Heathcote Williams

‘Jericho's intensely local and distinctive nature currently threatens to be sacrificed to the mercantilism of property privateers and ribbon developers whose plans, on close examination, amount to no more than a jobbing architect's hand-me-downs: atmosphere-proof, Lego-like dwelling-units predictably built not to house the needy but to satisfy the inexorable greed of “buy-to-let” property investors; and which, were such plans to be approved, would go towards rendering Jericho indistinguishable from Milton Keynes in an insidious erosion.

It seems astonishing that yet another predatory beast from Mammon's sickly abyss should surface and yet again threaten a unique place such as Jericho with being buried alive beneath breeze-block service-station architecture and all because the city council seems only to be fulfilled when cravenly pleasuring ruthlessly commercial outside interests.

In the words of Karl Kraus, “Progress is a Pyrrhic victory over nature”, and it is a short-sighted form of progress that requires the destruction of a place where people feel happy, and where once a group of seminal artists enjoyed a “spiritual fling” and whose work was devoted to celebrating a kind of ethereal, but enduring goodness.’