We’ve been swamped by hostile articles about the immigration wave from Romania but the country does also have its champions. Among them is Nicky Haslam.
The interior designer, who has redesigned himself several times as a middle-aged rock god, a Savile Row gent and a septuagenarian YouTube star, owned a house near the Romanian city of Cluj but gave it up last year because it was too far to commute. But Haslam still waxes lyrical about Romania’s opera houses — a breeding ground for sopranos such as Angela Georghiou — world-class universities and modernist architecture with a “Mallet-Stevens-ish Parisian charm, far better than the rubbishy stuff we were building at about the same time,” he writes in Spear’s magazine.
Is he worried about the influx of Romanian workers to Britain, the Londoner wondered, leaving no one to sing arias or to sweep the streets? “They are very beautiful and some are very bright,” says Haslam. “We might be lucky.”
