Architecture Update: In inns

THREE pubs have won awards in the 1993 Camra/English Heritage Pub Design Awards. Two, I W Frazer's Cumberland Bar, Edinburgh (Best Pub Refurbishment) and the Fox and Anchor, Smithfield, London (English Heritage Conservation Awards) are traditional designs. The third, however - the Truscott, Curtain Road, in Shoreditch, east London - is an overtly modern cafe-bar that may, says the judges, 'shock traditionalists'. They add that the pub is a 'rare example of an architect choosing to abandon fake historicism and the tired cliches of today's pub interiors in favour of a frankly modern approach'. The architects (for Clarke Baker Inns) are Stock Woolstencroft. Although bright and white, the design also makes use of 'rich greens, reds and yellows and even a striking verdigris effect for the bar front'. No pub in the Newly Built category was considered worthy of an award.