And now the encore

摘要

'Here be dragons,' Simon Jenkins told me once, long ago, jabbing a finger on a plan. The architecturally-aware journalist and conservation campaigner was at the time on the South Bank Board. It was at the time of the first, late 1980s, Terry Farrell-designed speculative project for the South Bank Centre. Jenkins was showing me the scheme and, naively, I'd inquired about the untouched National Theatre next door. It was emphatically apart, Jenkins informed me. The dragons were then NT director Richard Eyre and - even more fiercely protective of the theatre - its architect, Sir Denys Lasdun. As I was soon to learn when writing about it, Lasdun would leap to the phone to defend his masterpiece, breathing fire at the slightest provocation. He was magnificently engaged.