Architecture critic Rowan Moore is not thrilled with the thoughtless, crass commercialism filling Trafalgar Square. “It is not the presence of the market, precisely, that’s the problem, so much as the cluelessness with which it and other temporary elements are jammed in among the stonework. These include a crib housed in something like a bus shelter and a makeshift health-and-safety skirt of crush barriers and green tarpaulin around the 25-metre Christmas tree, donated every year by Norway in thanks for British help during the Second World War. If the Norwegians are kind enough to give us a tree … we should at least put a tiny bit of thought into whatever goes around its base.” – The Guardian (UK)