Don’t you?” He sounded as if there was nothing at all novel in the idea.Bankside is huge. The Tate says that the new gallery will be the same size as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, but it seems to be much bigger. And of course the Barbican will go …”I said: “Excuse me, did you say the Barbican will go?”Tate man, affably: “Oh yes, I think so, eventually. The Tate man said: “Oh, but that’ll come down soon, I’m sure.

One finds oneself thinking about people like Wren, and about the London of the Blitz and the Second World War, and about all the terrible decisions that have been made since.One of the visitors with me pointed out a particularly frightful high-rise building. It was once the brothel district of London, the location of the “stews”. Peering down over the power station parapet one sees the almost completed Globe Theatre, which was set outside city limits in rather the way that actors were buried outside city limits It wasn’t respectable. Someone told me (it seems fantastic but is no doubt true) that the decline of this part of Southwark dates from the Puritan crackdown on entertainments.Between the power station and the Globe there is a house in which it is said that Christopher Wren lived while rebuilding London after the Great Fire. Their works will be exhibited only after the winner has been chosen in February.They must all have stood, as we stood last week, and gasped at the comprehensive view of the City that the roof of the power station affords.Historically, the area has a pungent character. Alternatively, the bridge can be set at an angle, so that it does not block the view.I understand that it is the siting of the power station in relation to the cathedral opposite that has fired the imaginations of the architects on the shortlist for the conversion.

It’s just a hop , skip and a jump away.Now Prince Charles is apparently a little worried that this spanking new piss-elegant pedestrian bridge will block the view of the cathedral that river passengers enjoy at present However, there are ways around this One would be to settle Prince Charles’s hash. If you stand on the roof of the Bankside Power Station, looking across the river to St Paul’s, you can see exactly how you’ll get tothe new Tate.You’ll stroll to St Paul’s, walk halfway along the south side of the cathedral, hang a right, saunter down to the river and there will be a spanking new pedestrian bridge leading from St Paul’s Steps to this weird and wonderful building. Of the South or Left Bank I know only a short stretch of concrete running between County Hall and the LWT building. Anything else I would think of as remote, and I suppose that, when I read about the Tate’s project of converting the Bankside Power Station for its new gallery, I had a subliminal thought that, however fine the idea, this would turn out to be one of those things that one can never confidently find – like the Barbican, or the Imperial War Museum.
Last week I was invited to look at the site, and one of the first things that hits you is the brilliance of the location. However long you have lived in London, or think that you have lived in London, you never get to know more than the few bits relevant to you Me, for instance – I can never see the point of Fulham I get as far as something called the Fulham Road .. and then I lose interest. Athletes were banned or shunned for taking money the way they are banned or shunned now for taking drugs.

Yet suddenly money has become pure and holy and we are living in “the real world” and athletes are getting very rich on what used to be a forbidden substance.Are you saying that one day we will start living in the “real world” and permit the use of drugs and steroids in athletics?Sir John Potter writes: Sure.Are you on anything, Sir John?Sir John Potter writes: About £300,000 a year.Sir John Potter will be back Keep those questions rolling in!. Remember that until 10 years or so ago the most feared additive in athletics was not drugs at all, it was money. For heaven’s sake, you are not even meant to understand the way an Ulster Unionist’s mind works It’s a private game, like backgammon or curling. Politics in Northern Ireland bears the same relation to real politics as fantasy football does to real football.This Diane Modahl drugs inquiry: do you think she was guilty?Sir John Potter writes: Well, the point is not whether she was guilty or not; the point is how you define guilty. It was a kind of expiation, or penance, a reprimand or rap over the knuckles – rather like the way the BBC tells its more dissatisfied employees to go and direct shows for the Children In Need telethon.I don’t understand why Albert Reynolds’s most recent remarks should have caused such a furore among Ulster Unionist MPs.Sir John Potter writes: Nor does anyone else.