By Royal Appointment

Citation

Hoxley, M. (2006), "By Royal Appointment", Structural Survey, Vol. 24 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2006.11024baa.001

By Royal Appointment

Last night I attended an RICS Anniversary Dinner at the Banqueting House, London. The anniversary in question was in fact a double one. The first was to celebrate 125 years of the Institution being granted its royal charter and the second was the 30th anniversary of the Planning and Development Faculty (formerly Division). To dine in one of the few remaining Inigo Jones designed buildings and beneath a Paul Rubens painted ceiling was a very memorable occasion.

The Guest of Honour was the Prince of Wales, who I now know to be an honorary member of the RICS. I was lucky enough to be sitting a few feet from our guest speaker as he delivered a thought provoking “before dinner” speech. As might be expected the main theme was that of sustainability and he spoke at length about the Poundbury project. He lamented the lack of respect for “tradition” in urban design and spoke of the corrosive influence of planners and highway engineers in their preference for the motor car over the pedestrian (I noticed however that he hadn’t walked “round the corner” to the venue but was chauffer driven – but then I expect security as well as sustainability considerations had played an important part in his personal transport decision). He spoke a lot of sense of course and it is difficult to argue with many of his sentiments. He had some particularly acerbic asides saved up for the press who had been stirred up by that court case about his diaries.

I was on a table with colleagues from the RICS East of England Regional Board (and a Vice-President of the RICS) and we had all brought our wives. As you can imagine there was a great deal of secrecy about the attendance of our guest of honour and it was only 14 days before the dinner that it was announced that Prince Charles would be attending. Prior to the formal announcement there were of course rumours flying around and one of these was that Camilla would be accompanying Charles. I am pretty sure that this is why our wives were all so keen to attend something that they would not normally have shown any interest in. However my wife’s disappointment at the non-appearance of the Duchess of Cornwall was short-lived. Someone quickly referred her to the alphabetic list of guests which under “H” included the following entries: Hoxley, Dr M.; Hoxley, Mrs S.; HRH The Prince of Wales HonRICS. She is planning to frame it!

Papers in this issue

Following on from the SARS crisis in Hong Kong, Professor Edwin Chan and his colleagues present the findings of their research into improving natural ventilation arrangements in the residential blocks in the Special Administrative Region. Kangwa and Olubodun write about their methodology for the better self-diagnosis of owner occupied housing defects. Alan Richardson presents another paper on the use of polypropylene fibres in concrete and Carrion et al. provide a theoretical method for monitoring the condition of structures by the use of wavelet analysis.

Mike Hoxley