Saviours of Indian art are not always Indian. One such good Samaritan is Piero D’Angelico, a hairdresser of Italian origin, who has a salon on Mill Road in Cambridge.
Last week, D’Angelico saw builders busy at work, demolishing the old library, which until recently, was home to the Bharat Bhavan temple, the only place of worship in Cambridge for its 5000-odd Hindus. He was shaken.
He remembered helping his grandfather, a stonemason, and sculptor, to restore derelict churches. To his horror, d’Angelico learned that the intricately carved pillars made with pink Rajasthani sandstone around the temple’s altar would be destroyed during the building’s renovation by Cambridgeshire County Council. “When I saw these carved columns I knew that thousands of hours of craftsmanship had gone into creating them,” he told Cambridge Independent, the oldest newspaper of the area.