Lea Juniors go for gold at the National Junior Indoor Rowing Championships

Lea Rowing Club proved you don’t need water to make a splash by coming joint first in the National Junior Indoor Rowing Championships, held at Lee Valley Athletics Centre on Friday 23 March.

The NJIRC is the highlight of the indoor rowing calendar for many schools throughout the country.Nearly 2500 youngsters and more than 300 schools, colleges and rowing clubs battled for rowing supremacy in a series of individual heats and relays, contested on rowing machines.

In the individual events, Kate Dampster won the Gold Medal in the year 13 female category, while in the year 12 female category, Maddy Badcott triumphed with a winning time of 7:25.2 minutes over 2000m.

Lea won the 6780 metres relay (the same distance as the Oxford and Cambridge boat race) in the female category with a time of 21:58.4 minutes, beating their nearest rival by a full 200 metres. Rowers from both universities were at the championships to support and inspire the young contestants.

Overall Lea Rowing Club were joint winners with Abingdon School from Oxfordshire.

But as only one prize was on offer for 10 rowers and their coach to attend and follow the Oxford and Cambridge boat race on Saturday 7 April, the two winners decided to toss a coin to see who would get to go. Although Lea Rowing Club won the toss, they very sportingly gave the prize to Abingdon as the Hackney club had a training camp on the day of the race.

The NJIRC is organised by London Youth Rowing, a sports initiative that works with schools and clubs in London, aiming to make fitness and rowing accessible to young people from all backgrounds across the capital.

The Lea Rowing Club junior section is run by London Youth Rowing, a sports initiative that aims to makerowing accessible to young people from all backgrounds.  Matt Rostron, managing director of LYR, paid tribute to Lea’s hard-working rowers.

He said: “It’s a huge commitment on their behalf. Some of them train five times a week. They do early morning sessions where they start at around 7am, and a lot of them have to travel down to the Lea as well.”

London Youth Rowing have organised the Championships since 2007, and want to make indoor rowing a sport in its own right.

Matt Rostron said: “It’s always going to be difficult to give a lot of young people access to the water whenever they want it. About 95 percent of the 4500 young people we work with every year only do indoor rowing. That’s why we set about doing this. It’s to encourage people who just want to do indoor rowing to compete and have some fun.”

Saho Harada and Emiko Suzuki of Japan compete in the Synchronised Swimming Duet Technical Routine event at the National Aquatics Center in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Photograph: ODA

Thousands of non-existent tickets have been sold by the Olympic authorities, it has emerged.

As many as 10,000 tickets to synchronised swimming were erroneously sold in the second round of ticket sales last June.

Human error was blamed for the blunder, and the Olympic organisers have promised to provide the holders of the tickets with entrance to other events from a pool of contingency tickets so far kept back from general sale.

A spokesperson for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) said: “As a result of finalising the seating configurations in our venues and reconciling the millions of Olympic and Paralympic ticket orders against the seating plans for around 1,000 sporting sessions, we have discovered an error in seats available in four synchronised swimming sessions.”

“In December we contacted around 3,000 customers who had applied for tickets in the four sessions during the second round sales process.

“We are exchanging their synchronised swimming tickets for tickets in other sports that they originally applied for.”

This is the latest in a ticket sales process that has been dogged by controversy over fairness and the cost of tickets.

It is particularly disconcerting for those lucky few who managed to buy tickets to find that they did not have seats at their games of choice.

It is believed, however, that most of those who had originally purchased synchronised swimming tickets and have now been offered entry to other events have accepted the offer.

Team GB v Angola at the London Prepares Handball Cup in the Handball Arena, Olympic Park. Photo: LOCOG

Hackney’s youngsters were last month amongst the first in the world to experience sporting events at the new Olympic Park in Stratford.

At the end of last month (23-27 November) inhabitants of Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest were exclusively invited to the London Handball Cup, a test event at the brand-new Handball Arena, which can seat up to 6,000 spectators.

In addition to the 700 tickets generally allotted to Hackney, children from 40 schools across the borough were in attendance during the week.

Significantly, this marked the first occasion on which members of the public were permitted to walk through the near-completed Stratford site.

The opening day of the test event (Wednesday 23 November), witnessed by the Hackney Citizen, saw the Great Britain women’s handball team dramatically defeat Angola 22-20.

Despite being a relatively unheard-of sport in this country, the arena was about a quarter full with spectators that included children from six Hackney primary schools.

Most will have come to the event with perhaps only a basic understanding of this Olympic sport, but, despite its pace, the game is easy to follow, especially with the help of a large scoreboard and loud commentator.

Each team, consisting of seven players on the court (and seven waiting to be called on from the bench), battles it out over the other over the course of a one hour match.

With Great Britain storming into a 3-0 lead in less than three minutes, it wasn’t difficult to establish how goals are gotten – players, who pass and bounce the ball between themselves, score by throwing the ball past the opposition goalkeeper.

In spite of their convincing start, Great Britain, pegged back time and again by a resilient Angolan side, were level 11-11 at half time, and later, with 50 minutes gone, found themselves 20-18 down to the 2011 African Games champions.

A penalty by Britt Goodwin and equaliser scored by Ewa Palies with six minutes to play set up a grandstand finish to the match, drawing an incredible atmosphere from the crowd.

In the final minutes, goalkeeping heroics by Jane Mayes and a winner scored by GB’s youngest player Nina Hegland in the 59th minute put the hosts in front before Goodwin, again from a penalty throw, guaranteed victory with just seconds to play.
In attendance amongst the crowd were Burbage Primary School students, who were thrilled with their fantastic opportunity.

Speaking on their behalf were 10-year-olds Derya, who described the day as “amazing!” and Isaac, who together are Burbage School’s Olympic Ambassadors, appointed in a scheme organised for primary schools by The Learning Trust. Isaac said: “I enjoyed myself and really enjoyed watching the countries playing.”

In charge of the Burbage fans was Elliott Anderson, who summed up the excitement of the day: “Once we came off the train in Stratford, we all felt the excitement of the Olympics and the guards stationed around the Westfield complex and the Olympic Park were so helpful in directing us to the Handball Arena.

The children really enjoyed the matches and the atmosphere associated with a competitive match.”

Hoxton karate students at the Fun Day in Harlow, Sunday 9 October 2011

Members of Hoxton’s junior Legends Karate group last month travelled just beyond the M25 to take part in a Fun Day in Harlow, Essex. The event on Sunday 9 October gave the students of Hoxton the chance to meet and compete with eight other London and Essex-based karate groups.

Organised by the Okinawan Traditional Goju Ryu Karate-do Association (OTGKA), the day was designed to give the students and Senseis (teachers) a chance to learn from the different styles taught across different karate groups.

This was the third year in a row that the Fun Day has taken place, but was the first time the Hoxton group, led by Sensei Joost Frehé, had been invited to take part. The karate teacher, who also took his three other junior karate classes from Holloway, Isleworth and Norbury, told the Hackney Citizen that he felt it was a “hugely beneficial” event for all those involved.

Sensei Frehé has been involved in karate for over 25 years but admits that even he could learn some new things from the day: “I teach Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo Jutsu – that’s ‘old-school’ karate – to my students,” he said. “Other groups represented in Harlow, on the other hand, were taught different styles – like Goju Ryu – which we are a less familiar with. It was really interesting to see different styles of karate coming together.”

The Hoxton teacher, who himself started learning karate in a junior group based in the Netherlands when he was nine, said: “This was a great day for the Hoxton kids. It’s the first time we’ve taken them to something like this, and I think it was a valuable experience for them to see some different styles of karate and experience the teaching of other senseis.

Sensei George Andrews, the chief instructor of OTGKA, oversaw the day in Essex. Having taught across four continents in his 45 year career, he is a highly respected sensei in British karate. He said he was pleased to see more faces at this year’s event and was full of praise for the Hoxton juniors: “They were a really good bunch of kids. They were new to the event but really integrated well and showed lots of energy, lots of enthusiasm and some great spirit – I was very impressed.”

He added: “Even though they’re not part of OTGKA, I’d always welcome them back into our community and hope that they can make it again next year.”

The six-hour day was made up of a morning devoted to training, and an afternoon of competitions. Despite some great performances and success by his Hoxton group, Sensei Frehé was keen to point out that this was not the main objective of the day: “Competition can be fun, and certainly added something to the day,” he said, “but winning and being ‘the best’ is not what martial arts are about.

“In its purest form, it’s about self-discipline and self-defence, not beating an opponent – it’s different to other sports. This is one of the messages we wanted the kids to take home from the Fun Day.”

Photograph: London Rockin’ Rollers

Competitive roller skating will be the thing to watch on Sunday 16 October when the mighty London Rockin’ Rollers will come head-to-head with the deadly Stuttgart Valley Roller Girlz in their annual match.

Girls on wheels may seem an odd spectator sport, but there’s a fierce buzz about it, and the London Rockin’ Rollers are a hot team by any standards. They describe themselves as “a league of swift and sizzling sirens on skates. Broads that do battle on eight wheels! Born on the wrong side of the roller derby track, these kick-happy thrill-hungry defiant dazzling darlings will steal your hearts….and then your hot rods!!”

But then the ladies from Germany can give as good as they get.

Stuttgart Valley and the London Rockin’ Rollers have been skating with each other since their first bout in 2007. They are sister leagues and traditionally meet on the track every year for an annual rematch. Last year saw the London Rockin’ Rollers taking the win from Stuttgart Valley Roller Girlz at Skate Wars. This time it’s on London’s home turf and definitely a bout not to be missed with some serious sibling rivalry as the Empire Skates Back!

At the same event Goldie Lookin’ Chain Gang will be taking on the Voodoo Skull Krushers. The Voodoos won the title last year over the Stuttgart Valley Roller Girlz so this will be a definite fight till the final whistle blows.
Whilst the roller derby girls get to spill some blood on the track, you can sit back and relax, watch the hits, raise a pint or two – and remember to scream if you want them to go faster (or hit harder). There will be a fully licensed bar as well as half time entertainment from the Screamin’ Sugar Skulls and DJ Chris Setzer.

So don’t miss the change to see London’s finest competitive roller skating this month and catch these total terrors on the track.

Skate Wars : The Empire Skates Back!
Sunday 16 October, 4pm
York Hall, Bethnal Green E2 9PJ
Tickets £12 for adults, £6 for children (under 5s are free).

Tickets available from London Rockin’ Rollers.

On the podium: Tao Geoghegan Hart (right) is en route to achieving his Olympic dream with a silver medal at the recent British Championships

A Hackney teenager is en route to achieving his Olympic dream after celebrating winning a silver medal at a prestigious track cycling tournament.

Tao Geoghegan Hart, who lives on the Nightingale Estate and is a pupil at Stoke Newington School, began his career just two years ago on the estates and parks of the borough.

His introduction to competitive cycling began with sessions at Cycling Club Hackney, which trains youngsters in the sport, and he has been coached by top talent-spotter Stuart Blunt.

The 16-year-old, who recently clinched five A stars and six As at GCSE, learnt to ride his first bike when he was three but didn’t start racing until he was 14.

He has since competed in national and international races, most recently representing Great Britain at European Youth Championships in Turkey.

“Fitting the cycling around my GCSEs was okay as long as I kept them balanced and managed to stay on top of everything,” Hart told the Citizen, before adding: “A levels will definitely be harder.”

Hart, who is sponsored by Condor Cycles and Rapha, aims to become a professional athlete.

He described as “amazing” the experience of competing at the British National Track Championships in Essex, where he bagged a bronze and two silver medals last month.

He added: “It’s really great racing on an international scale and representing your local borough. I am very proud to be a part of Cycling Club Hackney and I hope to inspire others and represent Great Britain in the Olympic Games one day.”

Asked where he likes to ride locally, Hart, who races on single speed Condor Leggero with a carbon fibre frame, said: “At present the best place I would say would probably be the canal. Some of the larger parks can also be good for riding. Just out of London there is the closed circuit cycle specific centre in Redbridge too.”

He wants to reach the top three at the British National Track Championships and you can track his progress via his regularly updated blog.

In the swim: 400m in the Lido before a 5km run round the Fields. Photo: LFTC

London Fields Triathlon Club is to host the third London Fields Aquathlon following the success of events in the spring of this year and the autumn of 2010. There will, once again, be a Junior Race for under 16s as part of the club’s commitment to bringing multi-event athletics to all in Hackney.

LFTC has been running well-coached sessions for local aspiring athletes since 2009 when the club was founded by Chris Skinner and Guy Holbrow.

Entrants face the challenge of swimming 400m in the London Fields Lido followed by a 5km run around the park. The race commences at 8am on Sunday 2nd October and will take place as a time trial with competitors being set off in intervals.

For the first time, there will be a team prize to be a claimed, in addition to the honours for the male, female and age group competitors.

Unlike the daunting reputation of the triathlon, this event has grown in popularity due to it’s inclusive nature and beautiful setting in the lido and surrounding London Fields. The race is ideal for both novice and elite athlete, many of whom will be returning for a third time.

Club Secretary Chris Skinner expects 200 participants this autumn for an event that invites participants to enjoy the day and compete at their own pace.

LFTC is a not-for-profit club, with a great sense of community spirit and a busy team of volunteers. The club runs a variety of sessions, four times a week, which help to develop fitness levels through running, swimming and cycling.

The event is now open to enter, with fees of £15 for adults and £5 for juniors.

Apply online by visiting the London Fields Triathlon Club website.

Sumo has very few rules, which can result in exciting bouts as seen at here at Clissold Park. Photo: Paul Cunningham

It’s an uphill struggle, but the signs are good. Hundreds of youngsters are turning up to try new and healthy activities. Enthusiasm for the Olympics is beginning to spread to a generation that badly needs to get active and stay fit.

Generations of kids have been put off sport at school and official surveys show levels of sports participation have barely changed in the adult population despite less than ayear to go before the Olympic Games.

Whilst there is some disagreement over which figures to believe, the government is in the process of ditching its aim to attract one million adults into sport and shifting the focus onto school leavers.

It is an argument that bolsters the case made by the organisers of the recent One Movement event in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington, attended by nearly 2,000 people on Saturday 30 July. The day, which was designed to raise awareness of Hackney’s many sports clubs, took sport out of its usual context, aiming to reignite the interest of Hackney’s less enthusiastic athletes with a festival atmosphere.

Helen Womak, Olympic Legacy Coordinator at East London Business Alliance (ELBA), said: “It’s still quite hard for some people to get involved in sport and that’s something that we are trying to work against and break down. We’re trying to work through the stigma of associating sport with PE at school.”

She added: “We’re working in the Olympic host boroughs to develop sporting opportunities for young people through supporting sports clubs with business skills training and volunteer support as well as introducing sport in an informal environment.”

400 metre Olympics gold medalist Christine Ohuruogu, who grew up less than a mile from the Olympic Stadium, said the Games were at risk of being irrelevant to London’s youngsters. She told the BBC: “The general impression I get is that they [young people] are not really interested. I’ve seen, not apathy, but it is like, ‘We don’t take part in sports, what’s in it for us?’”

The Clissold Park day was the latest in a series of One Movement events that started in June with teenagers having a go at archery, basketball, judo, cycling and tennis at Mile End Park in Tower Hamlets.

Kids who turn up at the events are encouraged to join local sports clubs including Stoke Newington Cricket Club, London Lionhearts (Volley Ball), Football Buddies, London GD Handball Club, Capital London Judo Club, Hackney Bulls (Rugby), Lea Rowing Club, Black Arrows Badminton Club, Wise Youth Trust and North East London Gymnastics Club.

The events form part of a wider programme that is aiming to increase sports participation among young people in the host boroughs and to support the development of local sports clubs.

An aerial view of the Aquatics Centre in the Olympic Park. Photograph taken on 24 March 2011 by Anthony Charlton, © ODA.

This article titled “Olympics Aquatic Centre – review” was written by Rowan Moore, for The Observer on Saturday 30th July 2011 23.06 UTC

From the outside, it’s a car crash. Or a UFO crash. Or, to use the watery metaphors that are de rigueur when talking about Zaha Hadid’s £269m Aquatic Centre, it is like a vast turtle waving over-sized flippers. A great roof, whose beauty should come from the way its great weight came down to the ground at three points is engulfed with even bigger temporary structures, blown-up, go-faster versions of what might be seen at a county cattle fair, needed to house the 15,000 temporary seats for the Olympic Games. They will be taken away afterwards, leaving a 2,500 capacity, which is the most that any non-Olympic swimming event is likely to attract.

Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, a room big enough for more than 17,500 people. It is impressive because it is big, and purposeful, and will contain large crowds, but also because the architecture rises to the occasion. The architects’ moves are confident and equal to the scale of the place. They don’t fumble or tinker. More than that, the interior has a feeling of wholeness. It feels moulded or carved, not assembled. It looks like a body more than something constructed out of pieces.

The big thing is the roof, steel-framed and timber-clad, which floats and undulates, but is also palpably substantial. Officially, it’s like a wave, but, with its combination of weight and agility, it’s very like a whale. At either end a concrete bowl, containing the pools, the permanent seating and support spaces, rises to meet the roof where it descends. Along each side, in the gaps formed between the bowl and the roof, huge glass walls will be installed after the games, opening the space to the sky and the surrounding park. Now these gaps open to steep banks of temporary seats, contained within the great flippers that are so problematic on the outside. Inside, they are continuous with the rest of the space, and add to its drama.

The work focuses on the two pools, for swimming and diving, coming down to a few human bodies in water, small and fragile relative to the whole, a shift in scale that is somehow achieved smoothly. The diving platforms are moulded out of the same concrete as the rest of the lower structure, making them extensions of the architecture rather than additional pieces of concrete.

Another pool, for practice, would be part of the experience too, visible behind a wide glass wall, but International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulations have required an unfortunate temporary partition. It’s something to do with keeping athletes and officials apart, which is clearly very important, but it blocks the view. Elsewhere the interplay of architectural and sporting demands is happier. The greys of the structure are offset by strong primary colours: the blue pools, the yellow and red of the lane markers, and an interesting pinkish light filtered from the outside through translucent walls in the temporary extensions.

The Aquatic Centre is the London Olympics’ most majestic space: the most potent, the most charged. It is also 2012′s most difficult child, the first venue to be designed, the last to be finished. It was accompanied along the way by stories of escalating budgets (nervous builders, and near abandonment of the design). Built, it has compromises, like the view-blocking partition and the flippers, about which Hadid does not even try to pretend to be happy. As originally conceived, the awkward temporary extensions would not have been there, as there was to be a roof big enough to cover both temporary and permanent, but this proved too extravagant.

The obvious comparison is with the £93m, 6,000-seat Velodrome, another wavy-roofed work completed last February, seemingly with the smooth precision of a high-performance bike. The Velodrome’s roof required 300 tonnes of steel; the Aquatic Centre’s – about the same size but with admittedly more difficult conditions – uses 3,000 tonnes. The Velodrome, trim and taut, is also a handsome building, and promises to be a powerful venue.

Part of the complication comes from the fact that the centre was designed before London won the bid. London was in danger of being seen as the safe-but-boring option, with dull buildings, and Hadid’s design could be waved in front of the IOC as evidence of stardust. The problem was that the people who would eventually be the clients for the building, the organisations set up after London won the bid, didn’t exist then, and the brief was not as developed as it would be later. When designs come first and clients second, there is often trouble.

But there may also be a mismatch between the processes of something like the Olympics and architecture as conceived by Hadid. Architecture, for her, is something that should make its presence felt, intervene, change things, perhaps get in the way. Her style seems to be about dynamism and weightless modernity, but her buildings are actually massive. They are slow, not fast. They reflect an old idea, common to Palladio and Le Corbusier, that architects sculpt and shape and compose. Hence her roof, which dips down in the middle to suggest two different spaces within in the overall enclosure, one for swimming and the other for diving.

What London 2012 wants is a great whirring delivery machine, driven by the inexorability of the project’s deadline, where as many details as possible are determined in advance by specifications and regulations. They want architects to slip into the machine noiselessly, if possible with a bit of elegance, like Hopkins Architects at the Velodrome. With Hadid there is more of a grinding and crashing of gears, but she set out to achieve “a really great spatial experience”, and did so.

I am sure that the Aquatic Centre could have been built more cheaply and easily, and without its crashes of permanent and temporary. It is a building that will be at its best after the games, when the flippers have been replaced by the great glass walls, although it will then face a new risk of being too grand for a public pool. The wavy roof risks being too small for the Olympics and too big for its afterlife. It can only be hoped that, whatever plans are made for its future upkeep, they are equal to the ambitions of the structure.

But, given that the whole £9bn Olympic extravaganza spends money that could have had more prudent and practical uses, it does not seem so terrible that a small fraction of its extravagance should go on a space as magnificent as this. Many hundreds of millions will be flushed away on more boring things, such as consultants’ fees and security that may or may not be necessary.

Lastly, a note to the IOC. While the Centre offers 17,500 seats for watching swimming, only 10,000 will be able to watch diving events. This is in accordance with IOC specifications, which seem to assume that people find diving a bit boring. Evidently, the specification writers haven’t heard of Tom Daley.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

An aerial view of the Velodrome, with construction completed on the venue with one year to go until the London 2012 Olympic Games. Photograph: Anthony Charlton / ODA

This article titled “London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names” was written by Robert Booth, for The Guardian on Sunday 31st July 2011 17.26 UTC

A new skirmish in a long-running and often bitterly fought architectural “style war” between modernists and traditionalists has broken out over the stadiums and arenas of the London Olympics park.

Prince Charles’s favourite architects have accused the head of England’s national architectural review body of “overt prejudice” after he made a barbed attack on the heir to the throne’s love of traditional buildings, and heaped praise on the resolutely modernist designs that will be beamed around the world as the backdrop to next summer’s games.

Paul Finch, chairman of the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government-funded design watchdog that vets major planning applications with the help of government funding, applauded the selection of Zaha Hadid, the avant garde Iraqi-born architect who designed the sinuous aquatics centre, and Populous, the designer of the main 80,000-seat stadium.

But, more provocatively, Finch celebrated the fact that the country’s leading traditional architects, who are favoured by the Prince of Wales, were not in any way involved. “One of the good things about the London 2012 Olympics is the realisation that we have a set of buildings produced not by Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam, John Simpson, but by Hopkins, Hadid, Populous, Make, Heneghan Peng et al,” he said. “None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales, none of it to do with heritage.”

The Traditional Architecture Group, whose members include Terry and Adam, both leading exponents of classical buildings inspired by architects from the past, including Sir Christopher Wren and Andrea Palladio, has complained to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and communities secretary, Eric Pickles, that Finch’s remarks, made in the Architects’ Journal, displayed “significant prejudice against one style or architectural philosophy at the highest level”. The group said its members were “dismayed and alarmed”.

“His is a fundamentally prejudicial point of view from someone in a senior position,” added Adam. “He shouldn’t be in the position he is in.”

Prince Charles has previously enraged some British architects by speaking out against modernist designs. In 2009 Richard Rogers was dropped as the designer of a £3bn housing development at Chelsea Barracks after the Prince questioned his design in a private letter to the Qatari client. In 1984 he torpedoed a modernist extension to the National Gallery in London by complaining it was “like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”.

Now the prince’s architectural allies feel they have found in Finch a lightning rod for their own simmering sense of injustice that a parallel “modernist establishment” is seeking to marginalise them with the result that some traditional architects believe commissions for Olympic projects were effectively closed to them. “It was considered a waste of time to go for the Olympic work,” said Adam, a classicist who has designed a new 4,000-home settlement in Wales with the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment.

Lord Rogers chaired the selection panel for the aquatics centre and Ricky Burdett, professor of urbanism at the London School of Economics and a close ally of Rogers, was hired as chief design adviser to the Olympic Delivery Authority. Finch continues to chair the panel scrutinising designs for stadiums and arenas for the Olympics.

The firm of Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed the Portcullis House MPs’ office, was responsible for the velodrome which is favourite to win this year’s Stirling prize for the best building designed or built in Britain. Make, a firm led by Ken Shuttleworth who was a lead designer on the gherkin tower in London, has designed the handball arena, while Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based firm, has designed a sinuous complex of footbridges between the main stadium and the aquatics centre.

In his remarks Finch singled out Terry, who provided architectural advice to Prince Charles in his successful attempt to block the modernist redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks, and John Simpson who was hired to carry out alterations to Kensington Palace.

The Traditional Architecture Group has asked Pickles, whose department funds the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, to instruct councils to ignore the watchdog’s views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks. “It is the policy of this and recent governments to favour no architectural style in planning decisions,” wrote Alireza Sagharchi, the group’s chairman. “Yet by contrasting some better-known traditional architects with those working on the Olympics, Mr Finch has expressed his very clear bias against traditional architecture.” He asked for assurances that Finch’s views would “not be allowed to taint the planning system”, according to Building Design magazine.

In response Finch said: “I will respond to them when they show me the courtesy of writing to me and I will be only too happy to point out the many apparent errors in what passes for their analysis.”

A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: “These are opinions expressed in a magazine article, not official advice to central or local government. As such we have no comment to make.”

Finch’s comments in favour of the modernist appearance of Olympic Park architecture appear to undermine the neutral stance he advocated last year when asked about a proposal by Prince Charles’s Foundation for the Built Environment to take on some of the design review role now undertaken by the Design Council.

He said: “The public interest is better served by concentrating on the quality of a piece of architecture rather than style which can come down to superficial visual appearance. It comes down to whether their advice would be independent and disinterested and they obviously have a stylistic preference.”

Charles’s tastes: rated and hated

• Charles praised Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, for its “underlying intuitive grammar of design”, saying it represented a better model for housing populations in the developing world than western architecture

• He backed Quinlan Terry’s alternative designs for Chelsea Barracks which were inspired by the work of Sir Christopher Wren, the 17th century architect of St Paul’s cathedral

• Poundbury in Dorset is the most complete version of Prince Charles’ architectural vision, including the fire station which has been described as “the Parthenon meets Brookside”

• When talking to soldiers destined for service in Afghanistan in 2008 he said the Ivor Crewe building at Essex University “looks like a dustbin from the outside”

• Earlier that year he warned a series of planned skyscrapers in London would be “not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners”

• Charles said the brutalist concrete Birmingham Central Library, designed in 1974 by John Madin, looked like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.