Home is where the art is: Will Kensington's latest tourist attraction be denied its chance to grow into a local treasure?

Modern-day architectural follies aren't always aesthetically pleasing but they bring humour and character to samey neighbourhoods

Street cool: Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring’s bid to shake up the neighbourhood (AFP)

If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then the old man over the road and that nosy couple two doors down are the rival warlords who must be intimidated. That’s why our courts are clogged with disputes about wayward garden fences, noise pollution and – if you’re lucky enough to live in the swankier end of town – perhaps an iceberg basement or two.

This was the disappointingly ordinary (ordinary for rich people, anyway) origin of London’s latest tourist attraction: a candy-striped house in Kensington. Multi-millionaire property developer Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring had applied for permission to extend her £15m townhouse with a two-storey basement (including swimming pool) but the neighbours objected. Then, one morning, they woke up to find Mrs Lisle-Mainwaring had created what one witness dubbed an “eyesore seaside hut”, in apparent retaliation.

If the neighbours triumph in this case, it will mean one more magnificent monstrosity has been denied its chance to grow into a local treasure. Instead, the stripy house will go the same way as a soon-to-be demolished castle in Surrey. Admittedly, Honeycrock Farmhouse is not an authentic relic of the medieval era; it’s a mock-Tudor four-bed with pretensions to a turret, but farmer Robert Fidler loves it just the same. When he built without planning permission in 2002, he hoped to escape the attention of the local taste police by hiding it behind stacked hay bales. Alas, it turns out, a building doesn’t even have to be seen to be unsightly.

These modern-day architectural follies aren’t always aesthetically pleasing but they bring humour and character to samey neighbourhoods. Yet, instead of being welcomed, or even ignored, they’re reviled. These days, “lowering the tone” of an area – and consequently the property prices – is a very grave crime indeed. How else to explain why Karen Gaynor from Rotherham was held in a police cell for six hours after pruning overhanging branches from a neighbour’s tree?

If only the petty property-price obsessives could appreciate that there’s a more important principle at stake here. This is about who gets to decide on the definition of good taste in our shared spaces and, as rebellious DIY-ers remind us, that’s an ongoing conversation in which everyone must have their say. The voices of bland conformity may be loud but the colour of my new kitchen extension is even louder.

Our failing judicial gene pool

When the UK’s most senior judge says something, people listen. This week Lord Neuberger exercised his privilege with a speech in which he called on fellow members of the judiciary to reflect: “A white, male public school judge presiding in a trial of an unemployed traveller from Eastern Europe accused of assaulting or robbing a white, female public school woman will, I hope, always be unbiased,” he said. “However, he should always think to himself what his subconscious may be thinking or how it may be causing him to act.”

The suggestion that the British legal system is vulnerable to bias is not a new one. A 2013 report by the Ministry of Justice demonstrated that judges consistently hand down more lenient sentences to white defendants for the same crimes as their black and Asian cohorts. But can Neuberger seriously believe this obstacle to justice would be overcome if only judges reflected more on their own shortcomings?

It is difficult, if not impossible, for any of us to be fully aware of how our subconscious works – that’s why they call it “subconscious”, duh. Moreover, High Court judges are not “any of us”. Compared with a random sample of the British population, our 97 per cent white, 82 per cent male senior judiciary is particularly ill-prepared to exercise the sort of ninja-level empathy that Neuberger advocates.

Like the majority of his colleagues, Lord Neuberger followed the time-honoured educational path of the British elite: a boys-only public school followed by Oxbridge. It’s a system that is exceptionally good at producing men who can secure a well-paid job or speak in a way that commands attention. But it fails in one important respect; these young men are rarely, if ever, exposed to lives different from their own.

This is the context in which Labour peer Lord Janner escaped trial for 24 years. Simply put, successive generations of powerful old men could more readily sympathise with one of their own than with the Leicestershire care-home survivors he was accused of abusing. This is also the context in which thousands of ordinary people annually seek justice. And their best hope is not just a wiser judiciary, as Neuberger suggests, but a much more diverse one.

Troubadour of truth

Given the educational disadvantages borne by Britain’s poor little posh boys, telling David Cameron to “F*** off back to Eton”, as someone did in song form this week, is a bit harsh. The busker, 36-year-old Robin Grey, admitted as much: “I thought I could do better than that. But I just kept on going, because it was coming from the heart.”

But it’s not Grey’s fault. There’s something about the heavily stage-managed nature of this election campaign that tempts passers-by to act out in spontaneous retaliation. Like the Year 6 pupil who told shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt of his intention to vote Ukip to “get all the foreigners out”, we are all liable to be caught up in the moment.

When face to face with politicians, all the sophisticated arguments we’ve been shouting at Question Time evaporate and we blurt out anything. But a word of advice: if you’re not a cute schoolboy, invest in a ukulele. When accompanied by George Formby’s rhetorical weapon of choice, even the crassest of insults takes on a twee charm.

The Shia nerve

When Shia LaBeouf debuted his rattail, fashion commentators worried that the “worst-ever men’s hairstyle” was making a comeback. A month later, LaBeouf is still sporting it but we can safely say that he’s on his own. No swarms of men have descended on barber shops demanding “a Shia” and no mass outbreaks of projectile vomiting have been reported among the heterosexual women of east London.

Shia is out there, rockin’ the rattail, in defiance of received style wisdom. But wait… doesn’t that sort of make it cool again?

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