Gabion: Welsh Phoenix: The Wales Millennium Centre 1/2: "When the wind blows across Cardiff Bay - and it blows like fury - lugworms become detached from the tidal mudflats and splatter themselves against the walls of the surrounding buildings. Lugworms have no recorded views on architectural styles, but they do cling tenaciously to glass. After a bad storm, you have to scrape them off with a spatula, like old chewing-gum. It is important to know this: it explains why Cardiff is building itself a tidal barrage at huge expense, to turn the mud into a permanent, fresh-water lagoon.

On the edge of this lagoon - still a year off completion - will stand Richard Rogers' very glassy Welsh Assembly building, so anti-lugworm measures cannot come soon enough."