Editor – Your article on Rothesay’s hope of being the UK’s Town of Culture (Bute launches bid to the Town of Culture, April 10) quotes the applicants as saying ‘central to the bid is Rothesay Pavilion, the island’s iconic seafront landmark’.
Whatever might be said about this late 1930’s folly, it is quite wrong to mock it as ‘iconic’. Being comically ‘futuristic’ in appearance, the Pavilion is about as far from being iconic as can be.
Contrary to what is supposed by those who are content to guess at meanings of words, this currently much-overused adjective means ‘executed to a conventional pattern’ (Oxford English Dictionary, Vol 7, p. 609). That is to say iconic means like an icon – an image usually hastily produced with minimum skill of a figure uncritically venerated by devotees. Hence, iconic is a term of derogation rather than of praise.
However, had Rothesay Pavilion indeed been of conventional design and built using tried and tested materials appropriate to its situation, like the timelessly elegant adjacent 18th and 19th century buildings which remain in sound condition having had only routine maintenance, it wouldn’t have had to have been virtually rebuilt at immense cost after only 80 years or so.
It would take a poet of greater lyric powers than mine to comment both approvingly and truthfully on Rothesay’s bid to be nominated UK Town of Culture. Not that I don’t like the place, you understand, but it seems a bit like proposing to designate Wagga Wagga as the Athens of the South.
