Fragments

San Rocco is a journal that publishes writing about buildings, drawings, projects, and built or drawn ideas from around the world. It is based on the idea that architecture is a collective knowledge and that this knowledge can take different forms within an architectural magazine – essays, illustrations, designs, etc. Each issue of the journal defines a field of interest through the presentation of a topic. This text reflects on the contents, means and methods of San Rocco. Structured as a series of short excerpts that cover different questions about the magazine, both practical and conceptual, it offers an overview of this journal’s position regarding the practice of architecture, its theory, its relation to history and the role of writing within the discipline.

Sundays / over on the boat / baby sister dead from TB / char woman / factory work / hopeful back to the old sod / hopeless back again when the doctor's bills broke them / homeless.

"No blacks, no Irish."
He is one of them, you see. I am one of them, you see. Not that you would know, to look at me, or to hear me. Same goes for him. We pass. Assimilated. Taken the Queen's shilling (well, he did; I did the online test but they told me I was not civil service material). Or at least, we tried. Easier when you run away, neutral territory, "that's what it says on my passport so it must be true". No need to think about it. But then there is "This man may be a competent diplomat but he will never make it in the salons of Paris or Rome".
It is not just the Irish blood in his veins, of course, it is all the things that came with that: the poverty, the grammar school, the Catholicism, growing up in a place that only looked inwards. Poles were alright -Catholic, you see. Better a Pole than a Protestant, even if they did not speak very good English. Yes, they had Poles back then, too.
Anyway, back to those stamps. And the nanny. Class is a funny thing. Dad went up, you see, high enough for his kids to be on solid ground (despite the salons of Paris). Nanny. Private school. Big house. Married up, both times. Travelled the world "on behalf of her Britannic Majesty", me in tow. So I got the bug, which has not helped on the assimilation front but it keeps things interesting. But his brothers and sister? Not so much. My June-September 2017 Women on Brexit cousins are factory workers, barmaids, lorry drivers. Not much solid ground there. "White working class", apparently.
See, that is the thing. You say "there are too many of them", but you are not defining your terms. And that is whether you're talking about migrants or those mythical members of the "white working class". You want them to "go home" but where are they supposed to go? Most of them are home already. Scrape the surface and there is migration-on-the-grounds-of-economic-necessity a few layers down.
"Not me", says my feminist mother. And that is true, but then three centuries of prosperity does give one a bit more of a solid grounding in the world. Or at least, it did until last week, or whenever it was. She is as shaken and upset as the rest of us (and yes, for the record, that does include my "white working class" cousins. Some of them, at least).
Anyway, I have had enough. I never did understand what you meant by "English" and I never saw what was so "great" about Britain, either. I do not need your lion or your unicorn. I can wander the world with a passport with a harp on it, just as well, thank you very much. Vol. 5, Poem