Paul Finch's letter from London

摘要

The increasingly impertinent claims to authority by UNESCO, the unelected, Paris-based bureaucracy, should be firmly rejected by the government as soon as is possible. For as part of its Gauleiter operations to dictate to cities and nations what they should do with their built history, UNESCO has begun throwing its weight about in relation to the so-called 'world heritage site' that is our own Parliament Square.You might think that this would involve expressing a concern about how the buildings on the site are being looked after, and how new buildings proposed within it are contributing to the ensemble. Not a bit of it. Perhaps realising that controls exercised by Westminster City Council, English Heritage, a myriad of amenity groups and various other statutory and non-statutory consultees might just be doing the trick, UNESCO has turned its spotlight on a quite different set of buildings and sites: those that can, shock horror, be seen from the 'world heritage site'.