性吧电台

I鈥檓 more into traditional buildings and I was brought up in Newcastle, so I love Grey鈥檚 Monument and the rest of Grey Street in Newcastle. People don鈥檛 take enough time looking at the old cities like Newcastle and Liverpool. They miss a lot of the detail. But I like to spend five minutes looking at the details here as I walk from the monument down to the quayside. Everything on the street has been cut from solid pieces of stone. There are carvings - on the walls of old banks and into the doors of buildings. It was all built on the back of the ports and of slavery, really. It鈥檚 stood the test of time - unlike most of the stuff we are throwing up these days.

I spend a lot of time in America so I hate the strip malls that they put up over there - they try to make them look like Mediterranean villages by covering them with wood. If you don鈥檛 feel sick looking at it, there鈥檚 something wrong with you.

But a particular building that has stuck out recently is one of those academy schools in Peterborough. I鈥檝e been visiting a lot of schools recently to give talks. This particular one was designed by Foster + Partners and cost 拢50m.

It is full of pods and open spaces. There are too many distractions and it鈥檚 a cross between a mall and an art gallery. It鈥檚 like a large, glass-fronted maze. It obviously didn鈥檛 work as a place of learning because it had a resident policeman onsite.

When I compare it with the very established private schools I鈥檝e also been visiting, I think it misses the point. I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 a place that will last more than 200 years like them - even at its huge cost. It doesn鈥檛 sit well with me at all.

Chris Ryan is a former SAS soldier, best known for travelling from Iraq to Syria on foot after his mission ended in disaster. He has written severalnovels and presented the Sky series, How Not to Die