Amol Rajan

speaker

3,997 appearances 23 recordings 6 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.

Appearances

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Radical · Can Britain Change Its Ways on Housing? (Your Radical Questions with Shiv Malik) · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

So this city, there's lots of trees.

I'm looking at a particular, I'll show you which picture I'm looking at.

I'm looking at a particular kind of avenue of sorts, which has a cycle coming down it, which tells you we might be in the vicinity of Cambridge.

There's kind of pleasing hedgerows and bushes in front of lovely gentle stairs.

And the architecture, I would say, is in sympathy with its surroundings.

So you've got nice curved fronts, big glass windows, multi-story apartments where you could imagine a family living.

It looks quite sort of American suburban in some ways.

Of Harlow, Stevenage and Letchworth.

Do you know what they're going to look like?

Do you know what the city is going to look like?

What inspiration do you take from places like Harlow, Stevenage and Letchworth?

Or what do you want to avoid from there?

There's one of your arguments for the location of Forest City is that it's close to Cambridge, which is a new kind of centre of gravity.

On Thursday's episode, I stated the probably not very impartial opinion and very, very controversial view that quite often

old buildings look nicer than new ones, which has developed a kind of strange political tinge here, partly because a previous or recent conservative government asked the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton to do this work called Build Big, Build Beautiful or something along those lines.

And it's just a very, very, very strange thing to me that it's become a sort of right wing thing to believe in sort of beautiful buildings built in sympathy with their surroundings.

But one of the reasons people might also believe that is because of Poundbury, which is this place

in Dorset that Prince Charles kind of envisioned in the 1980s.

To what extent do you look at Pound Bree as a lesson or inspiration?

So that's one, Charles.

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