The fire and demolition at the Glynne Arms – or as we all call it, the Crooked House – have revived the old debate about re-creating lost buildings. Andy Street the Mayor of West Midlands, among others, has called for the pub to be rebuilt brick by brick. Joe Holyoak in BD says that would produce a “worthless fake”.

It’s a measure of the resurgence of Modernism in the present century, that the idea that reinstatement is somehow morally wrong has come back, along with the condemnation of using traditional styles as ‘pastiche’. Twenty years ago, both had shrunk away so much that they were almost confined to lecturers in schools of architecture. Now they’re commonplace again, as they were forty or fifty years ago.

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