ABSTRACT
Not everything that is new is modern. And not everything that is old is oldfashioned. Jonathan Glancey was criticising the assumption that Canary Wharf Tower, Tony Blair’s choice for a meeting with Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin, was the best example of a forward-looking, modern, New Britain. He argues that,
Throughout Britain, and up until the eighties, local councils, education authorities, universities and other public or publicly minded bodies fused Modern architecture to Modern ideologies…not simply to create the shiny and new, but to modernise class-divided, low-wage Britain…. New Labour has inherited [the] Thatcherite penchant for fancy dress and has yet to separate in its mind the New from the Modern. The former is all about fashion; the latter about the health of the body wearing the latest clothes.1
