And from the ad hoc too: even pragmatic or accidental change can deliver a

And from the ad hoc, too: even pragmatic or accidental change can deliver “a particular kind of harmony and beauty”.The harmonics of urban change are produced in a Britain in which “nobody plans. But the public realm, our urban places, cannot be left to hang,” Farrell says. “Development control only effectively addresses the landholdings of the private sector, and no one considers the bits in between. All the post-war governments had seen our urban areas as problem areas and, while investing heavily in public projects, did not invest in the existing infrastructure of towns and cities.” The Thatcher years, he adds, fuelled the vainglorious bonfire of private-sector development, giving loser status to the difficult leftover public “places and spaces” that brindled our urban expanses.”Constraints in life there are aplenty,” says Farrell, “but as we are merely existing in a snapshot of time, it is these very constraints and contexts that make us what we are, and our places what they are. Cities and towns are brilliant and extraordinary expressions of the human psyche in this search for personal and collective identity. They are statements about who we are, right now – and yet we know the city, the town, the village, the neighbourhood are all part of an accumulation from others in the past that we have added to, and that will be adapted and added to by our successors.”How many of us think of our habitats, our places, in this directly engaged way? How many of us are locked, instead, into the detail-stripping slipstream of a present awash with what the great Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas refers to as “the violent surf of information”? Terry Farrell is a figure in a landscape of possibility, and he has issued the first notable architectural polemic in Britain since the start of the new millennium. Williams was sentenced to seven years for fraud.* Rosemary Aberdour borrowed the title of “Lady Aberdour” and on the strength of that, the 24-year-old book-keeper at the National Hospital in London, embezzled £2.7m.But her flamboyant ways and the publicity meant the real Lord and Lady Aberdour read about her in a newspaper The phoney fled to Brazil but returned to face trial.

It might be possible for someone to pretend they were the owner of the title and offer it for sale.”Unless the buyer used a qualified Scottish solicitor to research the background they could find themselves with a worthless piece of paper.”Unlike English titles, Scottish baronies will continue to be “heritable assets” transferable to an heir, even though they will no longer be verifiable on official records.Mr Hamilton, who was behind the sale of the Barony of Macdonald on Skye and the Barony of Braemar, near the Queen’s holiday home at Balmoral, said: “The new register will allow a measure of protection for those who own or buy titles after the 28th. “Without the proper checks and balances which the official records used to provide, unscrupulous people could try to sell bogus titles or ones that don’t belong to them.”In England, where there have been numerous problems with sales of lords-of-the-manor titles, for which there is no official government register, fake titles have been offered for tens of thousand of pounds. From 29 November, experts will launch their own Register of Scottish Baronies to prevent fraudulent sales which can no longer be verified on Scotland’s official land registers.Alistair Rennie, the retired deputy Keeper of the Registers of Scotland who has devised the new register, said: “As time goes by, there is the possibility for people to make others believe that after the 28th they own the barony.”It might be possible for someone to sell the same title several times over. So concerned is the Government about na? Americans buying fraudulent titles that it advises on the official website of the British embassy in Washington: “You cannot purchase a genuine British title, with one exception, the feudal title of a Scottish baron; and you certainly cannot buy a peerage title”.The 7th Earl of Bradford, whose ancestor was ennobled three centuries ago, has his own website faketitles and there he publicly names and shames several fraudsters selling fake titles or masquerading as aristocrats.But all is not lost for those who really want a title.

“This is a big business, worth about £2.5m a year,” said Brian Hamilton, who sells 90 per cent of Scottish titles. The idea of “place” – simultaneously real and fugitive – is back on the agenda.’Place: A Story of Modelmaking, Menageries and Paper Rounds’, by Terry Farrell, is published by Laurence King (£29.95). The end of 1,000 years of feudalism in Scotland next week could provide a multimillion-pound market for conmen dealing in ancient barony titles, some selling at £500,000 each. Farrell’s strength – if not his psychological default setting – is founded on the tensions of one or two dynamic ambiguities. He’s a loner, a distruster of clubbish groups, yet committed to socially inclusive architecture. He is an acute observer and critic of political and administrative processes who, nevertheless, pursues their possibilities doggedly.