The critic and author, recovering from heart surgery in France, discusses architecture, Jeremy Hunt and life in Marseille while cooking dishes from his new book of recipes, A Plagiarist in the Kitchen
Jonathan Meades has spent an adult lifetime on unlikely pilgrimages of one kind or another, partly to test his contention that “there is no such thing as a boring place”. For the BBC he has gone in search of the architectural essence of Birmingham, and the discrete joys of Essex; he has found magic in the garden city and the Victorian terrace, and offered despairing deconstructions of post-Thatcher planning. No one observes house and home with a more acute eye. Meades is Pevsner in shades; Betjeman with attitude. It is with a broad smile, therefore, that you stand outside his own current billet, and take in its brutal geometries.
For most of the past decade Meades, now 70, has lived in France, having wanted a change from London, but drawing a blank as to anywhere else in England he could confidently exist. For the last five of those exiled years he has lived in an apartment in Marseille in the most influential of all postwar buildings: Le Corbusier’s visionary “machine for living”, the Unité d’habitation, an 18-storey concrete slab, tricked up with Mondrian primary colours, a couple of miles south of the old port. Le Corbusier planned 18 of these blocks, a fanfare to the working man, stretching all the way to sea. Because of a hole in the city finances, only one was built, and it stands marooned, a World Heritage site beside a dual carriageway. Meades lives on the second floor, with his third wife.
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