The looooong awaited DCM Stonehenge Visitor Centre has been scrapped by the UK government.
The UK architecture minister (they have an architecture minister??) said that the scheme as a whole was just becoming too expensive. Apparently it all rested on putting a road underground nearby, to the tune of about £500 million. The building itself was a mere £65 million in comparison.
Now though the government is proposing a temporary visitor centre instead, which seems like a good way to build something shoddy that will not function very well and will probably cost them more in the long run anyway (or hang around for longer than it was ever meant to, like those classrooms in Victorian schools built in the 1950′s that only had a 25 year life-span but are being vainly renovated to this day).
DCM are understandably a little bit peeved.
as a kid who attended one of those ‘temporary’ schools, i am wont to rant often and uselessly about the false economy of penny pinching in the present to the detriment of the future.
my state school was built to process the baby boomers, after which it was to be knocked down. 60+ years later and it is still there, with thousands of ad-hoc additions, and it is a complete eye-sore.
shitfully this mentality pervades everything now. govt, etc etc
drives me NUTS. it’s really only a reasonable way to go if you need to fix something as a stop-gap whilst you build something else. but they really need to plan the ‘something else’ from the beginning!
yes, i too went to a high school with ‘temporary’ classrooms, whole wings of them, with portables stacked next door… then i went to another government high school that was half an awesome old 1930′s building and half two floors of an office building over the road because the government were too tight to stump up for some new buildings. though mercifully that did prove to be actually temporary, they now have a new building.