Nicholas Grimshaw

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and three, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is an architect. He set up his own practice as soon as he graduated from college and has never worked for anyone else. The fruits of this single-mindedness can be seen all over the world, from a New York subway station to the Berlin Stock Exchange to the Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo and the Eden Project in Cornwall. As befits a man whose father was an engineer and mother a portrait painter, his buildings are a marriage between mathematical functionalism and intense creativity. He's determined to be practical, but he wants them to be elegant and beautiful too. I'd defend them all, he says. There isn't one I'm not really proud of. He is Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. You make them sound, Nick, like children, your offspring. Is that how you think of them?

Nicholas Grimshaw1:16

Well, certainly the process of designing a building is very much like sort of bringing up a child, I think. And there is a point when somehow they leave home and you have to let them have their own life.

Presenter1:28

But do you then go out and sort of check they're all right, tend to them, or do you just leave them to do their own thing?

Nicholas Grimshaw1:34

Yes, uh I mean, I I always think in some ways architects are shy of talking about beauty, but you you will find me sometimes standing at night looking at one of my buildings and enjoying it.

Speaker 41:47

Hmm.

Nicholas Grimshaw1:48

If you think you've got something right, there is a huge satisfaction in in in going back and looking at it and saying, well

Nicholas Grimshaw1:57

Not bad.

Presenter1:57

Having that confirmed. The latest one on your drawing board, I gather, is Battersea Power Station, that sort of great lump of an upturned Victorian table just on the other side of Chelsea Bridge. Do you think that that is a lump, or is it a thing of beauty?

Nicholas Grimshaw2:13

Well I think actually it's it's a really iconic building for London. I I can remember the Festival of Britain in fifty one, and it was it was a symbol of power.

Nicholas Grimshaw2:24

There was a tree walk in Battersea Park, I remember, as part of the Fifty One exhibition, and you could you could see the power station.

Nicholas Grimshaw2:33

From the park, and it was a most enormously powerful symbol.

Nicholas Grimshaw2:38

And still is, I think.

Presenter2:40

So what I mean, just give me the vision. What's going to go on in the middle?

Nicholas Grimshaw2:43

Well, apart from the usual kind of shops and restaurants and all the rest of it, it's a place very much for the arts and entertainment, which I think is going to give it a terrific life and hopefully a twenty-four hour life. There is going to be um a huge area for launching design, sort of big

Nicholas Grimshaw3:03

what you might call British design events.

Presenter3:06

If you had to put a date on it, when might we see it then?

Nicholas Grimshaw3:10

I would think probably between four and five years to get the whole thing finished.

Presenter3:15

Which is the sort of normal length of your the upbringing of your babies, really?

Nicholas Grimshaw3:20

Well, I often say seven years actually from the time you first meet a client to the time you have to attend the last bent door handle.

Presenter3:30

Okay, we're sending you to a desert island anyway, t getting you away from all that work. Uh tell me about the first record you'd like to play there.

Nicholas Grimshaw3:37

Well, the first record is Rostropovich playing Bach's unaccompanied cello suite.

Nicholas Grimshaw3:44

I heard him play all of them at the Queen Elizabeth Hall quite a few years ago, and it was the most wonderful experience. It was like in a sort of way a marathon, because it was a a long day. But the thing that struck me most was Rostropovich just coming on to the stage, holding his cello.

Nicholas Grimshaw4:06

He sort of sat down and looked up for a minute, and he just started playing, and there was no question as to whether we were there or not.

Nicholas Grimshaw4:17

He was listening to himself and playing as an absolute individual creative person.

Nicholas Grimshaw4:24

And I personally I think there's such a lot to learn from that.

Nicholas Grimshaw4:27

You could say he was his own critic.

Speaker 45:01

Mm-hmm.

Presenter5:30

Rostropovich playing part of the prelude to Bach's cello suite number three. You say, Nick Grimshaw, that the artist is his own best critic. How does that apply to you, the architect? Because you, you know, you can't allow the audience to be an irrelevancy, which is what you say Rostropovich was in that moment. You you've got to care what we think. We're using these places that you build.

Presenter5:52

Or don't you?

Nicholas Grimshaw5:54

Well, that's a very interesting point because I was working out the other day that something around about twenty or thirty million people use our buildings every year.

Nicholas Grimshaw6:03

But it's a very, very delicate balance. You have to do what you think is the best detail and the best quality of work you possibly can.

Nicholas Grimshaw6:13

But at the same time, it has to be a hundred percent suitable for its purpose.

Speaker 46:18

Hmm.

Nicholas Grimshaw6:18

That is not for you to decide.

Nicholas Grimshaw6:21

I think buildings well, in a very basic sense, have to be honest. They have to have structure and they have to go together. And there's no such thing, I hope, with our buildings as saying, Well, don't worry, nobody can see that bit.

Presenter6:35

Like we all have when we take the bath panel off, you know, and see what the plumbers left behind there, all those old washers.

Nicholas Grimshaw6:35

Like we

Nicholas Grimshaw6:37

Yeah.

Nicholas Grimshaw6:39

Uh

Nicholas Grimshaw6:41

That's right. But in a wider sense, if you take something like structure, it's extremely disturbing if you can't really see how the structure of a building works, if bits of it sort of disappear behind walls, or you can't work out how it's going to be.

Presenter6:56

You think we should be able to see that, do you?

Nicholas Grimshaw6:58

I think you should have an inherent sense of why a building's there and how it sustains itself.

Presenter7:05

Well, I want to come back to you on that, but I want you to describe to me, if you would, the latest of your creations, which is about to be unveiled. This is the new Bath Spa. There have been protracted delays. But gi give me I read that it's a building sandwich between water. What does that mean?

Nicholas Grimshaw7:22

We've got a kind of spa pool at the ground level, and then a stone cube held up with four wonderful sort of mushrooming columns. And then going up to the roof, there's another pool.

Nicholas Grimshaw7:35

In the open air.

Nicholas Grimshaw7:37

So, you could you can sit in there in this very hot water. It comes out of the ground almost hotter, and you can touch it.

Nicholas Grimshaw7:44

with sort of steam all around you, looking out over those wonderful hills around Bath and across the roof tops. And I think that would be one of the experiences of a lifetime the little bit of winter mist and wood smoke around. Just to sit up there and contemplate the stars I think would be wonderful.

Presenter8:02

And as we look at it, does it fit in with the Georgian city that it's in? Or does it stick out as something intensely modern, intensely twenty first century?

Nicholas Grimshaw8:14

Well, it is genuinely a modern building, a building of its age. But we've used Bathstone, we've used it in in a quite a new kind of way.

Nicholas Grimshaw8:23

We've used a certain amount of glass, but it's it's it's not by any means a sort of glass building.

Nicholas Grimshaw8:29

And

Nicholas Grimshaw8:30

Paid a lot of attention to scale and to light and shade.

Nicholas Grimshaw8:36

And so far not one person in Bath has said to me, Look, that shouldn't be there, or it it doesn't fit in. I think they're amazed that actually they've got a modern building which does fit in with a what is the most absolutely spectacularly beautiful town.

Presenter8:53

Tell me about record number two.

Nicholas Grimshaw8:54

Record number two is the Rex Tremendi from Mozart's Requiem. Both my daughters were at uh an all girls' school, and every year the call went out for any parents who'd sung in their school choirs to do the tenor and bass parts for a big choral work. And it was rather a wonderful experience to stand roaring basses at the back and see these wonderful little

Nicholas Grimshaw9:20

A hundreds of little um children in front of you pick out the two fair heads of my two daughters.

Presenter10:24

The Rex Tremendi from Mozart's Requiem, performed by the Leipzig Radio Choir and the Dresden State Orchestra, conducted by Peter Schreier.

Presenter10:32

You sang it, Nick Grimshaw, you say, with your daughters at school. You you were a musical person, I think, from very early on. Apparently you used it. Music is an escape from for yourself at your public school. Escape from what?

Nicholas Grimshaw10:46

Well, I suppose in those days well, the level of my interest in the teaching wasn't very high, I have to say. And so one sort of sought solace a bit in music, in singing in the choir, in listening to music, and, to some extent, to art and the theatre.

Presenter11:06

This was Wellington.

Nicholas Grimshaw11:07

Yes, Wellington College.

Presenter11:08

You got out quick, apparently, of the school. You left early, didn't you?

Nicholas Grimshaw11:12

Yes, I left when I was seventeen, and the sudden feeling of freedom was just absolutely staggering.

Presenter11:19

But it must have been at school, you know, a huge contrast from home, because um it yours was an all female household, wasn't it? Your father had died when you were really very small.

Nicholas Grimshaw11:28

Yes, my my father died when I was two and a half, so I never really knew him at all.

Nicholas Grimshaw11:34

I had two sisters, my mother and my grandmother, living in rather small house.

Presenter11:39

And they will

Nicholas Grimshaw11:40

All

Presenter11:40

Who are Yeah.

Nicholas Grimshaw11:41

Oh.

Presenter11:41

Yeah.

Nicholas Grimshaw11:41

Well, my grandmother was rather a good portrait painter, and my mother's an artist as well. My sister went to the Royal College of Art to do fabric design, and then my younger sister is a photographer.

Presenter11:56

So there we have that whole, as I said in the introduction, that that artistic influence in your life. But your father, and I think some of your forefathers, were engineers.

Nicholas Grimshaw12:05

Yes, I've got two great grandfathers I'm rather proud of. One of them was a um a civil engineer who built dams on the Nile and did huge irrigation schemes.

Nicholas Grimshaw12:15

And the other was a well, actually, a physician and a philanthropist in Dublin.

Nicholas Grimshaw12:21

who plotted what were all the endemic diseases in those days, like cholera and typhoid and I think particular virulent form of gastroenteritis and so on and he plotted them against the streams that ran into the Liffey.

Nicholas Grimshaw12:37

Published the map.

Nicholas Grimshaw12:38

Which showed quite clearly that these diseases were water-borne diseases.

Speaker 412:43

Yeah.

Nicholas Grimshaw12:44

And then he ran a terrific campaign to get the streams piped and really the first drainage system going for Dublin.

Presenter12:53

So there you were, this little boy, brought up in Guildford with in this female artistic household, but with all this kind of engineering and inventive background, too, in the genes. And you sat there. I have an image of you sitting there playing with a Meccano set. That's what you did, isn't it?

Nicholas Grimshaw13:08

It isn't.

Nicholas Grimshaw13:09

Well, I d I I did inherit a wonderful, rather battered set of Meccano. I must have been well pre war, I think. I also had quite a big gang of lads locally. I had a um two cousins living round the corner and three or four friends over the road, and we used to kind of roam

Nicholas Grimshaw13:29

around the countryside and quite often building things, building houses up trees or various kind of shelters and so on, and and damming streams and that kind of thing. So the it was quite a a constructive youth, I think, in a way.

Speaker 413:41

Yeah.

Presenter13:46

It's coin phrase. Okay, record number three.

Nicholas Grimshaw13:50

My third record is the love duet between Alfredo and Violetta from La Traviata, and I think this is a most extraordinarily beautiful piece of singing by both of them. He has the most languid and mellow kind of voice she has that raw, wild feel her singing, and I think the contrast of the two is quite quite extraordinary.

Speaker 414:46

Come on, Jeffrey, Come to France.

Nicholas Grimshaw14:48

We are in the ages.

Speaker 415:02

Let's see how

Speaker 415:04

The beauty of God.

Presenter15:14

UNDI FELLICE ETEREA from Act One of Verdi's La Traviata, with Francesco Albanese as Alfredo and Maria Callis as Violetta, with the Sinfonica di Torrino della Rai conducted by Gabriella Santini.

Presenter15:27

So, um, Nick Grimshaw, we've got this vision of you constructing things as you say as a child, uh treehouses and so on. You also sailed, you know, boats were there, the nautical influences were there. There's something in there, isn't there, about the movement of wind and water and construction and so on. That's something that obviously informs your work.

Nicholas Grimshaw15:47

Yes, I mean boats do fascinate me. It was another, in a way, form of escape for the school holidays. We had a a completely wrecked old fishing boat, which leaked like a sieve, and we had a sailing dinghy moored alongside, where we could go sailing.

Nicholas Grimshaw16:04

And this was in Christchurch.

Nicholas Grimshaw16:07

and I got more and more fascinated by the boats and the way they were constructed.

Nicholas Grimshaw16:12

I think the the constructional side of boats was fascinating, but also the the structural side.

Nicholas Grimshaw16:20

sailing itself, the stresses and strains put on the the boat, how much it could take, how much wind it could take, the physics of sailing and dealing with the wind and weather.

Presenter16:31

And and it's there to be seen now in your buildings, as I say. I mean, cut to one of your earliest buildings, the ice rink, the Oxford Ice Rink. It's com it's locally known as the Cutty Sark, I think, isn't it?

Nicholas Grimshaw16:41

Bunny. Yeah.

Presenter16:42

sort of two masted schooner with a great beam hanging between it.

Nicholas Grimshaw16:43

Well it is

Nicholas Grimshaw16:46

In a way it is. But it's a very spare structure. It's a very efficient structure. And I I think that is one of the things you learn from boats. You will very seldom see anything redundant on a boat. Everything is there for a purpose.

Presenter17:02

But it's gone on, has it? I mean, there are more nautical parallels in your work. If you look at your building for the Western Morning News in Plymouth, that's said to look like a a maroon ship and the boardroom is on the bridge. And I gather there's some kind of a hull of a ship inside your own home in Norfolk, isn't there? What what what's it doing there? Has it got a function or is that again just'cause you like both?

Nicholas Grimshaw17:23

Well well, actually we have a stone barn, which for historic reasons you couldn't do anything really to the outside. But I was very concerned

Nicholas Grimshaw17:34

actually to try and keep the integrity of that structure as a wonderful stone barn. So when we had to put bedroom accommodation in, I kind of hung it from the roof, like the hull of a boat really, so that you could see the barn walls going up either side of it. It doesn't actually look particularly like a boat, other than the fact that it's it's curved.

Presenter17:58

Record number four, tell me about that.

Nicholas Grimshaw18:00

Record number four is the Beatles. I was doing a student exchange working in Baltimore. The Beatles were on tour at the time and had just passed through Baltimore. And they did have a huge impact in America and everywhere, I suppose.

Speaker 418:20

Love, love, we do.

Speaker 418:22

You know I love you.

Speaker 418:26

I've always been true.

Speaker 418:29

Go

Speaker 418:33

Love me, dear

Speaker 418:36

Oh, love me.

Speaker 418:41

Love, love me do

Speaker 418:44

You know I love you.

Speaker 418:47

I'll always be true.

Presenter18:49

Uh

Presenter18:50

The Beatles and Love Me Do. So you were artistic, musical, interested in engineering, although you ducked out of A levels as fast as you could. At what point then did you pull all those threads together and say, I know what I really want to do. I want to be an architect?

Nicholas Grimshaw19:07

I was in Edinburgh visiting my elder sister, who'd by that time got married to someone who was teaching at the Art College, and he showed me the architecture school.

Nicholas Grimshaw19:20

and they were all busy building models and drawings, and I went through several of the studios, and I just instantaneously thought this this is for me. There was no question of doubt in my mind.

Presenter19:35

So you went, in fact, to that art college in Edinburgh and then studied there, and then um architectural school in London, and then immediately, as I said in the introduction, you set up

Presenter19:45

In your own practice. You never worked for anyone else. Now, I mean, that was ambitious, certainly, maybe even arrogant.

Nicholas Grimshaw19:52

It was just luck, actually. I had a relative who was involved in finding accommodation from s for students coming into London from Africa. There was a row of of six houses, two hundred students, and no bathroom accommodation at all. It seemed it really distilled itself into the main problem. So I decided that the answer was to build a tower of bathrooms behind, and this had a core with all the plumbing in it, surrounded by fiberglass pods, which were bathrooms, and they in turn were surrounded by a helical ramp.

Presenter20:29

And it looked incredibly futuristic. It was a s steel tower with with these pods, as you say, f sort of fiberglass pods. And am I right in thinking that a that a certain

Presenter20:40

inventor designer in his seventies, much ad whom you much admired, actually came along to have a look at it too.

Nicholas Grimshaw20:46

Yes, this was Buckminster Fuller, whose most wonderful fellow.

Presenter20:50

Because he was the man, we should explain, who created the geodesic dome at Expo sixty seven in Montreal, wasn't it?

Nicholas Grimshaw20:55

Yeah.

Presenter20:56

And what did he think of your bathroom tower?

Nicholas Grimshaw20:58

Oh, he w he was pretty um he he w he he liked it'cause he'd done work himself on prefabricated stainless steel bathrooms'cause he thought

Presenter21:06

Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Grimshaw21:07

Anybody can put up some kind of a shack, but the one problem is, you know, to have have a decent bathroom.

Presenter21:13

And of course through you it would seem he's had quite an effect, although long dead now, on the Eden Project, which I want to talk to you about in a minute, but let's pause for record number five.

Nicholas Grimshaw21:22

Record number five is Richter playing part of the fourth movement of Schubert's piano sonata. I've chosen Richter particularly because he used to play regularly at the um music festival in the Turenne at the Grange de Malais, which is a wonderful thirteenth century barn. And I remember going round to this barn

Nicholas Grimshaw21:49

With the doors open, sunlight pouring in, Rishta practising at the piano, and a few chickens from the farm yard pecking around on the earth floor of the barn.

Nicholas Grimshaw22:02

And it's one of the most wonderful scenes you could possibly imagine. The festival was run by some friends of my wife, and I'd rather like to sort of dedicate this piece of music to my wife, who's been the most marvellous support to me all my life in architecture and every other way.

Presenter23:18

Sviataslav Richter, playing part of the fourth movement of Schubert's piano sonata No. seventeen in D major. So at Nick Grimshaw, the uh the Eden project. I mean, those biomes, so called, those great conservatories, they're pure Buckminster Fuller, aren't they? All those hexagons and the odd pentagon there.

Nicholas Grimshaw23:39

I think we got the job at Eden really because of Waterloo, which at that time was one of the biggest sort of glazed enclosures in Europe.

Nicholas Grimshaw23:48

Waterloo was on a firm base, on a level base. Here we had a

Nicholas Grimshaw23:52

Very irregular sight. So we looked.

Nicholas Grimshaw23:56

for a kind of or much more organic form that almost that you could sort of snip around the bottom with scissors to make it fit the ground. I think perhaps Mr Fuller would have approved in the end.

Presenter24:11

But again, the material and he certainly would have approved of that, wouldn't he? That the the the stuff that you used in these great pillows, these hexagons and pentagons, is like super duper cling film, isn't it?

Nicholas Grimshaw24:22

Well, it yes, it it is a form of Teflon, really. It it has a lot of very good properties, particularly um it's sort of almost self cleaning and uh lets a lot of light through to the plants. It's very, very light weight and very strong material.

Presenter24:40

Less dangerous than glass, obviously.

Nicholas Grimshaw24:41

Well of course, yes. And we we developed a system well we designed a system right from the beginning for replacing them. And we did find we could do them in twenty four hours.

Presenter24:50

That is another theme of yours, isn't it? That that the building should be able to sort of change its skin.

Presenter24:57

You know, you don't build buildings as were built in, you know, eighteenth and nineteenth century with great stucco fronts that should remain like that for ever. You don't mind if they get changed.

Nicholas Grimshaw25:09

That's right, and I like the idea of people being able to change the buildings and make them work for them. I think if a building's good, it will go on lasting. And I think the basic core, the heart, and the bones of a building, should be designed in such a way that they can go on being used.

Presenter25:29

Record number six.

Nicholas Grimshaw25:30

Record number six is the Leonora Overture from Beethoven's Fidelio. I heard Fidelio in Vienna Opera House. I remember sitting, as it happened, in a box over the orchestra when the second act starts with this extraordinary feeling of anticipation, a sort of tremoring anticipation.

Nicholas Grimshaw25:55

and you hear this music in the virtually in the dark.

Nicholas Grimshaw25:58

before the curtain goes up on on the second act.

Speaker 426:20

Uh

Presenter27:00

Part of the Leonora Overture No. Three from Beethoven's Fidelia with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abardo.

Presenter27:08

What about uh domestic architecture, Nick? You've done some, I know, not a lot, but a a block of flats that you built early on near Regents Park in the sixties has recently been listed. Again, high-grade aluminium cladding outside that, and then there was a terrace in Camden Lock, isn't there? Um three bedroom properties, a long row of them, which sold, I read, at the time, what, nineteen eighty nine, for a quarter of a million pounds each. That was a lot then, wasn't it?

Nicholas Grimshaw27:33

Yes, it was, and I would quite like to have bought one, but I couldn't really afford it. I would quite like to have bought one for one of my daughters, but uh I thought it was a lot of money at the time, but they were they were all sold.

Speaker 427:44

Hmm.

Nicholas Grimshaw27:44

I mean actually th uh there's very little

Nicholas Grimshaw27:48

um modern housing in in London, really, really housing of our age, I think. It's difficult to put your finger on it, but I think that it it's it's a sort of fear that uh people will get something thrown at them which they can't live with.

Nicholas Grimshaw28:05

And yet, ironically, we have one of the best planning systems anywhere in the world. You have a terrific democratic right to examine and protest and criticize anything that's put forward in in this country. And I think if people used that system more and were tougher, I think you could have perfectly good buildings of this age.

Nicholas Grimshaw28:30

built pretty well anywhere in the towns or in the countryside.

Presenter28:33

So would you like to do that? Would you like to build a housing estate? Would you like such a commission?

Nicholas Grimshaw28:38

I'd love to, yes. And I I think that the more

Nicholas Grimshaw28:42

Unfettered one was, probably the more popular the houses might be.

Presenter28:47

What about your own house in London? What's it like?

Nicholas Grimshaw28:50

Well, we we uh live um just near Primrose Hill and it's a wonderful eighteen fifty five house and

Presenter28:59

But what would shock us about it if we walked in through the door?

Nicholas Grimshaw29:03

The ground floor with its curving wooden wall built by a shipbuilder might might impress you a bit. One side's all stainless steel and glass and the other side's curving

Nicholas Grimshaw29:14

warm wood with a seat built into it. And I think that um it would be nice to have the opportunity to do a a modern house, but these very, very simple, straightforward

Nicholas Grimshaw29:27

Structures between two party walls can be made to work pretty well for you, really.

Presenter29:33

Piccod number seven.

Nicholas Grimshaw29:34

The stones I can't get no satisfaction. It has a kind of raw and rasping quality about it, particularly the opening guitar, and I think it it sort of expresses the exuberance of what one felt in the sixties. It wasn't really protest as so much as the feeling that almost anything goes.

Speaker 430:04

In Get No Santa's Faction.

Speaker 430:11

Couldn't get to know what he said.

Speaker 430:16

Show me this I tried

Speaker 430:22

Yeah.

Presenter30:29

Read Rolling Stones, and I can't get no satisfaction. So what, uh, Nick Grimshaw, does a a modern architect build on a desert island, do you think? Much the same as any other castaway or?

Presenter30:39

We got another take on the old palm fronds.

Nicholas Grimshaw30:43

Well, I because of my early youth and and building things in trees and so on, I think I probably wouldn't be too too bad at it. I think it would be a pretty ecological house. I think one could probably guarantee that. And it would be um designed so as to um have its back to the prevailing wind and to give you shelter from the sun and you know to keep you warm at night and not to burn down when you lit the fire. And I think, you know, one one would would have some rather nice sort of time using one's basic architectural skills.

Presenter31:20

Last record.

Nicholas Grimshaw31:22

My last record is the Linos Wind Quintet, led by Catherine Willison, who happens to be a young music student who's living in our house at the moment. And I've listened to her her quintet practice many, many an hour in our house. I think it's absolutely wonderful to listen to young musicians when they're still enormously enthusiastic and keen on what they're doing. So here they are playing Mozart.

Presenter32:57

Part of Mozart's Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat performed by the Linos Wind Quintet, and that was recorded for ABC Classic FM in Brisbane, Australia.

Presenter33:07

So, Nick Grimshaw, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

Nicholas Grimshaw33:12

I think I'd probably take Rostropovich, because with any luck I would get the all the cello suites, um so I could sit there and listen for for several hours on end.

Presenter33:24

What about your book? We give you, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Nicholas Grimshaw33:28

Well, I I I'm probably um overstepping the mark, but I'm I'd like to take the complete works of Patrick O'Brien, who's a wonderful sea writer, and combines wonderful detail about the ships with a terrific span of history. And I know that actually it might be rather a big volume, but that's what I love to have.

Presenter33:53

And your luxury.

Nicholas Grimshaw33:54

Oh dear. I think I'm I'm probably going to overstep the mark again. I thought I'd like to take the um

Nicholas Grimshaw34:01

RIBA Drawings Collection. It's a absolutely wonderful collection of uh drawings. I don't know how far back it goes, but I mean virtually every architect has ever worked in this country and a lot of uh drawings from from abroad and a lot of drawings of nineteenth century buildings like the Crystal Palace or our wonderful railway stations and all the rest of it are all there. And I suppose if one

Nicholas Grimshaw34:26

was really getting desperate for what to do. You could pace all these buildings out on the sand.

Presenter34:32

Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Nicholas Grimshaw34:36

Thank you.

Speaker 334:43

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.