Is this a brick I see?

The people who look after Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-avon want to move the railings in front of the house a yard or so further away because people have been stealing anything they can prise from it, such as a tile from the lean-to porch. Everyone wants a bit of Shakespeare – his genius, his universal excellence. The next best thing is a relic, as though a tile added 100 years ago was the equivalent of a programme to Hamlet signed by the Bard himself. The Birthplace Trust only came into being because in 1846 Phineas T Barnum wanted to ship the whole house brick by brick to America. If tourists taking selfies outside the house also catch in the picture parts of the hideous neighbouring Shakespeare Centre, from the Sixties, with its concrete stilts, they might wish Barnum had succeeded.