If you have slightly pathological interest in all the components of places, it forces you to engage with them in a way that perhaps otherwise you wouldn't, and that's the only way I can put it.

Conversion requires a subtler mind. Architects don't like it, architects want to create their own landmark buildings so that people a few years hence will say, 'Oh, that building there is being knocked down, who did that one?'

If you're going to write about something it becomes a damn sight more interesting than if you're not going to write about it, because you engage with it actively in a way that you wouldn't if you were just passing through or if you were going to St Helens to visit family or if it was a place that made you resentful because you'd always wanted to escape from there.

I'm not against architecture per se, I'm just against bad architecture.

Vertigo doesn't apply in planes for some reason. You think it's some kind of magic and you don't know how it's keeping you up, but when you're on a cliff top it's a different matter.

At any point in the world's history most architecture is going to be bad but I think there's been a collective mentality since the late Conservative years - the end of Thatcher/start of Major and certainly continued throughout New Labour and continuing now - that new is necessarily better, so there is this neophilia which isn't the vanguard of progress, it's just the vanguard of the construction industry enjoying itself.

You always have to find something to say about the subject and in seven cases out of ten there is nothing to say.