“Silence is violence.” I cannot begin a column on social value without offering my respect to the Black Lives Matter movement that has wrought such changes to society across the globe in the last few weeks in response to the terrible killing of George Floyd and many others.

A few weeks ago BLM protesters toppled the statue of slave master Edward Colston, disposing of it in Bristol Harbour (from which it has since been retrieved to be put in a museum). A mysterious papier-mâché statue has been temporarily put in its place showing a man stuffed into a wheelie bin sporting the words “Spoiler: St George was Turkish” (Banksy is of course a phenomenon of Bristol’s urban creativity). What might these historical events enacted simultaneously across the globe mean for architecture? How many of our canonical buildings were built on the blood of others, specifically the blood of black people?

I have taught Architectural History 101 at a variety of schools for almost 30 years and have externally examined at several others and I can say with some authority that the teaching of architectural history has changed very little during that time, continuing to valorise the development of aesthetics and technology over everything else, just as it did last century in the days of the famous modernist historian Nikolaus Pevsner. This is partly because of a near total absence of historical research into anything else.

…