8:00am Friday 3rd September 2010
IT is difficult to describe the wave of anxiety, depression and rage that the proposed sculpture by artist Walenty Pytel produced in me. In what must be a short letter, where do I start in putting my views on a scheme that is just plain wrong in so many ways?
Mr Pytel’s reasoning is that this will put Herefordshire on the map and that not a lot of people know where Hereford is – and that passing motorists will be magically and mysteriously lured into going to see the Mappa Mundi as they speed past his monstrous, hideous, Stalinist, sci-fi excrescence, heading in any direction but towards Hereford.
Mr Pytel must surely be aware that all that is best about Herefordshire is its organic and small-scale development over centuries – development that was driven by geography, history and agricultural expedience. To proclaim the distinctiveness of the county by artificially plonking a “distinct” (and unusually ugly) structure in its midst is to miss the point and to risk ruining the distinctiveness.
I read that it will have to go through the planning procedure. How much say will we have in the process? Has anyone in the county expressed any desire for this or identified any need for it?
Remember the way we were urged to love the Millennium Dome, that we are being told that the 2012 Olympics are beyond doubt “all good” and that the vuvuzelas “were all part of the atmosphere”
of the 2010 World Cup! But all those were, or will be, passing discomforts and bearable in their brevity. If it were built and subsequently reviled, who would have the political or financial wherewithal to remove it?
S C BROWN, Bucknell, Herefordshire
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