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Nicholas, it appears that your link has been blacklisted by browsers, so I feel disinclined to visit the FOI letter for now, but I trust it's authentic.

This happened to me too during my last comment on Urban Realm, which I had to wait around 5 days to see. It was subject to around an unparalleled moderation period supplemented with the entire Urban Realm site going into malware alert blacklisting for a couple of days – 3 or 4 days after posting my comment.

Needless to say - that when it was eventually uploaded and the malware alert removed - it had become old news due to the flurry of newer articles and comments on other subjects, ergo to push it off the homepage.

I’d hardly call ruining one of the UK’s best historical urban spaces* OLD NEWS, but if the powers-that-be insist so, then so be it, there’s nothing we can do about it.

[*BD: incidentaly if you’re looking for another possible cause celebre that also confronts a really bad planning decision then look no further to the Royal Exchange Sq court scheme, which you’d covered during application stage]

I’d better watch, as I write this, some engineers/operatives are standing by an open comms box right outside my home, making peculiar beeping sounds. Not joking!

Back to the topical aesthetics

The visually metaphoric styling is heedlessly brave (not from the customer who demands it but from the architect at the expense of repute). It’s uncongenial contextually to the typical iconic architectural style of the rest of the campus; and more ironically it’s doing so with so very little historic fabric as counterpoint.

Metaphoric iconic is usually the staple of household name architects and works best in places choking with historical fabric. It simply clashes in a contemporary context. There’s a good town centre example where UNESCO didn’t bat an eye, name escapes, which sees a heart shaped parametric style building with ventricles/arteries at the heart of an historic world heritage site.

As I’ve hinted previously, it can save itself in 2 ways: 1) be redesigned to something more akin to the new Jessop West building, cleverly maximising elevations, albeit smaller; and/or 2) conserve the Edwardian wing in addition to the Victorian part so that it has as much counterpoint as possible to sit more comfortably as a metaphoric intervention.

Even then, budding critics will still be waiting in the wings ready to strike, but with potentially little or no justification.