annexe

Apologies. The Independent readers' guide to great unbuilt buildings that we should build for the Millennium with Lottery money will appear next week and not today as promised.

A report by Phil Davison from Lima in this newspaper last Saturday informed us that Abimael Guzman, head of Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) who is said to be responsible for the deaths of up to 30,000 Peruvians between 1980 and 1992, is imprisoned for life in a windowless cell measuring six-feet square. He is allowed out, half an hour a day, for air and exercise. Which is true, of course, of many prisoners (criminals or otherwise) held in Third World jails. Worth thinking about when you hear, as I did yesterday, that old bus-stop chestnut, "I live in one of these architect-designed prisons", meaning (I had to ask) a block of rather spacious, well-lit and well-tended council flats designed by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton opposite Sadler's Wells theatre in London EC1. Doubtless Philip II found the Escorial a bit of a squeeze, but the rest of us should be at least a bit thankful for our cosy domestic cells.