ACCIDENTS will happen, but their consequences needn’t always be disastrous. In the 1930s, Ruth Wakefield, proprietor of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, US, created the chocolate-chip cookie by chance when throwing broken slabs of chocolate bars into her biscuit mix, assuming they would melt in the oven. Her mishap created one of the world’s favourite sweet treats. And so it is with buildings that tilt, lean, list, slope or camber. We have long embraced these architectural equivalents of the failed soufflé with the kind of warmth and sentiment usually reserved for the retro sweets of our childhood.
Wonky pubs, houses and church spires are the poor kittens of construction and their obvious failings are precisely what we most adore about them. Perhaps it’s because a crooked building is a wobbly riposte to
