Off The Fence: The Worst Buildings in Britain

The Carbuncle Cup is back

Dear Readers, 

Welcome to yet another edition of Off The Fence. After a sweltering weekend of summer sunshine, we are delighted to be serving up an equally sizzling newsletter for you this afternoon. Since our last dispatch, copies of our latest print magazine have been scampering all around the UK, including to a picturesque hamlet in the Black Mountains in Wales. Marion Dakers took the mag to an ‘unpronounceable lake’ in Sweden and we were both repulsed and delighted by this photo from Madeleine Breen in Guatemala. For your chance to win a bottle of Bolly do send us your best pics of Issue 19 out and about. 

If you're at a loose end and haven't yet got your hands on a gorgeous print copy of our latest you can do so here. 

Alternatively, for the extremely reasonable price of just £19.99 you can jump on board with a subscription. It's a surefire way to look intelligent while reading on the Tube and an even more assured way to impress an overnight guest if featured laying casually on your bedside table.

In other news, we got a very lovely shout out from Tom Rowley, the editor of Backstory magazine last week. He called us a provider of both ‘the serious and the salacious’ – a compliment we take very seriously. You can read his lovely words about our salacious publication here. Let’s get on with it, then.

King Charles’ Merry Men

We are absolutely delighted to have revived The Carbuncle Cup, the award for the worst new building in the United Kingdom. Dormant for the last 6 years, we are looking to honour the depths of contemporary British architecture; the half-cocked, the ill-conceived, the aesthetically vapid; the morally abominable; the just plain dreadful. 

An all-star panel, chaired by Tim Abrahams, will be meeting later this month to choose a winner. In the meantime, we are seeking your nominations.

We’ve launched the competition on Twitter, and we’ve already had some astounding entries within, not least the Edinburgh ‘Jobby’. But we do, of course, need more – do email us with the edifices that chilled your bones, but please remember that they have to have been finished in the last six years, and also be British. Bad British Buildings only, please. There will be much more on the Carbuncle Cup in the weeks to come.

Beef Broth & Watercress

We’ve shouted out our friends at Offal Industries a couple of times now: first to laud their strange, hypnagogic ‘audio zine’ (distributed in clips through WhatsApp), then, to celebrate their move into the mad, bad world of physical print, and, uh, ‘textual’ (?) zines. The only thing left for us to do was to get in the Offal studio booth ourselves, and have a mess-around with their artificial intelligence. 

The result is fantastic: a heady mélange of Fence pieces filtered through the distended voices of Anthony Blunt, Sir Derek Jacobi, and a whole host of other semi-psychedelic apparitions. If you want to hear this weird little collab – not our first new partnership of the year, and not our last – then the instructions are as follows: go to WhatsApp, and text +44 330 133 6523 with the message ‘Feed me Offal x TF’, and the audio will be dropped to you straight away. Have fun and eat up. 

Live, Laugh, Lease

If you are someone who rents or has ever rented, or someone who rents out a property, or has ever rented out a property, you simply must take the time to read Bertie Brandes’ latest. How to Be a Young Landlord is the spiritual guide young lessors have been waiting for, including advice such as smoking in your tenants house and engaging in amatory relations with them in order to lease out their room on Airbnb while they’re away. Stalwart advice.

Some Top Tips

If you’re enjoying The Fence, you should try The Knowledge. It’s a short, sharp and seriously entertaining daily newsletter that condenses all the most interesting stuff from news sources around the world into a five-minute read. The best bit? It’s totally free. Sign up by clicking here.

Theme Hospital

Thanks to everyone who has inveigled us to cover the Lucy Letby long-read. For various reasons, we have no comment to make at this time. But we probably will, in the very near future.

Light News

In case you only saw it after on social media – like all of our editorial team did – we are happy to inform you that you are not alone in having missed the Northern Lights this weekend. Pour one out for the poor souls who missed out on seeing this potentially once in a lifetime spectacle of nature either because they went to bed at 9pm, were too busy eating a Greggs sausage roll or, in the case of Jeremy Vine, because they were ‘downstairs watching the snooker’. The broadcaster sullenly told Vernon Kay on Radio 2 yesterday that he was ‘furious’ to have missed them. ‘Did anyone tell us it was coming?’ he asked Vernon Kay, who gently replied: ‘Yes. They did. It was all over the place.’ 

If it helps, Jeremy, we stand with you in Northern Lights-missing solidarity. But not because we were watching with bated breath for a 147 break.

Bringing Home the Bacon

In a feature vegetarians will doubtless find distasteful, Ian Treuger's dispatch for us details his time working at iconic restaurant, St. JOHN. His tenure in the Farringdon establishment owned by Fergus Henderson details, in depth, the behind the scenes of ‘nose-to-tail eating’, and it is meaty. Legendary uthor and journalist Bill Buford called it ‘terrific’ and said the ‘authors' relish for graphic gore’ made him very hungry. For the pig, the whole pig and nothing but the pig you can take a gander here.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

What happens when you put a virtual portal to New York smack bang in the middle of Dublin? Irish people take the piss out of Yanks. Obviously. The art project that has been connecting people via live video stream between New York and Dublin is situated on O'Connell Street and has been the subject of plenty of trolling, some people just showing photos of 9/11 on their iPhones and many a bare bottom being internationally broadcast. Over the weekend, one drunk woman was led away by Gardaí after spending 20 minutes grinding her arse on the portal, while others were – according to the sweet minded presenters at RTE – ‘pretending to take cocaine’. There was, to be fair, quite a lot of porn. 

The New York Post is understandably annoyed by all this. The portal has ‘brought out the worst in people’, they claim. Tourists are threatening – oh no! God no! – to stop coming to Dublin to buy Aran jumpers and tell the beleaguered staff at Temple Bar that their grandparents were from Mayo. Americans have responded with the hardest burns they know: putting a Hozier cut-out in front of the portal, and then pretending to eat a potato. Yesterday, as a result of all the anti-social behaviour the portal was shut down. And today it was announced that the portal will be changed because of ‘inappropriate behaviour’. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam. Tiocfaidh ár lá.

In Case You Missed It

Mary Grimm reflects on motherhood after going swimming with her two daughters in a moving essay for The New Yorker.

Malcolm Gaskill delves into a niche in the history of the supernatural, specifically: floating women. 

A writer celebrates an unforgettable companion with a poignant ode. He refers to her fondly as ‘ruling her empire like a spiny queen.’ He is talking about his giant stick insect. 

The Evening Standard lifts the lid on ‘Coin Club’ the private members club for finance dweebs, where membership is purchased in NFT format. Were we planning to send a writer to join before the owner disappeared? Not for us to say. 

And Finally 

Some people are saying: too much 1970s archival British media content in the newsletter. Other people are saying: too much ‘Irish propaganda’ in the newsletter. It is a power struggle, a constant, constant power struggle. This week, the latter wins! As such, we bring you back to the heady days of 2009, and the corridors of the Dáil, where Ireland is in the midst of a financial crisis, the Celtic Tiger has been slain, and everyone is understandably in a really bad mood. 

None more so than Paul Gogarty, then a Green Party councillor for Dublin West, who in the middle of a turbulent debate on the 2010 Budget's Social Welfare Bill engaged in what was 'most unparliamentary language' when he took on Labour Party TD Emmet Stagg. 'With all due respect', Gogarty begins, most politely, 'in the most unparliamentary language, fuck you Deputy Stagg. Fuck you.’ 

Gogarty immediately apologised to the house, and later claimed that the outburst was totally unplanned (some truthers say it was premeditated). It later emerged as part of an investigation into the incident that 'fuck' is in fact not included in the list of forbidden words set out in the 'Salient Rulings of the Chair', the code of conduct that all Irish politicians in the Dáil must adhere to. 

Emmet Stagg died this year, on St Patrick's Day. Paul Gogarty lost his seat in the 2011 election. A year later he released his debut single Wishing on a Photograph under the stage name of His Sweet Surprise. As in, sometimes it is a sweet surprise that Ireland is a real place.

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And that, as they say, is all folks. If you happen to be missing your latest issue, or just plain fancy a chat, do drop us an email at support@the-fence.com and we will sort that out for you forthwith.

All the best,

TF