destruction, iron railings removed in UK, Euston Arch.
I mean, Maya.
Yeah, we could talk about all sorts, couldn't we, really?
You are the Ferrero Rocher ambassador of architectural rabbit-holery.
So I'm really looking forward to it.
But before we go on, how do you know this stuff?
What's your background?
What do you do?
So I've got to make this clear before I start.
I'm not in any way representing the architectural profession.
This is all my own personal opinion because of the way everything's set up.
So essentially I am a qualified architect and I've specialised in conservation architecture for about the last 20 or so years and kind of gone down Sort of my own personal rabbit holes to do with architecture really,
so a lot of this stuff has got nothing to do with my job, it's just stuff that I kind of do research all the time for general projects and tend to get a bit sort of sidetracked and start looking at other stuff really, so I kind of end up finding all sorts of things out.
And some of the stuff I know is just kind of common knowledge within the kind of architectural world but just doesn't seem to go any further so it's a bit kind of strange that you know people talk about stuff as if it's some mystery and it's like well it's an open secret you know within the architectural world just say it doesn't seem to be something that is kind of talked about elsewhere really so it yeah so So what are you thinking of in particular?
What things do architects talk about, like, take for granted, whereas in the outside world we go, what is this?
Wow!
I suppose the one that really got me, which I thought was hilarious, was back in the early 2000s.
There was a big conspiracy going round about Stonehenge and how it had all been moved and, you know, everything had been reset and stuff like that.
Well, I learnt that at architecture school.
That wasn't a big mystery or anything.
That's what happened.
But then for the next 10 years or so, there was kind of almost radio silence from the kind of officialdom.
And they did try and sweep it under the carpet for a bit.
It was really strange.
And I remember bits came out again around 2013, 2014. They started to admit, yes, we did repair Stonehenge.
And I was like, well, yeah, I knew that.
And now when you go to the visitor centre at Stonehenge there is a tiny little display board that says yeah all these bits fell down in the 19th century and then there was various repair works and basically every single stone at Stonehenge has been set in concrete and you know probably you know rebuilt at some time.
So it's not a kind of authentic you know this is a stone circle that's never been touched at all.
Do you know what?
I remember coming across this alleged conspiracy theory a while back and having it heatedly denied by various people who ought to have known better.
You know, it was outrageous.
It was just some crazy theory I'd come up with.
And it was very hard to find...
On the internet, evidence of Stonehenge having been tinkered with.
But was it you who shared those extraordinary photographs of the stones at Stonehenge with inside they've got these metal supports covering the concrete?
Is that...
It might have been, I can't remember.
There's quite a few photographs knocking around now.
There was certainly a period of about 10 years where it was all a big mystery and we tried to pretend nothing had happened.
There's a lot of weird things going on like that now, but you just can't quite understand why it's such a big secret.
Everything is being altered.
I mean, if you go back to, say, Carcassonne, I mean, even sort of in the 19th century, it was a massive controversy.
You know, how much do you repair and how much do you restore and how much is conjecture?
And these are kind of debates that have been going on ever since.
I mean, basically there was a lot of...
Shall we say, a lot of railing against what they did at Carcassonne in the 19th century, in terms of basically, Violet Ledoux, murdered his name there, basically just made up a lot of stuff, basically.
He did stuff that he thought looked pretty, and he created this idealistic version of what he thought a medieval castle should look like.
But there's a lot of debate on whether actually any of it is authentic.
And you can go there and you look at it and you can actually see that actually they pretty much rebuilt most of it.
You know, if you know what you're looking at, that there's not an awful lot that you could say would be even vaguely original.
That's interesting.
I feel rather guilty now because when I was...
I spent a few months living in southwest France, well, near Montpellier, and I took a trip over to Carcassonne on a couple of occasions and went round it and ate in some of the nice restaurants there and thought, wow, this is...
This is amazing.
This is like a fantastic recreation of a medieval walled city.
And I rather liked the pointy sort of fairytale towers, you know, like you Well, you don't see them very much in real life, do you?
No, exactly.
It's kind of, there's a lot of debate on whether any of that is even vaguely authentic.
I mean, it looks nice, but yeah.
Who wore some?
There's a lot of that going on, but, you know, there's lots of stuff.
I mean, it turns out that, you know, Leduc did all sorts of restorations around France.
I mean, Notre Dame, he rebuilt the spire, which apparently was built to a different size design than the one that supposedly had fallen down.
So yeah, his work kind of Well I suppose he was the first kind of architect to do restoration and again he wasn't even a trained architect in a sense but he decided that architecture school was too much you know they basically churned out identical people that you know did a sort of standard design he wasn't interested in that but somehow he was well connected and he got his first job at 24 25 you know and was allowed to work on these amazing grand
projects.
So who was he?
He obviously was of the aristocracy from what I can gather, but I don't know much about him beyond that.
He seems to be very well connected within both the pre-revolution government and afterwards.
So his family seems to be connected to the royal family and then afterwards he seems to carry on as if nothing had happened after the revolution.
Obviously someone with lots of connections, basically.
Okay, so the fact that he's got lots of connections and comes from probably a bloodline family suggests to me that there might be some ulterior motive behind these...
that he committed on on on the past that there might okay so it could just be a sport rich rich kid indulging his fantasies or do you think there could be another reason why that he got away with this i mean this is the this is where i'm kind of coming to over the kind of whole list thing of what's been going on for at least the last 200 years
in terms of there's been a massive sort of movement in restoration, changing things,
You have a lot of stuff that went on, particularly in the early 20th century when there was the whole kind of, say this is where Le Corbusier comes in, this whole switch from after World War One where although there's the kind of inklings of a bit of change within architecture up until World War One you've got a very consistent line of kind of architectural design and then suddenly you get the kind of Bauhaus and you're not allowed to have ornament anymore and everything's
all very stripped down and it's a very different world and everything you know architecture is a machine and You know, this whole humans living, you know, in these kind of mechanised cities and it's all about the machine and you're thinking It kind of changed very, I mean, although the actual impact on places was probably quite minimal, the impact on architectural education, I think, was massive because it was so pushed into schools.
I mean, even when I started, it was still taught in a lot of places, as though this was still current stuff and, you know, and that always fascinated me because it was like, this is really old stuff.
Why have we been taught all this stuff as if it's still new theory?
It was very strange in that sense.
So it came in, Am I right?
In roughly the same period that modernism was making its impact on literature?
That all the kind of traditions were just being ripped up?
Yeah, they all seemed to happen at the same time.
And one thing I found very fascinating, just in the Second World War, when they brought out utility furniture, because obviously, you know, everything was rationed and utility furniture was part of that rationing.
There was a massive resistance among the working class to utility furniture.
They hated it because there was no decoration.
And there was almost like a kind of propaganda campaign to sort of tell the plebs, no, you should like this stuff.
This is, you know, this is what you should be buying.
Plain is good.
Yes.
Decoration is decadent.
There's a lot of those kind of things that you can kind of trace looking back, but you think, yeah, why was there such a big push for this?
Yeah, I don't know.
What do you see going on in the Soviet Union as well?
Well, it's going all over the place, isn't it?
Yeah, that's the other thing.
It's a kind of international thing.
But going back to the education thing, so this is fascinating.
So this book, I don't know if you can see that at all.
This is the fourth edition.
Anyway, this is called Sir Bannister's Lectures, A History of Architecture.
And this is the 1901 edition I've got here.
Now, this book became the most influential book in architectural education.
And the foreword, I'm going to read this outline because it's so ridiculous.
I couldn't quite believe it when I read it.
Find it.
So this is the Preface to the Third Edition.
So this was in 1897. And basically he's talking about how popular this book was.
It came out in 1896 and it was already on the third edition by 1897. And it says, it has been accepted as an intelligible and an aid to a wide circle of readers.
It has been accepted as a textbook for university extension lectures And whilst for fact it has also been adopted as a textbook in the leading colleges and schools of art of Great Britain and Ireland as well as many similar institutions in America and Australia and is sufficient proof that lecturers have not been backward in according it a welcome.
So basically saying this became architectural history education in Australia, the US, and Britain, and Ireland, all of a sudden.
And having read that book in bits, that we were actually taught almost verbatim some of the passages out of that book, like the end of the 90s.
And it's still in publication.
This is the modern version that I had when I was at university, By this point, much, much thicker and kind of encompass a bit more of the world because the first edition was basically the Mediterranean, you know, your classical architecture, your Roman architecture, your Egyptian, and then a token gesture of a few other things.
But it's just fascinating that this book is still in...
The most recent edition was 2019. So it's still in production and it's still being taught as a kind of reference manual for architectural history.
Well, presumably, if it were a good book, that wouldn't be a problem.
But you're suggesting that perhaps there are things wrong with it, that it's promoting a particular agenda?
I wouldn't say it's necessarily wrong.
It's promoting a specific view of the world, which obviously has changed over time.
I mean, the last edition was very much rewritten in a very modern interpretation of history.
It's the whole, it's kind of come down, but this is all fact.
And when you actually read the, say, the original edition, there's things like, it's talking about how they dated the Egyptian pyramids, and it's basically saying they used one reference of one guy who wrote down a list of, you know, the kings within the Egyptian culture.
That does seem a slightly tenuous thing to base your entire dating history on.
I mean certainly my view is that you should be looking at a bit more kind of in depth but that was the whole Victorian way wasn't it?
They were very confident that they knew exactly what they were doing and if one source says this is right then it must be and that's it we're not going to question it.
Well, I might have thought that once about the Victorians.
I don't know what I think anymore.
Because it seems to me that every era has potentially been hijacked by people who want to Change the culture in a particular direction for particular reasons.
So I'm not sure I'd say anything sweeping like the Victorians, because I'm not sure that...
Well, yeah, I mean, the impression you get from all the sort of, you know, classic things that you're supposed to know about, but they always come about sort of very overconfident, you know, so I guess, but that's what they were projecting.
Okay, so this book comes out in 1896, and...
It's remained the cornerstone of architectural teaching.
What view is it promoting?
I mean ironically the very early one was very much about it was kind of teaching architects about classical architecture and you know what all the various techniques were and But that's why I find it curious because you're thinking well surely there's been this whole progression certainly since you know the Georgian times of the Grand Tour and architects doing this and architectural education at the end of the 19th century was very much a kind of
apprenticeship model so architects Or budding architects would go along to a practice.
Their parents, I think, would pay for them to be articled and then they would attend sort of night school or day release, you know, art school and things like that.
But it was very much on the job training and they would learn from a master and they would learn how to do things.
So you're kind of thinking, why did they suddenly need at the end of the 19th century to teach architects all this stuff?
When they were all being taught it anyway and that's exactly what they've been doing.
And then the other thing that's interesting is Sir Bannister Fletcher.
So there were two Bannister Fletchers.
There was a father and a son and they both wrote the first edition and then the elder Bannister Fletcher died.
Around 1900, his son took over.
His son then went on to be a big mover in the whole shift in architectural education over to the degree-based model and formal training, and that architects were no longer going to learn on the job from, you know, a mentor.
They were going to go, you know, into the university system.
And he very much promoted that with the RBA, which basically created the kind of current model we have at the moment.
I mean, I just have suspicions about that, but what was going on, particularly the timing of it and everything else that was sort of happening that I kind of feel like it was that education was being homogenised and this was very much the official line on this is what you're going to be taught and we're not going to have any of these people going off at tangents and learning from, you know, mavericks within the profession maybe.
Right, yes.
A bit like, not long after that, I mean, in the next ten years, medicine was hijacked by Rockefeller Medicine, wasn't it?
And they took over, Rockefeller, and was it...
Was it J.P. Morgan or Carnegie?
I forget.
They took over all the medical schools and standardised medical teaching and got rid of the old medical, you know, and got rid of the mavericks and stuff.
So something similar was going on.
When I go round somewhere like...
Birmingham or Manchester and you go into the centre of town and you see these magnificent buildings which have survived from the sort of industrial era, the heyday of these cities from the height of the manufacturing and industrial revolution.
And you look at the...
They're not just magnificent buildings, but they're also highly decorative.
There's love that's gone into them and civic pride.
And in order to get to these buildings, These days you've got to negotiate sort of ring roads and concrete and just horror that's been erected.
Urban planning has clearly changed the nature of these cities which were once really beautiful.
What happened?
Well, this is something I do get very suspicious about these days.
So, there was definitely a movement to tell people that Victorian architecture wasn't worthy of anything.
It was, you know, considered the lowest of the low at one point.
I remember my parents talking about that when I was quite young, but when they were growing up sort of in the 1950s, they were basically being taught that these were old You know, horrible buildings.
Everything was covered in, you know, so anyway, so, you know, you couldn't really see what it looked like and they were told this nothing was worth keeping and it was all, you know, we need to get rid of it and have all this new stuff.
So that was certainly a kind of psychological thing going on that that was being sort of fed out to the public.
And you had, I suppose, obviously the Second World War there was a fair amount of destruction, but not that much.
Most of the things that we lost actually happened after the war with, you know, planning guns, you know, creating these new, you know, the new utopias that it was all marketed to everyone.
And this is where the Euston Arch comes in, because the Euston Arch Obviously was pulled down to make way for the new Euston station and there was suddenly overnight uproar about it because I think that was the first time people started to twig that hang on we're losing loads of stuff here and maybe we want to kind of hang on to some of this you know why is it all disappearing?
And that was, I suppose, what's considered now the kind of beginning of the modern sort of conservation kind of movement in terms of people actually realizing that, you know, maybe we need to hang on to some of this stuff that, you know, it's worth having.
And it's worth having not just because it's nice, but because it has evidence of, you know, old building techniques, designs, all the rest of it.
It's a physical record.
And that's the thing that bothers me because we're losing more and more of it.
Despite having in the UK a quite robust system to supposedly protect stuff, it doesn't that well because there's so many loopholes.
I mean, one thing we do have a lot going on is developers will buy, say, a listed building, which is supposedly protected, and then they will just neglect it.
And it'll be, oh whoops, it's fallen down.
Or, oh whoops, it's on fire.
And you know, these things go on an awful lot these days.
And although you could say, well, it's just about money, you kind of begin to get a bit suspicious.
This is happening too much and there's too many blind eyes being turned to this.
So again, we've got all sorts of different stages of destruction, but if anything it seems to have almost accelerated despite having supposedly protections.
Again, you can't pin any of this stuff down.
You're just starting to see patterns evolving over time.
Somehow, because old buildings are a physical record of evidence, there might be a reason why people want to get rid of them.
I don't know.
If you had an agenda, you don't want people to know their past.
What's a better way to obliterate it than remove all the physical evidence?
Yes.
I mean, if we'd been talking about this ten years ago, before I sort of started developing my conspiracy theorist antennae, I would have said,
well, you know, things move in waves and you get sort of trends and counter-trends and the reason that The reason that Victorian architecture was obliterated was the same as when,
after, I don't know, flares went out in the 1970s, people reacted with sort of skinny jeans, and this is what happens.
And I'm not sure I buy that now, because I don't believe that these movements are...
I don't think that...
I mean, you mentioned Le Corbusier, for example, and Bauhaus, and I remember growing up in a world where, okay, so one...
I didn't learn about architecture, but...
Insofar as one was expected to have any kind of view on architecture, it would be that Bauhaus was a good thing, you know, or interesting at least, and that Le Corbusier, yeah, this was an important movement, and that the Southbank Centre, for example, you might think it's ugly, but it's not.
It's actually really good for you, and you should enjoy it, and it's great.
You know what I mean?
There's a sort of propaganda campaign conducted by institutions like Channel 4, the sort of RTTV channel, promoted by sort of newspaper columnists.
You were supposed to...
Feel okay about this stuff.
Not to go, this is an atrocity.
This is wrong.
What happened was really bad.
Okay, so you've got mavericks like John Betjeman.
John Betjeman sort of became the figurehead of the Victorian society, didn't he?
And he wanted to save this stuff before it was too late.
But it was kind of represented as a sort of rather eccentric, charming thing to do, rather than a kind of fighting pure evil.
Yeah, and those arguments aren't without merit, but I do get the suspicion that there's possibly something directing everything, that it's all going in a certain direction.
Because so many other things have been influenced by, you say, very powerful people like Rockefeller and Carnegie, Why would architecture be immune, I suppose, is the way to look at it, you know?
Everything else was being sort of pushed to an agenda, so why wouldn't architecture be?
So if you wanted to develop this theory, what would you say?
I mean, who is behind this?
What is the purpose?
I think there definitely seems to be a concerted effort to remove bits of history so we have a less complete record.
Everything seems to be becoming more and more isolated.
So instead of getting whole streets with a sort of complete thing, you're getting kind of pockets now.
And it's really difficult to know what's actually going on because you're still in the middle of it.
It's happening around you.
Even in my lifetime, I've seen how much stuff disappeared.
And I'm kind of thinking, well, why was that pulled down?
It didn't look like there was anything particularly wrong with it.
And there's this ridiculous phrase that people come up with, oh, well, it's, you know, it's the end of its life.
Well, that doesn't really make any sense because all buildings can be repaired.
You know, you just, you know, if you talk about, say, you know, the sort of Japanese temples and things, There's virtually nothing original in those.
They just keep, you know, repairing it and, you know, making bits to match.
And you can do that with pretty much any, certainly any pre-World War II building.
Modern buildings with modern techniques of construction, it becomes more difficult.
And this is the thing we're kind of encountering now, where we've had this kind of wave of modernist architecture has now become sort of preserved.
And no one actually knows quite what to do with that because there's so many kind of different techniques and none of the materials were really designed to last and you know how do you even keep that stuff and what do we do and you know those are kind of current debates generally you know within the kind of profession so it's It's not a kind of theory that I could say, oh yes, well this is definitely going on.
All I'm getting is lots of things that are now kind of converging in my mind.
I'm going, yeah, something's not adding up here and I don't know what it is, you know?
One of the things that really saddens me is when you see a surviving...
School building from the Victorian era.
And there's normally a boy's entrance and a girl's entrance.
And they're really...
They're quite nice looking.
And you look at modern school buildings, which presumably often stand on the site of Victorian buildings which have been knocked down.
And they're horrible.
They're really depressing.
And they often sort of...
Breakdown quite quickly.
What was the one in...
There was one in...
That school in Dolphin Square, I think, is it Pimlico School?
Oh, Pimlico School, yeah.
That was designed, I think, in the 60s or the 70s and became unusable because it got too hot in the summer because they hadn't figured out that all this sort of glass and stuff was not conducive to, you know...
Yeah, I mean there was a lot of that went.
I mean some of the 60s stuff there was actually some quite interesting moves in education but they were quite small pockets of isolated experiments and then I think there was a kind of mass building program where most stuff was just put up cheaply you know there was a lot of that kind of the same as with the tower blocks it was all you know Throw it up as fast as you can, trying to use prefabricated techniques but no one knows what we're doing.
My very first work experience while I was still at school, I went to an architect's office for a week and the guy who was showing me around was Talking about when he first started work in the 60s and one of the very things they had to do was one of these prefabricated schools and he said literally people were sat there on site scratching their heads because there was no instructions for these panels and they were actually trying to figure out how to assemble this school.
It was just it was just bonkers of stuff they did because yeah stuff was just rushed out and no one knew what the hell they were doing.
Yes Yeah.
Well, I imagine that there is so much skill that we've lost over the years.
I mean, one of the things that we've lost is a lot of kind of traditional techniques.
We almost lost them completely until there was a sort of revival, probably sort of...
Late 80s, early 90s with all the conservation movements.
So some skills have kind of been rebuilt but only in very small scale versions.
But one thing I'm very aware of is when I was very little my grandfather was still working and he was a bricklayer.
So I used to be fascinated watching him work because he did some work on our house and he used to mix mortar by hand.
He absolutely refused to use a cement mixer.
Absolutely refused, even if my dad brought him one over to use it.
He said, oh no, it'll be quick.
He said, no, no, I'm not using it.
And the texture of his mortar, he used to mix.
I've never seen anything like it.
It looked like silk.
It was just amazing stuff.
I just was so fascinated watching him mix it.
And it was clearly just a different world that he came from because he was trained pre-World War II and learnt the very end of the old techniques, basically.
Yes.
Well, I live in an old house with lots of sort of walls around the garden and stuff, and you look at where it's been repointed over the last 50 years, and the mortar is completely wrong.
It's either too hard or too soft.
It's clear that For some time now we've been living in an era of botch jobs rather than of artisanal or traditional skills.
Basic skills.
And there's another dimension to that which again goes back to that whole kind of destruction of things.
It's not just that this stuff is botch jobs but these materials that we're using now are actively harmful and actually accelerate the deterioration of buildings.
I mean particularly things like cement mortar.
And cement mortar is a really interesting one because it actually Apparently first appeared sort of late 19th century and architects at the time were absolutely adamant they were not going to be using this stuff.
They said it's an inferior product.
We want to stick with lime mortar.
This is, you know, we've been using this for whatever, you know, thousands of years.
You know, this is the superior product.
We don't want this, you know, horrible cement mortar.
Yet somehow there must have been a big propaganda campaign to try and get architects to start using it because eventually it became the standard and certainly by the end of the Second World War The kind of lime mortar pretty much disappeared.
No one was using that and we were all over to, you know, cement, which, say, even on new buildings, it's probably not the best material.
It's fast, you know, you can get stuff up quickly.
That's its main advantage, but it's...
A big problem in terms of now you have to design new buildings with expansion joints because it's so rigid that the bricks can't flex at all.
Whereas lime mortar is slightly flexible so you could do a great big long, an old wall and you could point it with lime mortar and it would be fine and it wouldn't crack if you got the right mortar mix.
Whereas you could never ever do that with cement.
You would have to have breaks in it because it needs the differential movement.
And then you also have the issue that this cement then effectively blocks the pores of the building so traditional buildings are designed so that it lets water get in and then it gets out whereas you have a kind of modern construction where the idea is to try and keep the water out so it doesn't work water gets in then gets trapped by the cement and then it starts Basically trying to come out through the masonry,
the brickwork or the stone, which is softer than the mortar, and then it destroys the stone or the brickwork and, you know, it freezes in winter, blows the faces off the stone, the stone starts eroding away, and you can see that now on a lot of old buildings, particularly at the base, where they get damp all the time, that the stonework is literally disappearing, it's just dissolving.
At a kind of fantastic rate now because what we've done with all these kind of new materials that don't work.
You could sort of say, is that deliberate?
Did someone introduce that knowing that was going to happen or is it incompetence?
What are you saying has been done to the old buildings to stop them working in the way that they should do?
So basically, we've used things like modern cement mortars, cement renders...
You mean in repairs?
In repairs, or just to tart them up, or let's repoint it, it looks better with this new mortar on top, or it looks a bit damp, or we'll put some cement render on and hide it, or we'll paint it in modern paint just to hide the thing.
And every layer of this causes more and more problems.
Yes, yeah.
What's the difference between lime mortar and cement mortar?
Well chemically they're very different, but essentially in terms of what matters for a building is the cement mortar, one it's not very flexible, it literally is a very very rigid material and also it's to a certain extent Not particularly water permeable, except it is in the sense water will get through.
It's a bit like concrete.
Concrete's theoretically, you can have waterproof concrete, but it never seems to work in reality.
But what happens is the water gets in, but then it has a terrible trouble getting out again and can't evaporate, essentially.
Whereas lime is a very soft mortar and it's designed as what you call a sacrificial element in the building.
The mortar will erode much faster than the stone or the brick, so it's designed that you have to re-point on a fairly regular basis, but because it's not soft and breathable, the water is supposed to come out through the joints in the building, and so it's supposed to be an easy route out, the wall dries out quickly, you don't have a horrible damp building.
That's the theory anyway.
If I were trying to make lime mortar at home, I mean, not slightly, but just roughly, how do you make it?
So there's two different types of lime.
There's lime putty and there is hydraulic lime or naturally hydraulic lime.
Basically the mix is literally the lime and sand and a bit of water and not very much water.
So you can make lime putty which is literally quick lime and they do this thing called slaking where you put it in with water and it kind of cooks, it gets really hot and generates a chemical reaction and eventually it matures into what's called lime putty and it's called that because it is the texture of kind of putty and it's nice and soft.
They use that for kind of traditional plasters.
Hydraulic lime is more of a powder, and then you literally can mix it with sand, a little bit of water, and it's all about the actual agitation, the kind of beating it together that actually binds it together.
But it's the type of sand that you have to use that's important.
It has to be sharp sand, because the particles are, you know, little sharp triangular pieces, not round kind of particles, and these sharp pieces are what binds the whole mixture together.
This is getting really technical.
No, but it's, whereas cement mortar is made how?
So you can have a sand lime cement mix, which is I think what they started doing post-World War II. But that actually, bizarrely, the chemistry works for if you add cement to lime, it actually ends up quite Often harder mix than if you just have the cement.
So cements the same, you would have a cement and sand mix with a bit of water.
And these days they have things called plasticizers that they add into it which can help with using it at low temperature or alter the mix slightly.
But essentially it's a very basic thing.
You've got the sand, the water and either cement or lime.
Yes, but take me back to basics.
So lime, presumably, you can dig it out of the ground, can you?
Well, this is essentially chalk.
It's calcium carbonate.
Which has been treated?
Only in the sense that, you say, you do things like slaking quicklime to make lime putty.
You can't use it directly as it comes out.
You have to do something with it.
How do you make it into quicklime?
That, I can't remember, to be honest.
Okay, it doesn't matter.
But some things are stuff you would buy for your garden, essentially, you know, or used to, you know, always used in, what do you call it, murder films, you know, when they're trying to depose of a body.
It's that stuff that, you know...
It can dissolve things, yeah?
Yeah.
Which is why you have to, you have to kind of do the chemical reaction to turn it into lime putty, so it's not dangerous.
You can't use it just neat as it is.
Okay, but, and what's cement made out of?
So cement is...
what's it called?
It's Portland cement.
So it's a particular type of...
I suppose it'd be a rock, won't it?
And this is where I'm forgetting all my chemistry now.
It's a very different thing.
I mean the big thing that ironically for all the kind of net zero people is lime is actually net zero because the chemical reaction absorbs the same amount of carbon dioxide as it releases so it's actually neutral whereas cement actually uses a heck of a lot of energy to actually extract it and produce it.
So it's a much more energy-intensive process, basically, to get the stuff and process it.
I imagine that...
Is it a bit like...
One of the reasons that...
Or the ostensible reason that dentists started using amalgam fillings is that amalgam is much easier to slap on quickly than other forms of dental filling.
In the same way, I imagine that cement mortar requires much less skill than lime mortar.
Yeah, well, one, it goes off much, much faster.
So it goes hard, essentially, much, much faster than lime.
Lime can take a long time and the chemical reaction for lime can take up to two years.
So it's still hardening, you know, way after a building's finished.
Which means it's very difficult these days when people are trying to figure out what mortar mix is to use because all the tests are done within a few week period and then they go, oh well it's this hard.
But you don't actually know what's going to happen because it's going to carry on hardening for another two years.
Cement's much more predictable.
The chemical reaction has finished very quickly.
You know exactly what you're going to get.
You can do more lifts, as we call them, you know, layers of brick in a day with cement because it's going off.
It will support the weight much quicker.
Lime is a much slower process all around because it's going off much more slowly.
It's very sensitive to the weather.
You can't do it once the temperature really goes below about 8 degrees, certainly not below 5 degrees.
Cement, you can do it when it's frost, as long as you've got the right admixes in.
So from a modern construction point of view, cement's fantastic material.
You can get buildings up really fast, get loads done, you can have lots of people working on it.
Lime's just so slow and it's almost seen like witchcraft these days because you can't sort of say, oh we're definitely going to do this and you don't quite know how it's going to perform and then you get failures because no one's quite sure what mix they should have used.
It's not an easy material to work with, basically.
Are there people out there who still are capable of making lime, mortar?
Yes, yeah.
I mean, if anything, that's something that's actually increased a lot over the last sort of 20 years.
There are kind of small companies that produce this stuff.
Most of the stuff's imported from France these days.
The French, ironically, because of their history of kind of restoration, have always kind of continued all these kind of artisan kind of techniques.
So when we lost them sort of post-World War II, they were continuing using it.
And that's essentially what happened when the Canva was the revival sort of towards the end of the 20th century.
Everyone went over to France and tried to adapt whatever they were doing to kind of UK situations.
But yes, there are lots of specialists, little conservation contractors these days who do work with these materials.
You know, they're the people you'll find working on a cathedral and, you know, an old church and things, you know.
Ah, now you mentioned the C word.
We should talk, should we not?
Because when you mentioned about castles and cathedrals, same era.
Well, what's weird about that?
So this is just my theory.
I was going around some castles a couple of years ago and looking at the dates and thinking, hang on, these dates, this is supposed to be the same date as most cathedrals.
I'm thinking, the techniques are very different and why was this castle being attacked all the time and all these cathedrals are still standing?
What's going on here?
And also you're thinking, well hang on, the kings are living in these castles.
Now we know what the elites are like, they're all psychopaths, they have delusions of grandeur, they all think they're gods.
Why would they let the cathedrals be the best place and they're living in these places which were nowhere near the same quality of construction?
And you're just thinking, I don't know, something's not adding up here basically.
So I mean I haven't really got beyond that but I mean the other thing that I find is difficult with castles is so many of them have been restored there's so many layers of restoration it's very difficult to work out what's going on with them but again that's interesting because you've got the cathedrals which to a certain extent you still see a reasonable amount of authentic Yes,
we've had additions over the years and all sorts of things have been taken away, but the basic construction is more or less From what we can gather, you know, a complete thing, or at least partially.
Whereas castles, you very rarely get that.
You get, you know, the more you look at it, you're thinking, well, it's been restored.
And quite often you go places and they actually admit about, you know, it was restored, you know, in the 1600s and the 1700s and the 1800s, you know, it goes on and on.
So you're kind of looking at this thinking, This whole thing we've been told, oh yeah, the king was in the castle, and then you had, oh well, you know, the cathedrals were left alone because everyone loved God so much and the king...
really?
Did they really agree not to touch the cathedrals and just touch the castles when they were fighting?
That's not really how...
Well, maybe.
I mean, to be fair, Maya, it's much harder to defend a cathedral.
Because they've got these huge bloody windows in them, and they haven't got ramparts for boiling oil from, or for your arches to go, and they haven't got portcullises and drawbridges.
So they're not very defensive.
I'm just putting the counter-argument here.
No, which is why I kind of think, well, why didn't they get attacked?
Because not all cathedrals were surrounded by city walls, as far as we can see.
I mean, maybe they were, but even so, when you look at them, they would have towered above The kind of ramparts and be quite, especially the top bits would be very vulnerable to people lobbing stuff over.
So I don't know but that's just a kind of my kind of suspicion.
Something's not quite adding up here and maybe we've kind of, you know, you know, maybe something's not quite as we were being told.
Yeah, so I read, my favourite substack is, hang on, what's he called?
Agent, have you ever come across this guy?
He's got a very annoying name because he's got lots of numbers after him.
Agent 131711. And he's done this series on World's Fairs.
Which were these...
As I understand it, there were these extraordinary sort of showcase events.
I suppose the Great Exhibition would have been one of the early ones, wouldn't it, of 1851?
Yeah.
And then from then until, what, the early 20th century, so you had the Chicago World's Fair, where you had that serial killer on the loose.
You had all sorts of weird stuff going on.
And the reason I mention it, first of all, we'll talk about this in a moment, but I'm slightly getting that vibe from what you're saying, that the stuff about our architectural past and its transition into the present, which doesn't make sense, but what I've never found is anyone to say, look, this is what happened, this is what they're doing, this is why they're doing it.
And presumably you've got no answers either.
You told me you'd looked into the Glasgow Yeah, so the Glasgow one I looked into because that one...
When was that?
So that was 1901. And there are remnants of the Glasgow, what we call the Glasgow exhibition, but it was a world fair.
You've got the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery, which supposedly was built for then, and that's still obviously standing.
And there was also what I think they call the Machine Hall, and I think that's still standing.
But then there was the main exhibition building.
Now everyone says oh well yes it was just a temporary building and it was just made out of you know skins of canvas and plaster.
But I've seen some of the photographs of the interior and as far as I can see the construction is pretty much the same as it would be for railway station of the era.
You know you've got massive steel work You've got fairly substantial, what looked like, masonry columns.
Yes, it's certainly all decorated with plasterwork, but again, that doesn't have to be temporary.
And then, of course, they pulled it down instantly.
You say, well, why did they pull it down?
Because that building, no matter how rubbish it was, you would have got 50 years out of it.
So even that doesn't add up.
Why were we just demolishing this stuff almost instantly?
That doesn't add up at all to me.
It's like, well, you know, you spent all this money, you've done this thing that's literally just for, you know, six months of the year, you decide to, you know, you decide to keep some bits, but other bits are just completely destroyed.
Yes.
I remember...
You know how in the days before...
You went down the rabbit hole.
I'm talking about one, not you particularly.
And there were these things that never made sense.
And you just thought, well, hang on a second.
And I remember always feeling that about the great exhibition and the Crystal Palace and stuff.
And I was thinking, well...
Why?
Why isn't there more of it?
It sounds like it was amazing.
It sounds like really cool.
Why didn't they keep more of this stuff?
And it was never successfully explained.
It was just one of those things that one just had to say, yeah, yeah, they built this amazing stuff and then they, yeah, they got rid of it because reasons.
But there's clearly something going on.
Do you have any idea what it, because you mentioned the surviving art gallery.
Which is a...
It's a magnificent building, isn't it?
I seem to remember.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's amazing.
Really, really good.
Well built.
So if all the stuff, the rest of the stuff was of that quality...
I don't think it was.
I think it was designed, particularly that one, as a more utilitarian structure in terms of its construction.
But we've got World War One stuff that was designed as temporary but still hanging around.
You know, you can't say, oh, it was very badly built, we wouldn't keep it.
That isn't an explanation.
That doesn't make sense to me.
Because we've kept loads of other stuff that, you know, you could say, you know, probably less interesting to most people.
So why were these things taken down?
And then there was a whole exhibition we did in Wolverhampton I think about five years later.
Now that one's more interesting because that one really does look a bit more temporary but the designs are quite fascinating and It was probably designed and built at least to the same sort of specification as, you know, a lot of the stuff in Blackpool was at the era.
You know, it was, yeah, maybe they took it up quickly, but it's not as temporary as people keep trying to make out that, you know, oh, it was just a tent.
It's not a tent, you know, it's a proper building.
So it's just the sheer amount of money they threw at these things, then just to demolish them that is baffling that I can't get my head around.
Well, I think Agent 13711's theory is that what these things were really designed to do was to dismantle buildings which may have pre-existed.
Yeah, that may well be the case in America where it's much harder to tell because I don't know the areas very well.
I can't work out what's going on from the photographs as well.
I've not seen any kind of internal photographs of those to kind of work out what the construction is.
But it would kind of make more sense that that was what was going on because there's all sorts of things like how on earth did they get enough electricity to illuminate these places because they were absolutely massive and you know you would have needed a you know you think electricity was in its infancy at that point and the way these places were lit up that wasn't gaslight and you know and even if it was gaslight the infrastructure needed to do that was massive and the time it takes to build this stuff and Yeah.
There's loads and loads of questions that no one seems to have a particularly good answer for.
I mean, the Glasgow one's interesting just on the sheer numbers, because when you look at the numbers that they said went there, and then you look at it and think, well...
Yeah, maybe working class people went once, maybe twice.
You know, you're not going to go very often.
It was an expensive thing.
It was a shilling, which, you know, was quite a big chunk of someone's income in that era.
Also, you're probably going to be fairly local if you're going to go to it because of the travel costs.
If you look at the capacity of Glasgow Central Station and Queen Street Station and the amount of people they can handle today, Compared to what we're supposed to have been through-putting at that time.
It doesn't add up.
Someone's lying about something.
These numbers don't make sense.
Where did you get the numbers from?
So again, the sources are...
I'd looked in Wikipedia, which obviously you don't take much seriously, but I then looked at where else people get in.
So they're supposedly from reports that were done after the time about how much money they made and all the rest of it, and someone said, oh yeah, we had this number, so it could have all been completely made up.
These are the official things that we're being told we're supposed to believe that these numbers are correct, but they don't seem to make sense to me in comparison to the population of the UK at the time, particularly the population of, kind of, Scotland.
And you've got to bear in mind, Glasgow's not that easy to get to.
I mean, yes, you could have, obviously, with trains, but you have to be fairly wealthy to afford a train journey from London to Glasgow, you know.
There's not that many middle-class people to go.
Yes.
Agent...
13711's theory on this, or his anomaly he spotted, is that there's very little evidence of anyone actually going to these affairs when they were supposedly up.
It's almost like the story about them and the propaganda appeared after the fair was over.
So a lot of effort was put into producing souvenirs, memorabilia from the fairs, as if lots of people had been to them.
But There's not so much evidence of people actually going to them.
So his suggestion is that it was a huge psyop.
And the question is why?
Well, yeah, it's kind of...
I mean, there's...
Photographic evidence of it being moderately busy at the Glasgow one.
I mean it's not like one of those ones where it's empty.
There are people in the pictures and it looks like lots of people milling around.
But you're only talking about maybe half a dozen pictures with people in.
You know, it's not a lot, is it?
It's not like anyone seems to have ever discussed...
It's not something that's ever come down through someone's family that I can gather that they talked about, oh, wow, how amazing it was to go into this exhibition or anything like that.
Yeah.
Or the literature.
Is there anything in Dickens or Trollope about anyone going...
You'd think that somebody would have a scene...
Where somebody would go to one of these things if they're such a big draw.
But they don't seem to have done so.
Yeah.
They did a later Glasgow exhibition just before World War II in 1938. Now you look at that, it's a very different kettle of fish.
I mean, that looks a bit like the Festival of Britain.
It's fairground rides.
It's a few structures that aren't particularly well built and And lots of people sort of talking about, oh yeah, we went for a great day out and Billy Butler was running it and all that kind of stuff.
But that's very different from these kind of, you know, sort of 19th century ones.
That was just, you know, you're very much into the modern era by that in terms of what's going on.
It is a temporary exhibition.
There's nothing of much substance.
And lots of people went for a day out and, yeah, different city really.
So it's fairly clear that in the 19th century they had architectural skills vastly superior to ours, you know, decoratively in terms of the stuff that they were, the quality of the building materials and things like that.
And also, as you've pointed out, they seem to have access to free energy, effectively, of some kind.
This was pre-Edison, wasn't it?
Because Edison kind of hijacked the market.
He stole it away from Tesla.
So there was...
Does any of this relate to sort of more ancient theories?
Like, where are you on Tartaria?
So the Tartaria stuff's really weird because it's now become this just encompassing thing for anything we don't know about history.
So it's I mean the general theory is oh yes there was a this you know amazing empire of you know advanced architecture and we had all these amazing things whether any of that's true or not I've no idea but I do know and I've seen it in museums now that Tartaria as a place existed on maps I saw in a museum in Prague in the summer to Artaria on I think it was a 16th century 17th century map
in a museum just there you know That bit isn't made up.
There was a place that people referred to as Tartaria.
So that's fairly conclusive.
What it was and why there's been such a thing to try and pretend it doesn't exist is, again, another one that's baffling me.
Because I remember growing up, people used to refer to the Tartars.
And I actually asked a colleague at work, who's a complete normie, who was a bit older, and I said, do you remember when you were younger, did people used to talk about the Tatars?
And I said, oh yeah, yeah.
You know, that was a thing.
And he said, where did you think that was?
Oh, somewhere around Russia.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, so why is that suddenly become, you know, that didn't exist.
It's almost like that kind of Mandela effect thing that you're not allowed to talk about that anymore.
Well, there's a poem that starts, If I were Lord of Tartary, myself and me alone.
It was a sort of children's-ish poem that one learned.
So, yeah, you're right.
Something's up there.
I just want to make sure we don't miss any of the things that...
World War II was clearly used to advance this project.
It was almost as though the whole war was devised for this purpose.
Yeah, there's so many different things went on.
Coventry, which we're told the official narrative is that Coventry was so badly bombed that it was one of two Britain's One of Britain's best preserved medieval cities, wasn't it?
Along with Winchester.
And it was completely trashed.
And I get the impression, correct me if I'm wrong, that even in Coventry's case, more damage was done by town planning than by the Luftwaffe.
I don't know much about Coventry, but I would suspect so, yeah.
I mean, one of the things I did want to talk about was the iron railing site, particularly in England.
Yes.
That is just appalling when you actually look at it.
And they're quite open about what went on.
So, essentially...
So, tell us what happened.
So, at the beginning of the war, they had this idea that they needed material for aeroplanes, so we need metal for aeroplanes, and obviously the general public, having no clue that aeroplanes needed aluminium, and railings were made of iron.
We're told, oh we need all your iron railings and we need to collect all these for war effort.
So we literally went round removing all the decorative railings around houses, churches, everywhere.
And they were all sent off to some central location.
Even, I think it's quite early on in the war, and I think it's actually in Hansard, they actually admit that this stuff is of no use whatsoever and they're dumping it out at sea.
And there's even a discussion, well shouldn't we stop doing this now?
And the conclusion is, no, this is good for morale, we need to keep people doing it because they think they're doing something good for the war effort.
Yeah.
And you just think, you're basically destroying all these records of these beautiful old railings, because the places where they do survive, some of the stuff is, you know, quite artistic.
There was one case I came across years ago, it was a church which actually still had these amazing, I think, railings.
And I think these were cast iron, so they were quite ornate.
And basically what had happened is during the war, the vicar had actually been quite foresighted and gone.
We're not destroying these.
This is appalling.
So they were taken down and then they were hidden in the basement from the entirety of the war and then reinstated after the war.
Interesting.
Yeah.
You see...
And that's just a little thing, but there were just so many little things going on that when you start looking at it together, everything seemed to be like, we must get rid of all these things from the past.
We must go over to this very modern furniture.
We can't have any of this ornate stuff anymore.
The working class have got to be told, get with the programme.
We're going into modernism now.
Everything was being directed down one pathway.
And then, obviously, you've got the architectural education all being in place just before the war, this new system where everyone has to go through, you know, the university system, be all taught the same, to the same curriculum, and after World War II, you get, you know, people going into the universities and they're all being taught this new modernism and this is what we're all going to do and, you know, everyone's, you know, following the same programme and, yeah.
There's lots of stuff That went on in World War II on the home front which was presented at the time and which historians have still mostly gone along with because they're all court historians but which now sends my conspiracy antenna twitching.
So gas masks we know from What's that book?
My brain's gone.
I've still got a concussion from falling off a horse.
We know that the sole purpose of gas masks was to have this...
They never thought they were going to be gas attacks.
It was so that the citizenry could constantly have this mental connection with the dreadful threat of attack from the evil Nazis.
So they had to carry this annoying object round with them and have air raid warden saying, you know, where's your gas mask and stuff like that.
So it was unable to police the populace.
And then you had evacuees separating children from their parents and sending them off sometimes to happy rural idles, but often, well, sometimes at least to abusive households, you know, whatever, sometimes at least to abusive households, you know, whatever, taking them away from their mothers.
Pfft.
And then you have that incident with the pets at the beginning of the war where there was this mass extermination.
People were psyoped, brainwashed, into having their pets put down.
They were convinced that this was the thing for the public good and that their pets were better off dead.
So mass extermination of people's pets.
And then you had the railings, which again was a sort of completely gratuitous destruction of something that was beautiful and traditional that would connect people to the past.
I don't know what conclusions we can draw from that, but there's definitely stuff that went on which was...
Oh, and Coventry Cathedral.
I don't know whether you've been to Coventry Cathedral.
I have actually, yeah.
I don't know whether you are of a religious sentiment, whether you're a Christian or not.
But it's clear to me that Basil Spence's replacement cathedral is satanic.
It is absolutely not Christian.
You get terrible vibes from it.
I got a kind of meh.
You know, it's okay.
There were some bits that you thought, no, that's quite nice.
Another bits you get, you know.
The main made is a bit, yeah, it's not quite right.
It's evil!
But I wasn't getting this...
Some places I get the real kind of evil vibes.
I get that around Westminster.
Westminster freaks me out now.
I can't cope with that.
But, yeah, Coventry Cathedral, it was like, it's just a bit dead, really.
It's not kind of got that, you know, whatever it is that cathedrals have, you go in and you just get that sense of something that, you know, it's, yeah...
It was quite funny, I was talking to a friend about that, and she said, oh yeah, there's a certain spot I always go to, a cathedral.
She said, you go to the crossing, and said, somewhere around there.
And I said, I walk around, and I said, yeah, that's the spot.
And she does that in every cathedral she goes to.
What, in Lincoln she does that?
No, every cathedral she goes to.
Every cathedral?
Yeah, she's kind of got this idea that there's a certain point in every cathedral that is the place where you're going to get all the good kind of vibes.
Interesting.
Yeah, I'm sure they are powerful, apart from Coventry, which is definitely working for the other side.
You mentioned about the dry rot and double glazing and the other thing.
Tell me about those.
So these aren't really conspiracies, but there's a huge kind of propaganda and industry around these things.
I mean, double glazing is the most ridiculous one, particularly in the UK. We were bombarded with, you remember those Everest adverts in the 80s?
Yes.
Telling everyone how wonderful double glazing is.
But the reality is you save so little energy by double glazing that I did the calculation once.
You take about 100 years to pay back, you know, to get your money back on the energy you saved.
It's like, if you don't need to replace your windows, don't replace your windows.
It's just one of those things.
Well, especially not...
Especially if they're historic ones, yes, exactly.
I mean, Maya, you must share my despair at...
Sometimes I'll be driving through a lovely Northamptonshire village with all these ironstone buildings and the buildings will have been ruined by these plastic framed windows.
Oh yeah, it does my head in.
And it does my head in when they do period dramas and the continuity people don't even spot them in the background.
So, you know, you're supposed to be the 19th century and you can see these plastic windows glaring out at you.
I mean, sash windows are so much better, aren't they?
They're actually a very, very efficient form of window in terms of ventilation.
There's something about the fact that you can slide the panes up and down.
You get a draft going round from doing that, which actually works really well for ventilation.
They're very efficient.
You know, actual technology.
And again, you kind of think, why are we going backwards?
We've gone on to casement windows, which, you know, you can't open them properly.
I mean, a sash window, you can open it completely, so you've got half the window missing.
And you can also take out the panes, you can take them out to, you know, if you...
These days they do things where you can actually get them out easily but even the original design is designed so that all the kind of beads and things are meant to be sacrificial so you can take them out and repair the windows.
You can basically keep sash windows going fairly infinitely if you keep repairing them and obviously the quality of the timber used to be so much better so it lasted longer I mean, it kind of really depresses me when people take out, you know, Victorian stash windows saying, oh, the end of the life.
They very rarely are.
Almost all of them can be repaired.
And presumably this is of a piece with houses no longer being able to breathe properly.
If you replace them with plastic, they can't breathe anymore.
That doesn't make a huge amount of difference because, to be honest, most plastic windows are so badly made, they leak air anyway.
It's not going to make a huge amount of difference, but no.
It certainly needs to be aesthetics that, you know, sash windows are sort of beautifully done, you know, even the kind of more clunky Victorian ones compared to the Georgian ones are still compared to modern windows, far more delicate than a kind of modern window.
You know, you get more actual glass in the actual opening because, you know, your timber works so much more slender and also is historic glass.
So up until, you know, the 20th century, glass was generally handmade.
So you get that lovely little kind of wobbly effect on it, which again, you know, It's interesting inside, it's also interesting in the street that you don't get this kind of very cold blankness of a modern float glass.
And as soon as you do that on an old building it's really jarring.
And the other one that really gets me is the rising damp thing.
So this one...
There is a huge industry where people come round and try and sell you these injectable damp-proof courses for your old building and say, oh, you've got rising damp, you need to put this in.
They don't do anything.
I mean, it's just absolutely useless.
And it's not rising damp.
What we've actually got is it's gravity.
You know, you have damp in the wall.
Of course it's going to sink to the bottom.
So the bottom of your wall is the most likely bit to be, you know, what's the last bit to dry out, basically.
There's just nothing kind of complicated about it, but we've been kind of sent down this road that, oh yeah, old buildings, oh yeah, they're really damp and, you know, you must inject them with all these chemicals and somehow that'll stop this damp mysteriously rising up and making everything inside work.
It's just absolute nonsense.
Right.
Does the same go with tanking?
Yeah well tanking is one of those things it doesn't work very well because essentially you've got the same problem.
You're trying to put an impermeable barrier against the kind of wet wall and you've just got this force of water coming against it so eventually it's going to fail because the water is going to try and get through.
The only tanking that seems to work is if you do it on the outside and you're stopping the water getting in the wall in the first place.
But essentially putting a kind of, you know, a waterproof thing on the inside is only going to hold for so long and eventually it's going to fail and they always do.
Right.
And what about dry rot?
Is that not real?
Oh no, dry rot is very real.
Dry rot is horrendous.
My claim to fame is about three seconds on the BBC talking about dry rot where they...
I did a very long interview and they cut it to literally a soundbite saying that dry rot makes buildings fall down, which I was mortified about.
But actually it's true, it has happened to me on several occasions.
So dry rot...
There's only one thing you need to do with dry rot to stop it and that is to get the humidity content down.
You can try all the chemicals you like but if you don't solve the actual problem of getting rid of the moisture it's not going to do anything other than put a sticking plaster on it.
Dry rot is very peculiar because there's also a tipping point where it gets too wet and then it turns into wet rot and although wet rot is a pain it's so much easier to deal with than dry rot.
I mean dry rot if the people don't understand it's like it's a fungus basically which will destroy timber but also it can grow through The actual mason in the building, it kind of feeds off one bit of timber, sends out tendrils, and it can go a heck of a long way before it reaches the next bit of timber and starts destroying it.
Oh, I see.
So, if it meets something that is damp enough, it will start feeding off it.
And it can even go dormant and then kind of regenerate.
It's horrendous stuff.
I mean, basically, I think Stranger Things is about dry rot because the...
The upside down is dry rot.
This is what dry rot is like.
People generally overheat their homes, don't they?
Probably.
I mean, I don't think people do so much these days given fuel cost.
No.
I mean one thing that buildings don't like is that kind of intermittent heat, especially old buildings, they liked a more consistent temperature which is what the kind of old-fashioned way of heating through fires did because you'd kind of heat it up the chimney and that would kind of you know warm up the whole masonry in the whole wall and you know if you had more than one fire going you'd end up heating the whole building.
And buildings perform that kind of construction much better if there's a little bit of consistent heat.
If you try and heat up an old building, well you probably know this, where it takes forever if it's got really cold.
I used to live in a Victorian property.
It took about 48 hours to get it up to temperature because you've got great big thick, two foot thick walls.
And so you had to keep it at a certain temperature.
Otherwise, you know, you just kind of like, by the time it warmed up, you know, you'd gone to bed if you turned the heating on in the morning, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, I believe in freezing one's arse off because it's good for one's soul and keeps one's fuel build down.
There is a certain thing where the building actually needs a certain amount of heat.
You tend to find problems if you don't heat.
Or rather, if you don't heat a building and then you have humans going in that basically breathe and, you know, Increase the humidity.
The structure doesn't seem to like it at all.
So churches seem to suffer from that a lot when you have intermittent use where the congregation goes in once a week and then they try and blast it with a little bit of heat which doesn't warm anyone up and then everyone's breathing out and there's all this moisture and humidity and then it just creates a horrible damp atmosphere.
Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.
Well, Maya, I think we've actually covered all the bases.
So, do you want people to be able to find you?
No, I'm not doing this for any reason.
I don't have anything to sell, nothing, you know.
I'm on social media, but under a completely different name, and I'm trying to stay anonymous.
So, yeah.
You won't find me, hopefully.
That's fine.
Well, thank you, Maya.
I mean, you sort of raised more questions than you answered.
Well, I know, and we could talk about all sorts of other stuff, but yes.
Well, I think it's good for people to realise that Stonehenge is not as sultuous.
You've ruined Carcassonne for me.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Maya.
It only remains for me to say, if you've enjoyed this podcast, I'm sure you have, you can support me on Substack or on Locals and get early access to my podcast.
Although I find my, weirdly enough, my pleas for sponsorship, people can't be asked because they get stuff free anyway.
They can't be asked.
I get more sign-ups for my articles than for my podcast.
But, you know, think about it.
I mean, if you're sponging off me, think about maybe you might want to support me sometime.
Support my sponsors.
Buy me a coffee if you just want to give me a little treat.
