It would never cross anyone’s mind to suggest that Mecca or the Golden Temple should lose their distinctively Islamic and Sikh characters to accommodate people of different faiths but Catholics, and conservative Frenchmen, are being asked to reshape anything that expresses their own beliefs and heritage. Why, people who share the sentiment attributed to Harwood should ask themselves, is liberal multiculturalism so fragile that any cultural distinctiveness is to be challenged?…

There is nothing essentially wrong with the modern. If this were not so then a mud hut would be more valuable than Notre-Dame. Yet one of the faults of modernism has been the iconoclastic urge to reshape everything traditional. Say what you like about modernism in art but if an unhinged situationist throws paint across the Mona Lisa I doubt that many people would suggest that instead of trying to remove the paint we should reconstruct the portrait in an abstract style.

There is, of course, no need to reconstruct the building brick by brick. If nothing else, it might be reconstructed in a safer style. But I believe, and suspect that most people would agree with me, that reconstructions should in general aim to recreate and not transform the earlier style. In a world of ceaseless, dramatic and dangerous change it will be a reminder that the beautiful and the profound can transcend generations.