07 12 05

Noted before on the Bleat: “Life at the Bottom,” by Theodore Dalrymple. He wrote an essay about the effects of post-war architecture , and the role it played in facilitating the passivity and sense of aggrieved & sullen victimhood he sees in the British underclass. He makes a rather obvious point – for some of us, anyway – that the buildings helped foster the underclass. The inhuman scale of the projects, the destruction of neighborhoods that had arisen to meet the needs of people, and the substitution of ideology for experience. This stood out:


This sense of community, now destroyed, allowed people to withstand genuine hardship – hardship that wasn’t self-inflicted, like so much of today’s. I remember a patient who described with great warmth the street on which he had lived as a child – “until,” he added, “Adolph Hitler moved us on.” What an admirable depth of character, uncomplaining in the face of misfortune, those few words convey! Nowadays the victim of such a bombing would be more likely to blame the government for having declared war on the Nazis in the first place.

Date he wrote the essay: 1995.

It’s been a long time coming.


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