3

BLAND AHOY!

Power, Politics and Insipidity’s Triumph

 

the dismal profession

The RIBA’s annual conference in 1979 was striking for three reasons, all of them regrettable. The first was the remarkably flimsy, intellectually fraudulent, historically ignorant ‘keynote’ address by Tom Wolfe, which he would subsequently expand into his captious polemic From Bauhaus to Our House. The second was the alarming passivity of the audience, which either didn’t realise that it was being collectively insulted or was, by then, so inured to deprecations of architecture that it could not stir itself to respond by, say, walking out.

The third was the sartorial dreariness of that almost entirely male audience, which was almost entirely dressed in the drab suits of high street tailoring. Was I in the presence of some sect that worshipped at John Collier – ‘the window to watch’ – or at Hepworths, or Burtons? No, this was architecture’s rank and file. And although it may be foolish to judge by appearances it is even more foolish not to judge by them. A familiar and reassuring figure of my childhood and adolescence had vanished: the flamboyantly bow-tied, floppy-haired chap with deafening tweeds and yellow socks. (Actually, I’m not sure if they all wore yellow socks, but a friend of my father did.)

That generation of architects – now dead, and by the time of that grim conference mostly on the point of retirement – dressed as though to express their self-proclaimed status as artists. Or aspirant artists. Or, at the very least, as arty folk. By 1979, however, architects had come to think of themselves as technicians, as members of a profession, as businessmen. An architect with the temerity to regard himself as an artist was by then a laughable and immodest dinosaur. That is the way it has, for the most part, remained these past twenty-five years. Twenty-five years that have thus been atypical in the history of architectural endeavour; twenty-five years that will, with luck, come to be seen as a strange hiatus.

At a typically lavish bash to launch his tectonic bildungsroman Place, Sir Terry Farrell made a speech that was quite the opposite of that which one might expect on so convivial an occasion. It was bereft of jocular niceties. Instead it was an impressively passionate call for a reassessment of the way architecture is taught and, just as important, of whom it is taught to. Now, this was not a matter of pedagogic hair-splitting. Farrell’s incontestable contention is that architecture’s self-image – abetted by the skeletal purity of much current work – is increasingly that of a branch of civil engineering. His argument, based on his experience as an astonishingly precocious painter of neo-romantic landscapes, illustrator, pasticheur and photographer, is that a background in the visual arts is of incomparable value to the future architect. The corollary is that the current emphasis on mathematics and physics is misplaced, though hardly surprising given the mistrust of art unless it is ‘practical’ or ‘vocational’. The qualifications demanded for entry to architectural courses are, simply, wrong. And schools are complicit: they discourage pupils who are not strong in maths in the belief that this is the primary gift required. Which would no doubt interest, inter alia, Michelangelo (sculptor), Inigo Jones (stage designer), Sir John Vanbrugh (playwright), Sir Edwin Lutyens (doodler), Le Corbusier (painter/sculptor), Pancho Guedes (sculptor and the only member of this list to be a ‘qualified’ architect).

These people have changed the way we think of buildings. They have done so through that combination of imagination, memory, intuition, risk, bloody-mindedness, whimsy, obsession, practicality and craft that we deem art. And which obeys its own rules – that are unquantifiable, and so impervious to bureaucratic scrutiny and professional control. In the mid-nineteenth century, opponents of architecture’s being granted the status of ‘profession’, such as Norman Shaw, foresaw the problems posed by attempts to regulate an art as if it were a discipline like the law. There is today an obvious irony in the insistence on irrelevant educational qualifications. For there has never been a better moment to be innumerate yet to conceal that failing and render it utterly irrelevant.

(2005)

fuck e**lish *erit*ge

The two Mast Houses just within the Victory Gate of Portsmouth Dockyard are raised above the water on piloti. They are structures of remarkable grace, clinker-built, painted the palest green. They are vast, as they needed to be. Their survival in an industrial site devoted for a century to the servicing of mastless vessels is a matter for celebration. The use to which the more southerly is put is a matter for obloquy: the Mary Rose Shop is a repository of tawdry, insipid tat. It’s the sort of stuff to make me wince – a dismal, timid inventory of mediocrity. Bad taste is forgivable. It’s no taste which is so disheartening.

Mr Tudor Rat is ‘a soft toy, very cuddly, and fun to have around’. (Watch the kiddies’ buboes grow. Contract Weil’s disease.) ‘A rich burgundy leather fan-shaped jewellery box inspired by the detail on the central boss from a Mary Rose gun shield.’ A Henry VIII ‘collectors’ thimble. A ‘Collectable Mary Rose Henry Bear’. ‘Henry VIII and Elizabeth I pots. Take off their heads and store your treasures.’ Mary Rose tea towel. Mary Rose coasters. Mary Rose cups. Mary Rose paperweights. Tudor Rose cross-stitch kit – comprises scissor keep, needle case, spectacle case. ‘Glossy gusseted carrier bag with rope handles.’ Jewellery ‘inspired by the collection of Anne Boleyn’. The mug punter surveying this dross is treated to pyped musicke from distante tymes.

Now this crock of olde shyte might be deservedly ignored were it not for its enjoyment of the imprimatur of English Heritage. This preposterous quango – composed, apparently, of the blind and the bland – has the temerity to oppose, say, Renzo Piano’s London Bridge Tower yet sanctions the debasement of marine archaeology, naval history and the magnificent dockyard itself by encouraging the sale of crass souvenirs which are no doubt ‘accessible’. It is all too evident what sort of England English Heritage wishes to preserve (or create): an England fit for beige cardigans and Country Casuals, an England that is ancient, deferential and dreary.

Directly across the road from the Mast Houses stands a fine, hangar-like storehouse completed on the eve of the Second World War. It is threatened with demolition and English Heritage will not recommend that it be listed.

That’s bad enough. Its arrogantly negligent attitude towards the nearby Tricorn Centre is far worse. The Tricorn is a building of national importance, but English Heritage has again indulged its preening antiquarian prejudice. You know the mindset: if it’s Georgian it must be good, if it is of the ’60s it’s not merely expendable but unworthy of consideration. The Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) is, mercifully, equally parti pris but on the other side of the fence and may yet still save it.

There is no surer means of pandering to philistine populism and currying favour in middle England than by uttering the words ‘concrete monstrosity of the ’60s’. The proposition that all copies of The Naked Lunch should be burnt and every print of Rocky Mountain and Tired Indian should be shredded is unthinkable, the stuff of yesterday’s dystopian nightmares. But buildings contemporary with those works are regarded as acceptable targets.

We properly despise the mid-twentieth century’s destruction of Victorian buildings (also ‘monstrosities’) and the late twentieth century’s destruction of art deco buildings (‘vulgar’). We know better now.

No, we don’t. Apart from being of the ’60s and of supremely sculptural concrete, Rodney Gordon and Owen Luder’s Tricorn Centre is also a (former) shopping centre. Which further relegates it: buildings are subject to a taxonomy of use that disregards their aesthetic worth and determines whether they will be listed. A temple is deemed to be a higher form of building than a temple of commerce even if that temple of commerce is the most thrilling brutalist work to have been made in Britain.

The Tricorn’s detractors – and they are many – presumably have no objection to Portsmouth’s latest shopping mall, Gunwharf Quays. This is a place that is offensive precisely because it dreads giving offence. It is architecture as frozen apology for itself. Its meekness is mitigated only by the Spinnaker Tower, a ‘millennium project’ which is showing signs of dereliction even though it is nowhere near complete. I concur with the waggish suggestion that the city would have been better represented by a 150-metre-tall OMO packet: if you don’t get the allusion read Pompey.

In the depths of the mall itself you might be anywhere. There are outlets and factory shops selling, presumably, last season’s styles or seconds though that doesn’t quite explain what the contents of a Cadbury’s factory shop might comprise and I didn’t have the stomach to investigate. Alongside these are a carousel, a pork and bap stall, the usual chains and a branch of Gieves & Hawkes, a tailor which had a long presence on The Hard in Portsmouth in its capacity as a naval outfitter. This branch is predominantly civilian. Aspirant tars can get their togs at a fascinating shop called Baum in Queen Street: the tropical kit includes Northampton bench-made white canvas shoes at a bargain price.

I didn’t experience the tropical microclimate of Gunwharf Quays because I was freezing most of the time I was in Portsmouth. Still, it must exist.

Everyone between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five wears clothes that suggest a heatwave. This is not occasioned solely by a desire for display – or so a Novocastrian tells me. The mindered clubs and bars which youth frequents are apparently so hot that the very minimum of garments is required. On Saturday nights queues stand in line and shiver as the Spithead Bite whips up off the water. Towns on keels slip past in the night. Gosport twinkles enticingly. (No one has ever written that before.) The harbour lights shine like jewelled fruit gums. They’re gaudy, much too gaudy: I think I know a body that can sort that out, dim them so that they cause no displeasure to the fastidious English eye. Vessels may collide.

(2004)

amateur

When John Vanbrugh, soldier, spy, herald and playwright, re­invented himself as John Vanbrugh, opportunist architect to the nobility, Jonathan Swift guyed him as ‘Vitruvius the second’ and wrote cattily: ‘Van’s genius without Thought or Lecture/ Is hugely turn’d to architecture.’

These mocking observations were, presumably, prompted by Swift’s suspicions about dabblers – though both Christopher Wren, astronomer, and Inigo Jones, stage designer, might equally, at the out­set of their architectural careers, have been charged with untutored tyroism. But their œuvre was already made when Swift pronounced. He had no means of anticipating that Vanbrugh’s magnificently sullen works would ascend to even greater heights.

The architectural amateur has existed in many guises, most notably as folly builder, but he – and it invariably is a he – has existed with decreasing frequency since the trade or craft was dignified as a profession in the mid-nineteenth century. That elevation to the status of conspiracy against the laity has militated against the professional employment of even the most enthusiastic hobbyists. They have thus been restricted to designing for themselves.

The 1st Earl of Lovelace had the fortune to inherit both a country house and the entire village of East Horsley outside Dorking where, during the 1850s and ’60s, he was able to practise his coarsely picturesque art with prodigal abandon. Amateurs are, typically, more restricted: building is, after all, a costly enterprise. Le Facteur Cheval’s Palais idéal in the Drôme, François Michaud’s sculpturally adorned houses in the Creuse and Lucien Favreau’s borderline demented bungalow in the Charente are the products of lifelong obsession, hyperbolic essays in naive or outsider art, bricolage pursued to its crazed end.

In the early 1930s the painter Meredith Frampton designed the one building of his life, a house for himself on the West Wiltshire Downs, a French-influenced curiosity with a mansard roof and oeil-de-boeuf windows. One might have said that it was, in England, sui generis, had not it echoed the one building that the painter and critic Roger Fry designed, a decade and a half earlier: again, a house for himself, on the edge of Guildford. Neither, evidently, pays any heed to professional architectural fashion. Nor does the writer Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s house in Sussex – a William and Maryish conceit constructed at the height of the Gothic revival.

The amateur is in these instances his own client. Patron and architect are one. If there is a single quality that defines amateurism it is bloody-minded whimsy.

I have excited the wrath of a former fashion designer called Wayne Hemingway by suggesting that his employment as an architectural consultant to Wimpey on a housing scheme in Gateshead is a ploy to lend that volume builder a dash of daring. If Wimpey and its peers really want to improve their product, I went on, there are people whom it might be an idea to commission: they are called architects.

Shaw omitted to add that professions are conspiracies against other professions, as well as against the laity. This truism is tiresomely, repetitively, demonstrated by the construction industry’s factionalism and territorialism. The mutual loathing of builders, architects, quantity surveyors and civil engineers is an endless entertainment: the letters column of Building magazine is a morass of recriminatory spite and pitiful whines.

It is unsurprising, then, that Wimpey should enlist an enthusiastic amateur with a name and without, yet, the ballast of interdisciplinary prejudice. Wayne’s bells-bulls-balls namesake once averred that ‘it is a man’s prerogative to change his mind’. What has caused me to change mine, to a degree, is not having this ex-clothie describe me as ‘out of touch’ (ouch!) but, rather, enjoying the opportunity to peruse his Gateshead project – albeit in miniature, at a RIBA exhibition, Coming Homes – without his mediation of it.

His whining, self-pitying, nagging Lancastrian exegeses on telly, in print and in numerous hard-hitting interviews – ‘Wayne, can you transfer your incomparable genius for patch pockets to defensible space?’ – have occluded the qualities which he has brought to the project. Which may not be those Wimpey bargained for. These qualities are not those of the old-fashioned amateur – whimsy is notable by its absence.

They are, rather, the qualities of the old trad professional, of the almost extinct genus of architect who thought first about the purposes of a home and its immediate environs and designed it accordingly. Yet Wayne affects to berate the shibboleth of form following function. Of all the projects displayed his is the most conservatively modernist, the most rooted in the humane modesty of the post-war new towns: this is where volume builders have got to.

But . . . If only . . . There are so many modern (as opposed to modernist) ideas and prototypes kicking around, seeking more than parochial commissions and not finding them. Modular prefabrication; properly maintained high-rises; ‘mobile’ homes which take advantage of the lax planning regulations which govern those strivingly twee coffins for the living with leaded lights, dimple glass and pitched roofs but which have been sleekly reworked with an orthogonal eye.

Britain is blessed with professional architects who can achieve something beyond another Stevenage. Nothing stands in their way save crass politicians, educationally subnormal planners and moderately talented amateurs seductively ushering them back into the recent past.

(2002)

mammarial

At first glance – and you are here glancing from high across the Arno, where the roads twist through naves of stone pines above the Piazzale Michelangelo – the Duomo appears to be straightforward synecdoche, an architecturally applied instance of the literary conceit where a part stands for the whole. Much of the rest of the structure is obfuscated – by other buildings, by the thick breath of half a million tourists, by the exhalations of half a million cars – but the dome is unextinguishable. It is the cathedral. It stands, too, incidentally, for the city of Florence.

This first glance, this first paragraph, is entirely misleading, ab­solutely wrong. The word, duomo, does not signify an inflated cupola, or any other vaguely hemispherical structure on top of a building. It derives from the Latin domus – a house (whence domestic, whence domicile, whence, presumably, Domestos), and it means, specific­ally, god’s house. Or one of god’s houses – god is famously over-housed. The Italian god may be housed down the road at Sienna, say, in a striped cathedral without a dome, with only a campanile tower reach­ing towards heaven – this house is still a duomo. So is Milan Cathedral, of which the word was first used: Milan Cathedral is the only major gothic cathedral in Italy and even the Victorians at their most promiscuously eclectic failed to top off Gothic buildings with domes.

The point is that the word carried a sacred connotation before it carried a geometrical one. It described a holy space before that space was defined by the characteristic form signified in French by dôme and in English by dome – a usage which is less than 350 years old, which is contemporary, then, with the earliest appearances of the dome in English building, in the form of lanterns on houses derived from Netherlandish models. But these were slight affairs.

The first and greatest of the few major English domes is that of St Paul’s, which is evidently a sacred building – though it wasn’t evident to me at the age of six when I first witnessed it in its sooty sublimity; I couldn’t understand how it could be a cathedral, for cathedrals had spires like Salisbury’s, and pointed arches. Even to an infant’s eye, it obviously wasn’t a musty repository of ancient mysteries and incomprehensible superstitions: the fearsome, jealous, tyrannical wrath-monger called god couldn’t possibly live here. St Paul’s was worldly. Even though I didn’t yet know the word worldly, I could discern the building’s swagger and urbanity and temporal grace. But for all those qualities, St Paul’s is a church. It is a monument to unreason – even if the particular brand of unreason is tempered and Protestant rather than high-tar and Catholic. Its precursors are, of course, exclusively Catholic: the baroque was a Catholic idiom. It was the tectonic propaganda of the counter-reformation.

And the dome was the paramount part of the baroque’s kit. Wren’s baroque may not be agitated classicism in a distorting mirror and it may be ornamentally chaste, may indeed be infected by sobriety, by a certain coolness and compromise and level-headedness, but the fact remains that London’s supreme building wears Roman (and French) clothes which have been only marginally toned down.

This should please the Christian Bomber Blair, whose fondness for Rome is well known. The Millennium Dome will inevitably be presented to the world as a technological marvel, a fantastic oppor­tunity showcasing all that’s wonderful about something or other . . . ad nauseam, ad vomitum. But even Blair probably has enough Italian to know what duomo means – and Richard Rogers, who is half Italian, certainly has. The Dome, the Dome, the Dome at Greenwich, the Dome that all sentient people are bored to the teeth with, is a covertly religious building. It is the First Church of New Britain and its dedication is to St Toni Scrounger.

Anything with a spire on it would have been too self-proclaiming. But what a spire means in England and in northern Europe is what a dome means in the southern half of the continent: they’ll get on-message down there. They’ll understand in Zaragoza and Turin that it’s the Saviour-of-Europe’s first Grand Projet.

Is there just the one message to be got? Is the dome as a form so bound to its sacred past that it cannot escape the meaning that institutionalised superstition has dumped on it? If it has difficulty escaping that burden, it is because its most singular quality is its aptitude for abeyance. There is no other comparable architectural device which is so prone to flit in and out of the common gamut: there was the Pantheon, Rome; then there was Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; then . . . well, save Innuits’ igloos and Puglians’ trulli, there was nothing – there was a few centuries’ hiatus when, because mankind had forgotten its technology, the dome disappeared from the mainstream until Brunelleschi set to work in Florence.

The Renaissance prompted a habit in western culture of perpetual subsequent renaissances, of serial revisits. A style, a manner, a subject may have been dead for 3,000, 300, 30, 3 years before it is exhumed, re-displayed, re-invented – the only certainty is that it will happen, one day. Nothing ever goes away for ever. Reincarnation is the norm. Yet the dome appears only fitfully.

Given that copyism comes all too easily to architects, it might have been expected that after St Paul’s domes would enjoy a vogue. But Wren’s own domes at Greenwich Hospital, Vanbrugh’s at Castle Howard, Hawksmoor’s mausoleum in the grounds of that house, Archer’s pavilion at Wrest Park and Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera don’t make a summer. And, anyway, the (more or less) baroque in general was short-lived in these islands.

Despite its baroque associations, the early Palladians didn’t entirely abjure the dome – witness Chiswick House, witness Mereworth (actually, don’t bother – the grounds are guarded as zealously as those of an Ian Fleming villain). Later in the century the makers of picturesque landscapes appreciated the eye-catching properties of domed temples, domed churches, domed mausoleums (Stourhead, Nuneham Courtney, Hawkstone, Brocklesby, etc.). It can be persuasively argued that follies have a secondary function beyond that of occasioning delight and adding accents to a landscape: they are also working models, stylistic exercises, try-outs for idioms that may subsequently be employed for utile structures.

Thus began the Greek revival. And sham castles proved so popular that milord and milady wanted to live in one. But once again the dome failed to make the leap. Sure, both S. P. Cockerell’s Sezincote and Nash’s Brighton Pavilion, the two great late-Georgian essays in the Hindoo style, do possess domes of a sort. But these are buildings which never really get beyond the state of follydom. They exist in an exotic cul-de-sac. And while their authors, and such contemporaries as Soane and James Wyatt, did design other domes, they are invariably peripheral to the main composition. They are the punctuation marks, not the text.

And so it was throughout most of the nineteenth century: it wasn’t that domes were structurally inhibiting – successive technologies were making them ever easier to achieve in ever greater spans – but that they were aesthetically disregarded. University College, London; the old Bedlam, now the Imperial War Museum; Haileybury College; the wretchedly feeble National Gallery – they look as though their archi­tects hoped that their domes wouldn’t be noticed. The Albert Hall, the largest domed building of the century in Britain, is more than 200 metres in circumference and possessed of a wonderfully impressive interior – but from without, its dome is so shallow as to be unnoticeable.

It is a matter of some regret to devotees of high Victorian perversity that none of the really wild men who flourished between the mid-’50s and the mid-’70s – Teulon, Pilkington, Lamb, etc. – brought his exhilarating insensitivity to bear on domed structures. For what might have been, one has to look to Piedmont and to the apparently certifiable work of Alessandro Antonelli at Turin and Novara: this frighteningly bizarre architect shared his English contemporaries’ impatience with notions of beauty, harmony, proportion and so on. He went for energy, clashing masses, terrible shrieks, hyperbolic geometry. His domes are piled on top of teetering drums; they are stretched so that the soothing roundness of the mammarial form is distorted like the exhausted teat of a veteran wet nurse; their ugliness beggars belief.

In England from the mid-1890s, more than 200 years after St Paul’s was begun, Wren’s example was at last followed. There had been isolated outbreaks of baroque in the ’50s: Wellington College, Leeds Town Hall, the immediate surrounds of Victoria Station – all of them enthusiastically francophile, which is odd, given the dedication of the first. But then all things architecturally French were at the height of fashion at the very moment when the paranoiac Palmerston was building fortresses to keep that nation’s armies out.

The baroque revival which extended well into Edward’s reign was, with rare exceptions, based on English precept – which meant that there wasn’t that much to base it on. There are many more baroque buildings of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than there are of the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth. And countless among them sport domes: the combination of red brick, grey stone dressings and green oxidised domes is ubiquitous. There is a dome beneath Justice on the Old Bailey which has the temerity to stand round the corner from St Paul’s; there is a deep dome on Methodist Central Hall and there are several shallow ones on Westminster Cathedral; there are domes in Cardiff and Lancaster and Delhi and Belfast and Pretoria and Edinburgh and Calcutta, and there would have been a dome in Liverpool had Lutyens’s Catholic cathedral not been interrupted by war, then ignominiously abandoned in favour of Paddy’s Wigwam.

Actually there are domes in Liverpool, on the Mersey Docks Building at Pier Head. The dome was evidently no longer confined to sacred buildings, nor even to buildings such as courts, governmental offices, town halls and so on which are required to fulfil a representational or symbolic function. Domes had become commonplace, if not quite common: they were attached to stores, public libraries, theatres, billiard halls, mansion flats.

Indeed, by the time they went out of fashion in the years immediately preceding the First World War, they had acquired an almost frivolous etiquette. And after that war, just about their only manifestation was on the caramel faience of Lex garages which sprung straight out of Dulac’s or Pogany’s mildly oriental illustrations in the first age of mass motoring, when touring at forty miles an hour was an adventure rather than a chore and the buildings associated with it were suitably escapist.

When an architectural form becomes as ubiquitous as the dome did in England in the first decade of this century, its versatility and tendency to crop up in the most unexpected places means that, for the duration of its popularity, it carries no particular associational significance – it can mean anything: temperance, hedonism, bellicosity, mercantile vanity and so on. Retrospectively, of course, we forget the billiard halls and the kursaals. We think of imperial splendour, Britannic might.

That is what Edwardian baroque domes speak of a century on: when we race past the Ashton Memorial beside the M6 on the way to the Lakes, we do not, despite the structure’s size and bombastic exhortation, remember the noble dynasty of linoleum barons it commemorates. We’re more likely to reflect in a generalised way on the risible confidence of the epoch it belongs to, on the almost touching hubris it displays and on our terrible knowledge of what came next. A knowledge which, quite unjustly, vitiates mighty domes, turns them into cheap rhetorical gestures. That’s hindsight for you.

After the war, the English dome duly went into another long hibernation. Architectural fashion had swung towards timid gentility, towards the straitened respectability of Quality Street Georgian and the cosmetic reassurances of the mock-Tudor. Grand domed gestures were for the Belgians: Liège has two examples of the domed expressionist church, and the northern Brussels skyline is dominated by the unloved and hilarious basilica at Koekelberg.

The grandest domed gesture was that of Hitler’s poodle Albert Speer, whose Reichshalle would have been the largest dome in the world, more than twice the height of St Paul’s: Speer possessed an infantile faith in superlatives and an indefatigable appetite for bigness. He believed that a building’s merit was in direct proportion to its vastness. Had he been homosexual, he’d have been a size queen.

With such a history of patronage by the church, by the British empire, by the Third Reich and by Harrods, it is hardly astonishing that the post-Second World War modernist establishment in England considered the dome off limits, reckoned it a form unworthy of consideration. And it wasn’t condemned simply by cultural and political association, but by its intrinsic property – a dome is curved, it doesn’t belong to rectilinear geometry, and that geometry was paramount throughout the third quarter of this century. The only acceptable dome had been the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain – which wasn’t really a festival of Britain but of (mostly) imported Scandinavian tics, and the dome wasn’t really a dome at all, but a Dutch cap. The most spectacular proposed English dome of that era, Pier Luigi Nervi’s for the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, was never built.

Now this dome, The Dome, the First Church of New Britain, is also a bit of an IUD, but it improbably derives from the Festival of (old) Britain. It belongs to a different tradition. During the years of the straight line’s global hegemony, there were always oddballs knocking about non-orthogonal notions: some, like Bruce Goff, even built, prolifically. Buckminster Fuller didn’t. But that has hardly lessened his fame and his influence. Still, the trick as an architect is to get the thing commissioned, to turn it from perfection on paper into flawed actuality. The first great Rogers building, the Beaubourg, could not have existed without the wheezes and manifestos and drawings of the Archigram group. But the members of that group are distinguished by seldom having got anything off the ground, certainly nothing on the scale of the Beaubourg. They have been more energetic, however, about reminding the world of the Beaubourg’s debt to their projected Fun Palace.

The Dome bears a kindred debt to Fuller’s techno-utopian models. The difference is that ‘Buckie’ (it’s the fate of the ‘guru’ to incite the familiarity of his followers) is not around to bitch about where the idea came from. Does the fact that the inspiration for this cable-net tent is, let us say, more than borrowed necessarily make it the work of a great artist? The syllogistic corollary to T. S. Eliot’s questionable dictum is that the more derivative a work, the greater its begetter.

At first glance – and you are here glancing from among the sugar refineries at Silvertown, from the heights of Honor Oak, from across allotments near Maze Hill – the Dome is magnificent and otherworldly. It might be fresh in from Sizewell or Sellafield, if not from the planet Tharg. And it will remain magnificent. On a telly programme with the only unindoctrinated Labour MP, Bob Marshall-Andrews, at the beginning of last year, I suggested that the only thing to do with it was to leave it empty because that volume of enclosed space was potentially uplifting. David Hockney came up with the same idea a few months later – so they do steal, these mature artists: that’s the proof, Eliot was right. It doesn’t really matter, of course, that the Dome will initially be used to propagate the cult of the Islington messiah. It really doesn’t matter what it’s filled with – good jokes, like Ron Mueck’s fifteen-foot-tall representation of a constipated, squatting William Hague, or meretricious junk selected by committee.

Politicians come and go – some sooner than others. And as for the meretricious junk – who now remembers what was actually exhibited at the Great Exhibition? No one. But we all know what the Crystal Palace looked like and we all rue the night of 30 November 1936.

(1999)

the absentee landlord

God is, of course, a human construct, an invention, a fiction, an irrational absurdity. But it’s an absurdity which is perpetual, immortal, protean; an absurdity whose existence it is absurd to deny because God is omnipresent, God is in believers’ minds or souls or hearts or wherever it is they know he is. This is a fantastically successful invention. If ever an idea had legs; this one has run and run and is still full of puff.

God has been doted on since man – in his bewildered ignorance and reverential wonder – conceived the notion that all of this, all of us, must have been made by something else, something bigger, by an omniscient grease monkey who fitted the parts together. And who now services them in return for songs, sacrifices, oblations, genuflection – but who visits plagues, earthquakes, typhoons, famines, buboes and hideous skin conditions on those who fail to sing to him, who neglect to thank him.

This is not a sophisticated conceit – which is what accounts for its appeal to hundreds of millions. God is a universal solution. He is the one in whom faith is taken as a mark of earnest, of moral probity, etc, rather than as evidence of delusion or a symptom of insanity.

Churches – the buildings – cannot be denied. And whether one regards the conceit that they are built to glory as tosh or transcendentally sublime, it is indisputable that they are efficacious propagators of the faith. And the fetishes they contain – the cross, the stations of the cross, the host, the representations of the son in glass and the mother in stone and of light’s vanquishing of darkness – all concentrate the beguiled mind and the fiction called the soul.

The idea of the church in England was self-evidently till very recently inextricably bound to the Church of England, the Church of Convenience founded to sanction a king’s polygamous lubricity and his Bluebeard appetites. Its moral basis may be infirm but its architectural basis was as strong as the rock which is Peter’s name. It annexed an incomparable store of parish churches, abbey churches, minsters, cathedrals, the bulk of which are in the several and overlapping pointed arch idioms that are lumped together as Gothic.

Ask a child to draw a church and it is a rudimentarily Gothic church that will be ideogrammed: here’s the church and here’s the steeple, look inside and see the people. That is what a church looks like. It looks Gothic. The nave houses the congregation (if there is one) and the steeple or spire points to the sky, which is where god lives in climatic insouciance wearing funny clothes and a beard which obfuscates his irate face. He lives there in defiance of gravity, which is a post-god discovery.

Even in the century-and-a-half’s hiatus between the Restoration and the Regency, when classicism in its various mutations and perversions was absolutely predominant, the church did not abandon the Gothic. The Gothic, after all, was its trademark, its logo. It built classical and baroque structures and then proceeded to give them Gothic silhouettes. It added vertical emphasis in the form of spires. It created architectural mongrelism in the service of self-advertisement. It was more concerned to maintain the continuity of easy recognition than to adhere to classical tenets. A church had to point to God.

After that hiatus, after the years of the Gothic survival, came the years of the Gothic revival. The orgy of church building which characterised Victoria’s reign re-created the Middle Ages before her subjects’ eyes. God had excelled in the Middle Ages, the Gothic centuries. That had been god’s moment, and here he was again, he was back and dominant after the enlightenment. God is a goth, which is not to make some frivolous link between the idea and Black Sabbath, but to suggest that the appetite for the sort of belief which is dignified by the word God is most wholly fuelled by the Gothic.

The Gothic is conducive to pious irreason. The Gothic revival was founded as much in a pseudo-morality as it was in an aesthetic preference. It fixed for all time – that is, till the present day – the association between a particular architecture and the church. And it fixes the church in the dark ages and in the decor of fear. The Gothic is often crazed, often suggestive of architectural psychosis. It complements and heightens the mysteries, the terror, the morbidity of the passion. It never lets us forget that Christianity is a death cult.

And the Gothic is an agent of de-secularisation, it is an architectural means of achieving sacredness. It made schools, law courts and railway stations into quasi-religious buildings which were thus invested with added authority: we thanked God for selective education, for the wisdom of judges, for making the trains run on time.

Atheism, unlike Christianity, possesses no architectural type or decorative style which is peculiar to it. It has no need – there is nothing to represent or celebrate. Only a void can stand for a void. Atheists do not worship. Atheistic genuflection is connected to shoelaces or sex.

Still, had atheists built they could have built at no more propitious a moment than during the middle years of this century, when nearly all architecture had broken with western Christian precedent, when architecture was so ideologically determined that it was itself a cult or religion. Atheists, quite properly, didn’t build. But the church, amazingly, did.

The Gothic hegemony had lasted almost a century. It extended into the 1930s. Between then and the outbreak of the Second World War a number of churches were built that dispensed with the revivalism of, say, Giles Gilbert Scott’s Liverpool (Anglican) Cathedral, but not with Scott altogether. The example of Scott’s first design for Battersea power station is evoked in N. F. Cachemaille-Day’s work: his buildings are sacred cinemas. They derive, too, from northern German expressionism and from Albi Cathedral, which strikes the unwary as an Odeon avant la lettre.

But Cachemaille-Day’s work is atypical. His churches were merely swallows. Summer had to wait till after the Second World War, after the Holocaust. If the Holocaust didn’t extinguish faith in god, nothing ever will. How could faith persist and the church build in the wake of that enormity? Easily, is the answer. Concern about the culmination of 1,945 years of Christian anti-Semitism was not the church’s priority. The true purpose and instinct of the church, as of every other institution and organism, is to perpetuate itself. The church exists to create its future, to demonstrate through its buildings and utterances that it is a pedagogic force, a moral force, a cultural force, that it is relevant, that it belongs to today. It is, consequently, acutely fashion-conscious.

The first post-war architectural fashion was that which we now associate with the Festival of Britain, the festival of borrowing from Scandinavia. The Festival style was whimsical, airy, short-lived. Post-war Britain was poor. Building was licensed. And by the time licences were revoked the Festival style was out of fashion. Parish churches usually still are poor. They are forced into a conservationist stance. Thus they are valuable repositories of forgotten crazes and half-baked ephemera which have elsewhere been excised or amended. There can be few examples of the Festival style, and of the early ’50s spectrum, so complete as Christchurch in the Coventry suburb of Cheylesmore. (The Royal Festival Hall itself was made over in the mid-’60s.) Conventional wisdom has it that compromises produce banality and insipidity. First-generation post-war churches fascinate because they are the products of compromise, not despite that condition. They are gay and trashy and cheap looking. They display a skittish lack of earnest. But then the old fearsome god had proved impotent in the face of systematic atrocity and industrialised annihilation, so perhaps it was time for a revised version, for god the unmighty, for god the ever such a nice bloke, for god the softy, god the timid.

In churches such as St Paul, Lorrimore Square, just south of Elephant and Castle, or St Andrew, Stevenage, we can discern the first steps on the road to the cheery new hell, the hell which isn’t such a bad place after all, the hell which provides its clients – for that’s what they are – with therapy and drop-in facilities before they are adjudged fit to pass on to the next station-stop in that great afterlife of theirs.

The dedications should be to St Cosy and St Cardigan. Anglicanism was getting very chummy indeed. Pulpits were stripped of pomp and, you might think, of authority. They were no longer boxes to thunder from. They were made of parquet and laminates and were apparently designed by G Plan. They might have been expressly wrought to discourage fulmination. St Cosy is a sunny place which prompts no thoughts of death, judgment, heaven, hell. This was the church which was distinguished from other branches of the social services only by the Dave Clark Five collars worn by its operatives.

The church underestimated the appetite for its own product. It misunderstood its unique selling proposition. That appetite has come to be satisfied by fringe cults, nuthouse sects, wobbly temples, worship shacks. The church got it hopelessly wrong. It wasn’t less mumbo-jumbo that its punters craved, but more. For all their stylistic variations, the churches of the ’50s displayed certain invariable mannerisms. The detached campanile, a feature it shared with fire stations, doubled as a spire, a vertical sign – the trademark was no more shunned than it had been in the eighteenth century. And interiors still comprised nave, choir, baptistry and so on.

The compromise was the result of those spaces being rendered in a manner that was admissible to architects who were ill at ease with copyism, but yet lacked the killer instinct to do away with the spatial forms themselves. So the Gothic template was adhered to but Gothic devices were shunned. This was modernism in a corset – which for those who subscribed to the holy church of modernism was no modernism at all. Modernism was extreme, fundamentalist.

A similarly resolute indecision characterises the sacred art of the ’50s and early ’60s. It was all hedged bets. The sitting-on-the-fence school predominated: semi-abstract, sort of representational, trapped in the gap between personal expression and liturgical propriety. When Coventry Cathedral was consecrated in 1962 it enjoyed a popular fame unmatched by any post-war British building with the possible exception of Lloyd’s. It became a place of pilgrimage: queues formed around the rebuilt city centre. Despite the ostensible purpose of the building, it was not holy queues it attracted. It was a symbol of renewal. It was a tardy monument to the qualified victory in the war which had cost Coventry its former cathedral.

There is certainly qualification in Epstein’s sculpture beside the entrance. St Michael, the dedicatee, is above Lucifer – but Lucifer is merely down, not out. He isn’t defeated, merely planning the economic miracle. Cantilevered out from the steps beside this work is a viewing platform. Even before the interior is broached, the pilgrim is invited to behold this phoenix in the form of a radiogram as an art gallery, as Basil Spence’s museum of expressly commissioned work on holy themes. It is a time capsule, rather akin to the collection at the Royal Holloway College that was put together exclusively during the years that that Loire château was being built in Surrey.

Spence created the space and opportunity for artists in several media – incised stone, an apparently basketwork ceiling, Graham Sutherland’s dominant tapestry, a descending flock of coat-hangers in the choir, outsized bobbins posing as candelabra, a faux naïf mural by Steven Sykes, wonderful stained glass by John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens. What, at the time, looked like contrasting styles seems all these years on to be of a piece. It is a collective tour de force, but a pre-modern tour de force. It is the last major church in an 800-year-old tradition. It may be a gallery but it at least pretends to be a cathedral.

The baroque was the propagandist style of the counter-reformation. It dazzled in the service of Rome. It fought protestantism with showiness, cleverness, richness, virtuosity. Four hundred years on, Rome addressed the schism by trying to out-prod the prods. The second Vatican council of the early ’60s responded to the Liturgical Movement – which was by then a century old, and which advocated a return to the forms of worship supposedly used by the early, primitive church. It decreed that all that was not essential (whatever that meant) was to be eliminated from new places of worship and the hierarchical division of clergy from congregation was to be quashed.

Not to be outdone, the Church of Convenience arrived at the same conclusion – they work in mysterious ways, these competing liturgical engineers. Holiness, henceforth, was to be expressed through form rather than through icons. The churches were making liturgical concessions to the architectural ideology of the time – an ideology which anathematised ornament and the western figurative tradition.

This was a prodigiously weird carry-on. It wasn’t merely a case of the churches sleeping with the enemy, but of marriage, impregnation. It was as though the meat trade had commissioned new abattoirs from vegans. It was as though the churches had abandoned Bach and Fauré in favour of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew. What next? Dedications to St Herod the Cleanser and St Judas the Supergrass?

During the years of its cultural and moral centrality, the church was an unparalleled architectural force. It led, it owned the initiative. Now it was cravenly following extreme secular fashion. It was not the patrons but the artists who called the shots. This gave rise to buildings which were exercises in pure form. They were like student projects (i.e. fantasies) which somehow got built. Modernism regarded itself as something more than a mere style. It was a faith. So here was one faith supposedly serving another but in fact grabbing the chance to prove itself a moral and pedagogic force.

This was cuckooism on the grand scale. It was the glorious parasitism of confident art upon wavering religion. Churches started to come in all shapes. There were bunkers and ships. There were churches that looked like silos, churches such as St Andrew, Livingston, in Lothian, whose entrance was hidden, churches with swervy roofs and hyperbolic paraboloid roofs, churches that aped giant ammonites. The faithful must have had to work hard to convince themselves they were attending church at all.

The new language of sanctity was a desperate esperanto. Every church had its own idiom. There was no norm, no consensus. The only rules were that churches were not allowed to resemble churches and that figuration was off limits. Where once everything had had to look like something else, now everything had to look like itself.

Otherwise, ecclesiastical modernism was unconstrained, especially by practical demands. God, like the Queen, doesn’t go to the bathroom. So god’s houses need no bathroom. Johnny Architect was presented with what he had always longed for – carte blanche.

This bewildering licence was just one of a series of own goals which included the New English Bible, the revised prayer order, the vernacular Mass, Honest-to-God, agnostic clergy, vicars with guitars trying and failing to reclaim the best tunes. The attempt to appeal to the modern world by coming into line with the modern world annulled the church’s appeal – which was nothing if not pre-modern. The ascendancy of theatre in the round hadn’t escaped the church’s notice; here was a device which would involve the congregation, a crudely material and literal device which assumes that physical proximity to the celebrant and to the host occasions a greater chance of divine access. Richard Scott’s St Thomas More in the Birmingham suburb of Sheldon is typical of this trait.

Much of the ecclesiastical work of the high modern years prompts awe. But that awe is more likely to be aesthetic rather than religious; it is not different to that which is incited by a grand hangar or concert hall – the potency of a building is quite distinct from its nobility (or baseness) of purpose. Efficacy as a church rather than as an architectural conceit derives as much from a lack of ambiguity as from any specific spatial or iconic devices.

Scott’s bizarre Our Lady Help of Christians in another Birmingham suburb, Tile Cross, may look east to Orissa (or somewhere) and west to Las Vegas, but it is unmistakably a church. It does not share its space with a youth club or a knitting circle. It makes it emphatically clear that it is a single-use building and that that use is holy. Further, it implicitly makes the point that such spaces should not be shared, should not be let out to all-comers with a good cause. The spiritual is separate from the temporal, no matter how worthy the temporal cause may be.

The last of the modern megachurches, Clifton Cathedral, seems embarrassed by its function. Sure, its stations of the cross are coarsely graphic and don’t flinch from the horror of Calvary. But the building would rather be the National Theatre. Its brute, board-marked concrete and jagged discords come straight off the South Bank.

An architecture which proclaimed itself as democratic – which, if it means anything, means that it was mostly made in the service of democratic institutions – is incapable of addressing the problem of a publicly visible hierarchy. The bishop’s throne is pitiful. No pomp. No majesty. No sign that the celibate who occupies it pretends to do so at god’s behest. There is no modern vocabulary to embody such an ancient and anachronistic idea. Abstractions cannot be represented by abstract architecture. Abstractions require figurative metaphors, physical analogues, explanatory devices.

Baptism does not require that sort of intercession because it is an idea which is made visibly manifest. The initiation by water is literal. This superstitious immersion may be a social rite, but it is a social rite which is performed in churches and which swells attendances. Baptisteries are thus the focus of otherwise hardly used churches. They are commensurately richer and more detailed than the buildings which contain them. Baptism will doubtless eventually be performed in specialist lidos, water palaces, geyser centres. This is not an outrageous speculation. It is the only vaguely religious ritual apart from weddings and funerals which is still observed.

Fifty years ago cremation was used to dispose of less than 10 per cent of British bodies. Now that figure is over 75 per cent. Crematoria are the true churches of the late twentieth century. They’re places where the fire is real and not one of hell’s props. They are no more for those suffering egress than baptisteries are for the mewling dunkee. It is the witnesses that these places must address – and in the case of death that means the bereaved, the stricken, the weeping, the disorientated.

This may be dealt with, architecturally, head on – by suggesting the momentous physical change that has afflicted the unknowing protagonist, by suggesting that the body will be swallowed, consumed in the building’s fearful maw, transported to another place. Such in-your-face grief-management may compound the offence caused by the sense of loss. It may heighten the indignity prompted by the funerary production line and by the bathos of the New English patois.

On the southern edge of Edinburgh, at Mortonhall, Basil Spence designed a crematorium chapel which is dignified, grave, earnest, solemn. It is capable of catalysing the illusion of transcendence. It encourages eschatological curiosity. It is almost unique among modern British sacred buildings in displaying a fitness for its purpose.

(1997)

neo-georgian

We do not dress like Milord Foppington or Mister Petulant. We do not eat salmagundi or posset. We do not hurl our faeces into the street. We do not travel in horse-drawn vehicles. We do not write with quills. We do not suffer tooth extractions without anaesthesia. We do not hang rustlers. We do not utter mild oaths like stab me vitals! We can tell the time. We can read. Our water is clean. Our life is long.

Yet the pull of a particular past is apparently so potent that many of us – most notably the very rich – want to replicate it, if only cosmetically. Such people as the banker Robert Gillespie and the interesting entrepreneur Nicholas van Hoogstraten want to live their long life literally immured within a token of the past. Their beau ideal is a neo-Georgian palace in the country. New, yet old. Now, yet then. Centrally heated, yet corniced. Double-glazed, yet sashed. Steel-framed, yet sort of Vanbrughian or sort of Palladian or sort of Adamish.

The aspiration to all this is so commonplace – witness the tens of thousands of lesser neo-Georgian villas – that its sheer dotty oddness passes us by. It’s an oddness which is exacerbated by its straitenedness and its randomness. We’re not talking here about going the whole hog. The thing outside with a wheel at each corner is called a car: its bodywork does not mimic that of a stagecoach. The tiny thing outside with a wheel at each corner is called a Smart car: its bodywork does not mimic that of a Sedan chair. The roaring gleam ascending into cloud is not shaped like a Montgolfier. And inside: a fridge evidently fulfils the same function as an ice house but its form makes no allusion to the fact.

The gamut of objects which we infect with the pretence that they come from another time is limited to furniture, frames, cutlery, chinaware. Domestic objects, all of them. Home is where the past is. Neo-Georgian is an approximate epithet for an approximate school of architecture. The Georgian to which neo- is affixed signifies the long century and a half from the Restoration till the Regency, a period during which domestic building, whether urban or bucolic, enjoyed a harmonious evolution. There existed a broad consensus about the form a house should take. Thus a house of, say, 1826 will manifest its direct descent from one of, say, 1682: kindred proportions, kindred symmetry, kindred reliance on local materials. By the former date, however, the consensus was becoming frail due to the aesthetic lure of the picturesque. And the consensus would soon be entirely ruptured by the ‘moral’ thraldom to medievalism and by the increasing ease with which materials might be moved about the country.

Still, that protracted period of domestic classicism gives its apes a great deal to draw on. But why do they want to draw on it? The positions of client-consumer and architect-supplier are disparate. Which comes first: the client’s whimsical wishfulness and desire to make a ‘statement’, or the eagerness of a small yet hugely self-confident tribe of architects to beat against the current? I have down the years admiringly ‘consumed’ Pope, Swift, Gray, Cowper, Hogg and countless others who wrote when buildings were ‘Georgian’ – but I wouldn’t want to imitate them even if I had the capacity. The very idea is preposterous. So would be that of a current composer who sought to imitate Handel or Haydn. Who, today, sees any point in painting in the style of Gainsborough?

All that any exercise in willed anachronism can capture is mannerism, surface. This is a lesson that has never been wholly learnt by architects (and whoever it is that confects Queen Anne telly cabinets), nor by their clients. It is worth noting Marc Girouard’s observation that the earliest essays in neo-Georgianism were made, in the 1870s, by architectural amateurs: architect and client were one, there was a touch of folly about these first creations. But follies have always been stylistic try-outs, the concept cars of the built environment.

And so the idiom gradually took off professionally and, by the time of Edward VII’s death and the accession of George V it was a recognisable and increasingly loud component of the architectural babel. Not that loud is an appropriate adjective. The appeal of neo-Georgian – I’m guessing – derives from its supposed quietness and modesty, from the presumption that it summons up good taste and Englishness. The facts that the earliest ‘Georgian’ buildings, those which are actually Caroline, are almost wholly Dutch in inspiration, and that subsequent refinements were made in imitation of French, Italian, German and Greek precedents, are happily forgotten in pursuit of the chimera of architectural nationalism.

Its champions will forever make the Jesuitical point that a neo-Georgian RAF mess of 1937 designed by the War Office’s W. Ross is of that year and no other and is no more or less literally modern than a contemporary modern movement building designed by Gropius and Fry. That is an easy paradox with which it is impossible to sympathise.

This is make-believe of the most insipid order; it is wholeheartedly half-hearted, no matter how convinced its begetters are of its probity. The very idiom appears to defeat those who embrace it. Beginning with Lutyens there is an ignominious history of architects who have enfeebled themselves by putting their imagination in abeyance while they played an ancient tune and played it weakly. It is that quality – imaginative bereavement – which characterises neo-Georgianism: good taste means, in this instance, no taste.

(2002)

postmodernism to
ghost-modernism

Modern architecture died on 16.05.1968 in Canning Town. We all know this. An explosion in the kitchen of an eighteenth-floor flat caused part of the recently completed Ronan Point to collapse. According to an age-old tradition, celebrated in music hall song, in east London gelignite (notoriously unstable) is kept in the fridge.

Modern architecture died on 16.03.1972 in St Louis. We all know this. The Federal Department of Housing demolished the sixteen-year-old Pruitt Igoe project, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, author, too, of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Modern architecture died on 16.10.1973 in Kuwait. We all know this. OPEC, greedily vindictive in its animus against Israel’s allies, cut the production of crude oil and raised its price 70 per cent: by early 1974 that price had quadrupled.

Each of these versions, with its fatidic 16th day of the month, has its supporters, DIY pathologists who gleefully proclaimed the absence of signs of life. Calendrical coincidence is not however maintained by 03.05.1979, the day that Margaret Thatcher attained power. She would proceed to drive the final nail into modernism’s coffin by dismantling the economic and cultural apparatus that had supported it. No architectural idiom can survive without the armature of patronage. British modernism was the material emblem of the cross-party, Butskillist, welfarist consensus that had endured since 1945. Indeed, during the period which Labour, at the 1964 election, decried as ‘thirteen years of Tory misrule’, the governments of Churchill, Eden and, especially, Macmillan had sanctioned the construction of an unprecedented volume of social housing. The welfare state was noblesse oblige nationalised and welfarism was la pensée unique, from which French locutions no decent person dared dissent in public. Its monuments served (and proclaimed) the democratisation of tertiary education, the provision of cradle to grave health care and of a decent dwelling, the primacy of high culture, the beneficence of the nation.

With, early on, the exception of a few soon-to-be-culled ‘wets’ (Ian Gilmour, Francis Pym, Mark Carlisle, etc.) Thatcher’s administrations were composed of self-made garagists, by-their-bootstraps mini-tycoons and nabobs of estate agency who exuded an unmistakable whiff of Poujadisme. Had they even heard of it these people were no more sympathetic to the idea of noblesse oblige than they were to the activities of trade unions. Institutionalised philanthropy was not susceptible to the new god of The Market.

Nor, according to the polls, was it what the public sought. The outgoing prime minister, James Callaghan, spoke memorably of a ‘sea-change’, thus revitalising that expression of Shakespeare’s and ensuring that if he is recalled for anything it is for his impotence in the face of electorate’s will; though had he summoned the nation to the polls a few months previously, in the autumn of 1978, he would almost certainly have been returned to office. Would British architecture, consequently, have taken a different course?

Probably not. The exercise of suffrage is curt. The process of architecture is tortuously protracted. The same architects tend to flourish no matter what the regime; it is not a pursuit of the morally fastidious. While political power changes hands overnight, an architectural scheme conceived under one government’s tenure will very likely not come to fruition till its successor is firmly ensconced.

Thus Mrs Thatcher’s accession followed close upon the completion of two architectural landmarks: Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road and the Hillingdon Centre. The former would turn out to be the triumphant culmination of a tradition of inspired social housing, the end of the line. Whereas the Hillingdon Centre, although it too was a public building, and had been planned as long ago as the first oil crisis, might have been commissioned as the bespoke herald of a cultural ‘sea-change’ commensurate with that which had occurred at the ballot.

These civic offices were uncannily predictive. But this was prophecy as apostasy. In the eyes of the modernist establishment, represented by the Architectural Review, the unblemished practice of RMJM and its chief designer, Andrew Derbyshire (b. 1923, author in 1960 of New Zealand House) had committed an act that was ideologically heretical, aesthetically treasonable. Hillingdon was not even akin to the decorative, mannered, late-modernism of, say, Richard Seifert (1910–2001) or William Whitfield (b. 1920), which at least paid lip service to the holy orthodoxies.

Here, in the wilds of suburban Middlesex, was a suburban town hall composed, apparently, of several dozen suburban villas and suburban bungalows which had thrown their keys into the centre of the room and which were now conjoined in cosily elephantine abandon. Like any suburban orgy (think South Ruislip) it was more comical than sexy: it broke so many rules and was so wholly divergent from the precepts of canonical modernism that it was revolutionary – in the snuggest, homeliest, most carpet-slippers way. It was the architectural equivalent of Benny Hill or Sid James: coarse, matey, blokeish, undemanding, unthreatening, accessible. Inadvertently and fortuitously, then, just the ticket for a decade when we would be enjoined to get on our bike in search of greed (which, we were governmentally instructed, was a good thing) and to make contact with our inner barrow boy.

Populism is the provision by a prosecco-drinking elite – which far from considering itself elite considers itself subversive – of Lidl own-brand tannic plonk to the masses who, devoid of the elite’s exquisite taste and compendious knowledge, are incapable of appreciating anything better. Anything better would be wasted. Populism is supremely patronising. It is sneeringly presumptuous: the masses are reckoned to be uncultivable, unimprovable, stripped of free will. They are slow-learners or no-learners who are to be held in pens of perpetual infantilism. They can be expected only to respond to what they already know. They are forever condemned to belong to the ignorance community. The proudly vaunting philistinism which has afflicted Britain for three decades found its first architectural expression at Hillingdon.

Here was a building whose components, if not their wacky aggregate, were familiarly banal, instantly recognisable, utterly comprehensible. These properties, in a startling variety of guises, would define the architectural mainstream for years to come. Architecture abandoned the analogues of atonality and twelve-tone serialism in favour of compositions worthy of a tectonic James Last. High seriousness was buried beneath an avalanche of toytown rustication, inverted diocletian windows and distended columns. The modernist hegemony was replaced by a pluralistic dressing-up box. The word ‘irony’, shorn of its literary and rhetorical meanings, was indiscriminately employed to signify smug knowingness and coyly daring playfulness. Jokiness became de rigueur. Just as battalions of unfunny comedians ensure a sycophantic response by laughing at their lame gags before they tell them, so do self-proclaimingly ‘witty’ buildings announce themselves with hyperbolic clashes of scale, a dubious chromatic sensibility, a willed illiteracy, a children’s entertainer’s garrulous importunacy. Grown men – and they were nearly all men – went back to the playground. And to their history books. This was ultimately the architecture of contrition. Architects knew how much they had been despised. They were now eager to please. They were penitents: some equipped with nursery colours and elemental shapes, others with servility and forelock.

The clamorously bruited diminution in state spending during Margaret Thatcher’s administrations was more notional than actual. It was cut by less than 5 per cent. Revenue was excised and books balanced by the privatisation of utilities and by the sale to their tenant of council houses under Michael Heseltine’s 1980 Housing Act. (‘Selling the family silver’ was, actually, Mrs Thatcher’s own wary summation of her predecessor Harold Macmillan’s misgivings. He himself did not use that precise expression, though, having been instrumental in building 300,000 council homes per annum between 1951 and 1963, he might have entertained doing so). These sales – what kind of right is the right to buy? – were effected for the short-term gain of electoral advantage. They were socially calamitous, the more so given the drastic reduction in the creation of new public housing. The private and housing association developments of the 1980s were in signal contrast to both the towering megastructural schemes of the ’60s and the impenetrably dense, labyrinthine low-rise projects of the early ’70s.

Just as the exhilaratingly harsh Gothic monolith of the 1850s and ’60s had been succeeded by the genial warmth of the misnamed Queen Anne revival, so did this new domestic revival conjure up a cosy sense of homeliness. The standard was set by Jeremy Dixon (b. 1939) who, a few years previously, had been co-designer of a regrettably unbuilt, confidently modernist, prismatic glass pyramid for Northamptonshire County Council. Now, in a redbrick purlieu of Notting Dale, he had designed a stylistically disparate but equally startling terrace for a housing association. It was a work of unmistakably reactionary inspiration which drew on a generalised Dutch vernacular and, specifically, on De Stijl. And he had built it on a street, a form of thoroughfare which modernists had scornfully cast aside for it connoted both insanitary Victorian slums and despised interwar suburbia.

One of the besetting problems of British and, indeed, European modernism had been the relationship of the building to its immediate environs. Architects are not necessarily urbanists any more than composers are conductors or playwrights directors. The slavish crazes for tall buildings surrounded by parks and for cluster blocks accessed by novelty walkways, experimental alleys or untested tunnels had created ill-defined, semi-public, vulnerable spaces that were awkward, illegible and threatening: deftly crafted projects such as Whicheloe Macfarlane’s High Kingsdown in Bristol were the exception. The North American ideal of adherence to the building line had been largely rejected. With a revival of such building types as the terrace and the semi, it was inevitable that streets would return, along with curvy ‘closes’ and less accommodating cul-de-sacs.

Dixon’s terrace would prove massively influential. That is to say that its design was sedulously ripped off. Architects’ plagiarism is shamelessly bereft of cunning. The London Docklands Development Corporation, a Heseltine-appointed quango responsible for the redevelopment of the banks of the Thames downriver from the former Pool of London, was statutorily sanctioned to apply but the laxest planning stipulations. Height and area only; ‘aesthetic control’ was forbidden as an illiberal contravention of the market’s power. Thus the LDDC smiled beneficently on meretricious hackery. The area became a sprawling, infrastuctureless showcase for nicked ideas, secondhand wheezes and all the typologies that ever fell off the back of a lorry. It was a neat summation of London itself – a brick and stucco Klondike, ever mutating, ever chaotic, joined up only by chance and proximity. The most accomplished copier of Dixon, other than an entire generation of Dutch architects who relearnt their idiolect from him, was Dixon himself. On the south-eastern perimeter of the Isle of Dogs he created an unusually coherent quarter of even more wholeheartedly Netherlandish semis and neo-Adelaide villas, laid out in crescents and squares, terraces and avenues. In less sure hands this civil, understated urbanism was liable to teeter into insipidity: witness Arup’s Lloyds TSB beside the Floating Harbour in Bristol, a crescentic building partially derived no doubt from that city’s ponderous Council House, and one which is desperate to please by giving absolutely no offence to anyone, anyone at all.

A more usual stratagem for pleasing everyone was to follow the Hillingdon route, to borrow from the past’s discards, to make art out of what had been calumnised as artless – this after all is what Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Andy Warhol, Mel Ramos, Roy Lichtenstein and countless others had been doing for years. But architecture is a tanker that turns torpidly even though its crazes and fads shift with the speed of skirt-lengths: thus many buildings are out of date by the time they are finished; the bigger the building, the longer the construction and the greater the gap. Architecture is also predominantly practised by people who are still reckoned young at the age of forty or fifty: this is the age at which they tend to at last get their chance. The extraordinary flowering of pop music in the ‘60s was achieved by war babies and baby-boomers. The architecture contemporary with that music was the work of their parents’ coevals. The modernist asceticism and straitened purity of these architects were there to be snubbed by filial insolence: one generation reacts against its predecessor. Baby-boomer architects embraced self-conscious impurity, high colour, loud ornament, unashamed facadism, burlesque frippery, (sometimes desperate) jollity, knowing vulgarity and, equally, unknowing vulgarity.

The cleverest and nimblest was Piers Gough (b. 1946), the most inescapable and ostentatious Terry Farrell (b. 1939). Both of them were incorrigible show-offs. Gough once described his work as ‘B-movie architecture’. That merely gets part of it. He certainly displayed a fondness for obscure West Coast architectural subcultures such as Borax and Googie, garish idioms which provided the décor, even set the mood of countless films noirs and saturated Technicolor melodramas. But Gough was nothing if not catholic in what he stole and from where: Viennese jugendstil, Regency gewgaws (he was brought up in Brighton), Home Counties arts and crafts, nautical motifs, the Belgian seaside, arterial road Metroland, officers’ mess neo-Georgian, Wrenaissance, Edwardian free style, the Amsterdam school. And so on: any source that was marginally tainted or not quite respectable. Gough’s invention was boundless. His method often appears to have been that of collage: stylistically disparate and temporally diverse components are juxtaposed. They elide. They collide. At his best – The Circle and China Wharf near Tower Bridge, the de Baroness shopping centre in Breda, Cascades in Docklands, the Black Lion development in Brighton – he has created, and continues to create, buildings that remain attached to the retina, images that carry an ineradicable emotional charge.

Terry Farrell’s unmistakable work of the ’80s and early ’90s is vast, hefty, glaring, squat, brooding. London’s skyline may not be altered but its ground level most surely has been. Like Gough and Dixon, Farrell had looked back, but to less definable topoi and eras, to unknowable generalised sites stored in his architectural back-brain, big sites, of course. Unlike them (and most American post-modernists) he was unmoved by the picturesque, by sweetness and light. His lumbering set pieces respond in kind to the modernism he had briefly embraced at the start of his career, behemoth to behemoth. They have the scope and ambition of megastructures if not their style. Alban Gate bestrides London Wall with brutalist confidence. Embankment Place is not at Charing Cross, it is Charing Cross; it derives from some dream of North American heavy engineering. The laughably un-secret MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross is a brutal temple to necessary surveillance. It is formidable, overwhelming, undeniably powerful. Farrell embraced the cult of sullen ugliness with the gusto of such high Victorians as Pilkington and Teulon. He too possessed the drive and muscular vitality known then as ‘Go!’.

No former modernist was more penitently opportunistic than James Stirling (1926–92). In the late ’50s and ’60s he had enjoyed, among his fellows, an unrivalled reputation. Among those unfortunate enough not to be architects, among mere lay persons exposed to his buildings’ manifold peculiarities, he was rather less fêted. His constructivist Leicester University engineering building was faintly praised by Anthony Burgess as ‘. . . functional. We can . . . admire [it] without being moved’. This was mild damnation in comparison with the rebukes that became routinely vituperative. Calls were made for the demolition of his history library at Cambridge within a couple of years of its completion. The Florey Building at Queen’s College, Oxford, fared little better. His buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases. By the end of the ’60s Stirling had become a by-word for extravagant failure. Throughout most of the ’70s he taught. When he returned to the actual practice of architecture he had, though he of course denied it, trans­formed himself into a fully fledged postmodernist – it was akin to witnessing a man in late middle age dancing to the latest hits. His Neue Staatsgalerie at Stuttgart mixed Schinkel’s classicism, fairground forms, wavy glazing, massive masonry (which, daftly, was considered rashly akin to Albert Speer’s), brash colours, bunker-like voids. Its exceptional incoherence did not prevent his career taking off again. A science centre in Berlin followed: it was as if de Chirico, another artist who famously lost his way, had devised a cylindrical cassata, baby blue and baby pink. He received commissions from Harvard and Cornell. At last, after than more than a decade, he was welcomed back to Britain; at least he was welcomed by the burgeoning and sycophantic architectural media which didn’t even entertain the idea that its esteem of him – and his esteem of himself – was inflated out of all proportion to his achievement. Charles Jencks, the taxonomically inclined cheerleader for postmodernism, described the Clore Gallery as ‘the greatest game of contextualism played to date . . . An architecture for all seasons’. The ostensible purpose of this extension to the Tate was to house the gallery’s collection of works by J. M. W. Turner. The building manages the improbable double of being both trite and overweening. Its reception by those who were not groupies, not parti pris was, quite properly, unanimously hostile.

 

Marina Vaizey These fun colours are not fun; they are shocking in the wrong sense. They are vulgar. The most subtle colourist in British art is defiantly shouted down.

Gavin Stamp An architect is showing off at the expense of England’s greatest painter.

John McEwan A well-upholstered bomb shelter.

Richard Cork The entire scheme had been conceived as Stirling’s work of art, rather than as the most fitting vessel for Turner’s long-abused bequest to the nation.

 

And so on.

Stirling died prematurely during a routine operation in 1992. His last building, No. 1 Poultry, in the City of London, was not completed till six years later. By which time it looked not only oafish but hopelessly retardataire. Fashion had changed. Architecture, no matter how much architects deny it, is in absolute thrall to fashion.

Postmodernism was, however, far from exhausted. While the epithet itself may have been buried some time between Black Wednesday and New Labour’s machtergreifung, the retrospective process that it signified has continued to flourish as the architectural norm. Instead of looking back to the Belle Epoque, or to primitive classicism, or to Tudor palaces (the bizarre Richmond House in Whitehall) or to Wurlitzers (Barclay’s Bank in Lombard Street) or to Anton Furst’s Gotham City in Batman (the ‘gothic’ Minster Court in Mincing Lane) or to the Beaux Arts (Canary Wharf), architecture has, for the past decade and a half, contented itself with energetically recycling the modern movement in its many guises. Most – but certainly not all – of modernism’s stylistic history has been plundered while the (possibly chimerical) ethical apparatus attached to it has been cast aside as an irrelevance. The quotes and allusions and citations and ‘homages’ which characterised ’70s and ’80s postmodernism are just as commonplace today, save that they tend to be occluded, they are deployed discreetly. They have been synthesised. Synthetic modernism or neo-modernism or IKEA modernism (Owen Hatherley) or CABE-ism (Rory Olcayto) is as revivalist, as ‘historicist’ as neo-Georgian or the old English style or the baroque of 1900–1910. But unlike these idioms it is loath to admit it: it adopts the pose of the ‘modern Gothic’ of the 1860s which disclaimed medieval precedent. It pretends to originality. And its omnipotent, ubiquitous global practitioners possess both a PR machine and – hardly different – a deferentially anilingual architectural press to support their vain pretensions.

The volume and influence of that press increased with the advent in 1983 of Blueprint, a cleverly positioned glossy newspaper which sought to make architecture attractive to a public which the worthy, rather ingrown Architectural Review and the cultist, jargon-splattered AD could not reach. If architecture was for the people then magazines about architecture ought to be for the people. Further publications appeared: Wallpaper, Icon, Frame, etc. They were not perhaps the most strenuously critical of journals. The national press, too, had begun to pay attention. The broadsheets, as they then were, having largely neglected the subject save to report social catastrophes and crumbling concrete, appointed architectural correspondents, starstruck panderers who sucked up to and repeatedly eulogised the same big names – whom they themselves had helped to create as big names by sucking up to them in a vortex of mutual dependence. These people were seldom inclined to challenge the claims of the globetrotting heroes whose vehicles and aircraft they had been privileged to travel in.

In the late 1970s Philip Johnson (1906–2005), the wizened Talleyrand of New York architecture, then in his Chippendale phase, described his former pupil, the future Baron Foster of Thames Bank (b. 1935), as ‘the last modern architect’. Good try. But wrong. Norman Foster was, rather, the first neo-modern architect. Or, anyway, the first neo-modern architect to get the timing right. It never does to be too far ahead of the game. It was the (literally card-carrying) communist Douglas Stephen (1923–1992) who had in 1965 been the earliest British architect to return to the forms of early modernism, when he adopted the rationalist idiom of the Lombardian fascist Giuseppe Terragni for a development of private flats on Campden Hill in Kensington which retains a delightfully baffling timelessness. Stephen’s marvellous David Murray John Tower (1975) in Swindon also looked back, to a 1920s platonic ideal of a tall building. It’s like the realisation of an unmade project glanced in a magazine – a far from uncommon instance of fiction made architectural fact, of ‘paper architecture’ given three-dimensional life. Foster’s Willis Faber Dumas building in Ipswich (1975) struck those who insouciantly came upon it as some unrecorded prodigy of the 1930s, specifically as an unknown work by Owen Williams (significantly an architect-engineer) whose black vitrolite Daily Express plant in Manchester Foster must have known as a child. Douglas Stephen went on to design a few largely unsung buildings in London.

Norman Foster (and his 1,400-strong practice under its succession of names plus a brigade of civil engineers in the small print) went on to design many of the most dotingly lauded and slaveringly mediated structures in the world. Foster belongs to a small cadre of masters of the architectural universe who dump lumps of prestigious tectonite with promiscuous abandon. He is globally prolific, globally honoured. Astana, Barcelona, Berlin, Bordeaux, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Millau, New York, Nîmes, Rotterdam, Singapore . . . And Cosham, Finnieston, Gateshead, Norwich, Swindon, Woking. Whether they are orthogonal or geometrically delinquent or blobbily biomorphic his work is characterised by sleekness, precision and jewel-like elegance. It is often glacially beautiful. These are machines for working in, for studying in, for creating in, for shopping in. And for living in – for living a life that’s tidy, costive, ordered, rational, fosterian. His buildings may be emotionally affectless, heartless, but they are exemplary. They process and condition their users as though they are revenants from the age of architectural determinism; although they are made for vast corporations and questionable dictators they retain a dilute utopianism, the hint of a will to improve the race.

Foster and his fellow milord, his partner of long ago Richard Rogers, are, due to the media’s and the curatocracy’s adhesive pairing, as inseparably conjoined in the collective conscious as Chang and Eng. Foster’s neo-modernism had its provenance in buildings made before he was born, and in the moral modernism of Pelican books, and in Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare strip in The Eagle (whose oldest reader he must have been) and in the early, Sarasota period, oeuvre of his (and Rogers’s) Yale teacher Paul Rudolph. In contrast, Rogers’s and Renzo Piano’s competition-winning scheme for the Beaubourg looked back only a decade to the sometimes fantastical, ‘unbuildable’ paper architecture of the Archigram group, to Cedric Price’s proposed Fun Palace for Joan Littlewood and to the forms if not the materials of Paul Rudolph’s design for Yale Architecture School.

A telly documentary which followed Price and some members of Archigram to the newly completed Beaubourg marvellously captures those originators’ mix of pride, resentment and amused astonishment at the barefaced chutzpah of Rogers and Piano, both of whom would also make the stratospheric leap to become global attractions, big pulls, the people to call in when, in defiance of economic discretion, gestural engineering and landmark beacons and iconic icons and 3-D logos and lighthouse rebrands and vision hubcaps and regenerative torches are required to bolster megalopolitan vanities. Chipping Camden gets a bus shelter by Calatrava, Chipping Norton responds with a stocks by Gehry.

Global architecture is trophy architecture, underwritten by base tribal primitivism, corporate one-upmanship, nationalistic boastful­ness. It was always thus – the height of medieval spires, the vastness of fortresses, the lavishness of palaces. The clock may be digital but it has been turned back. Architecture is once again for show and swank, mere building is once again for utility and shelter. This is the historic norm. The years of philanthropic welfarism were abnormal.

Unlike Foster, Rogers and Piano have been little imitated, no doubt because they share an unpredictability which is rare at this level of architecture, whose practitioners repetitively stick to a jealously forged ‘signature’ that renders them bankable, reliable, recognisable – Gehry, Liebeskind, Calatrava, et al. Rogers’s Lloyds building(s) in the City of London, the law courts in Bordeaux and Antwerp, the Hesperia hotel in Barcelona and the Beaubourg are entirely different from each other. What they have in common is that they are among the most viscerally thrilling structures of the past 50 years; his boorish Knightsbridge flats for oligarchs and petro-midases and his Millennium Dome are not. Piano has given London both the unmissable Shard and possible proof of daltonism at Central St Giles.

A multi-teated amputee reptile with a prothesis: forty years after the heyday of Archigram its founder member Peter Cook (b. 1936) demonstrated, in collaboration with Colin Fournier (b. 1944), that he retained that group’s power to astonish with yesterday’s novelty. The work in question was a civic art gallery, in the Austrian city of Graz. Future Systems had existed for a decade and a half before it received, in 1995, the commission to build the media centre at Lords, a chunk of 1960s product design immeasurably magnified. David Chipperfield’s most significant projects are in Spain, Germany and China. Will Alsop built the startling offices of Bouches-du-Rhone, department 13, at Marseille and a large ferry terminal beside the Elbe at Hamburg-Altona before he secured commissions in Britain. The Olympics Aquatic Centre is Zaha Hadid’s first major building to be completed in the country where she has lived and practised for almost two thirds of her life.

After he had completed the Beaubourg Richard Rogers was so short of work, so broke, that he considered moving to America to teach. So it goes on. It is impossible to deny the received idea of Britain’s tawdry, risk-averse unwillingness to take a chance on ‘new’ talent. Especially given the generalised refusal to acknowledge that there is actually nothing remotely new or audacious about the notion of the avant-garde, particularly when it tends to feed predominantly on the avant-garde of many decades ago, merely saucing the dish with sustainastic, sustainabulous splashes of green piety and chromatic discord. And given that London is the most cosmopolitan, most polyglot city in Europe – the home of the lingua franca where the lingua franca is seldom heard – it is odd that there should exist, alongside its resistance to architecturally indigenous daring, an equal disregard of foreign architects. Piano, Legorreta, Nouvel and Herzog de Meuron are rare exceptions.

The mainstream of British architecture over the past decade and a half is notable for its blandness. Because the media, in any field, thrives on the atypical, and represents the atypical as typical, that which is actually quotidian, ubiquitous and commonplace is overlooked, save when its physical dimensions plead for attention. Synthetic modernism is merely a stage of postmodernism, it offends only by its cringing fear of offending. There is something of Uriah Heep about the mood and tenor of the monuments that New Labour, its PFIs and its quangos bequeathed to Britain. The most bellicose prime minister of the last 150 years and his slimey mates were mere inheritors of the long-planned Falkirk Wheel and Jubilee Line stations which opened under their questionable tenure: these, anyway, like the Millau viaduct were essentially works of civil engineering decorated by architects. What was more commonly built under that corrupt regime was block upon block of ‘luxury’ flats which pleaded to be liked – in the early, needy manner of the Christian Bomber Blair. Block upon block – in London’s Docklands and on Salford Quays, beside the Clyde, at Cardiff Bay, Ocean Village and Brindleyplace, everywhere – was decorated with strips of oiled wood, terracotta-coloured tiles, translucent bricks, riveted Corten, titanium scales, random fenestration. But mostly it was just glass and funny angles. The gamut of devices was straitened.

The one idiom from the modernist past that was not exhumed was brutalism. It was presumed, no doubt, to be liable to scare the people. It was all too likely, as one its practitioners, Owen Luder (b. 1928), put it, to say: ‘Sod you.’ Luder and his designer, Rodney Gordon (1933–2008), could only watch from the sidelines as their masterful exercises in the sublimity of sculptural concrete were demolished to make way for an architecture of cosmetic vacuity and feeble consensus. An architecture which was all but official, governmentally ordained. This was the architectural monoculture sanctioned by CABE, the jobs-for-the-boys quango whose middle-of-the-road attachment to synthetic modernism and avoidance of controversy left little space for the two extremes.

The one extreme represented by the ‘new urbanism’, by the Prince of Wales (b. 1948) and Quinlan Terry (b. 1937), a classicist whose devotion to pastiche is almost as fervid as Norman Foster’s. The other by the genuinely modern rather than the ‘modern’: i.e. that which is novel, which has not been done before, which does not obey rules evolved by an extant culture, which exhibits properties that are, perforce, yet unknown, which returns primacy to the imaginative artist and removes it from the people, the consulted community, who know only what they have already seen, what already exists. It is the role of the artist to produce what does not already exist and to exorcise the persistent ghost of the day before yesterday’s architecture.

It is not difficult to surmise which of these two extremes is more likely to have flourished when the architecture of Coalition Government by Trustocrats is assessed and exhibited, here, some years hence.

(2012)

[SCRIPT #3]

VICTORIA DIED IN 1901 AND IS STILL ALIVE TODAY (2001)

 

PART ONE

TITLES. HEAVY RAIN. ARTIFICIAL-LOOKING, LAID ON POST-PRODUCTION.

CAMERA TRACKS IN TOWARDS A WALL COVERED IN TATTERED VICTORIAN POSTERS. IT TILTS ACROSS THEM SLOWLY. PANS UP AND DOWN. THEY SHINE IN THE RAIN, THEY ARE TORN TO REVEAL OLDER POSTERS BENEATH THEM. THEY ALL RELATE TO DRUGS, MADNESS, RELIGION: ADVERTS FOR PROPRIETARY BRANDS OF LAUDANUM AND PAREGORIC, EXHORTATIONS TO REPENT, THE WAGES OF SIN, MADAME GLEET, THE DOLLYMOP’S GIFT TO SIR JOHN THOMAS, BEWARE FRENCH PRACTICES, BEDLAMITES, ETC. EVENTUALLY THE CAMERA COMES TO REST ON: ‘GOD, POX, LAUDANUM’ THEN IT TRACKS HORIZONTALLY ON TO: ‘VICTORIA DIED IN 1901 AND IS STILL ALIVE TODAY’. . . CREDITS. RAIN RUNS DOWN FURTHER POSTERS FOR THE CREDITS. CAMERA TRACKS AND PANS TO FIND ‘WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY JONATHAN MEADES’. A RED BUS MOVES ACROSS FRAME OBFUSCATING POSTERS. JAMES SMITH UMBRELLA SHOP, NEW OXFORD STREET. HEAVY RAIN. A RED BUS MOVES R. TO L. TO REVEAL FRONTAGE. JM ON EDGE OF FRAME

Our Queen and Empress, Victoria Regina, is supposed to have departed this earth a hundred years ago, to have slipped away to be reunited with her beloved Albert and his cock ring.

Can we be sure of this?

It feels as though she is all around us. The dead, of course, are always with us: our friends, our parents, live in our personal memory, the famous (and the infamous) live in the collective memory.

FAMILY PHOTOS IN FRAMES – OF APES, ANCESTOR PORTRAITS

But Victoria inhabits a further space. She is so much with us that we don’t notice her. We take her for granted.

VICTORIA STATION, ROAD, PUB, PARK, SPONGE, PLUM TREE, VICTORIA CHIP SHOP

We take trains from Victoria. We walk down Victoria. We drink in Victoria. We eat Victoria. We climb Victoria.

PALL MALL CLUBS, LAW COURTS STRAND, BURSLEM TOWN HALL

Our institutions are Victorian.

Our traditions are Victorian – indeed the very idea of tradition is Victorian.

Our sense of nationhood, of our relation to the state is Victorian.

Our cities are the cities which her protracted age bequeathed us.

TOWER BRIDGE

Our shorthand for London is Victorian.

JM LOOKS UP, HOLDS OUT HAND TO FEEL RAIN

Still reigning. Still reigning after all these years.

JM WALKS OUT OF FRAME. VICTORIA (CHRISTOPHER BIGGINS) EXITS SHOP AND PUTS UP UMBRELLA SO THAT FACE IS OBSCURED. WAVES TO HAIL MODERN TAXI CAB. CAB STOPS. SOUND OF HOOVES AND CABMAN’S ‘WHOA!’ SIMULTANEOUS WITH HER APPEARANCE: ELO ‘RAIN RAIN RAIN’. CAMERA FOLLOWS CAB, PANNING WITH IT. VOICE OFF:

My god – him too! Quick!

CAMERA PANS BACK IN A BLUR TO SHOW ELVIS PRESLEY COMING OUT OF SHOP WITH UMBRELLA, AS MANY BOXES OF BURGERS AS HE CAN CARRY

They are always with us.

STATUES OF VICTORIA: WIPE FROM ONE TO THE NEXT. N END OF BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE (NEARBY: CITY OF LONDON SCHOOL AND TEMPLE), 15 CARLTON HOUSE TERRACE, FLEET STREET NEAR LAW COURTS, GLASGOW GREEN FOUNTAIN, ETC.

When the present queen succeeded to the throne in 1952, children of the post-war baby boom were optimistically styled New Elizabethans. It was an epithet that didn’t stick.

In contrast – by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 Victoria’s subjects had begun to refer to themselves as Victorians and to the multitude of things that surrounded them as Victorian.

She became a noun, an adjective . . .

VICTORIA STATUE IN WINCHESTER CASTLE – THIS IS THE MOST FANTASTICAL AND GROTESQUE OF ALL STATUES OF HER (BY ALFRED GILBERT)

. . . an icon and, apparently, a malevolent toad.

These appropriations of her name by a people and an age may or may not have been deferential. The point is that such coinages were made.

TRACKING SHOTS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TERRACES AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY TERRACES. THEY WIPE INTO EACH OTHER. QUEEN ANN’S GATE. COWLEY ROAD, CAMBERWELL, EDINBURGH NEW TOWN, REGENTS PARK, HIGHBURY FIELDS, PARAGON, BLACKHEATH

Victoria’s succession coincided with the dissipation of an architectural consensus which had existed for 150 years. From soon after the Restoration to soon after the Regency there was a unanimity about what buildings should look like. A house of the 1830s spoke, so to speak, the same language that a house of the 1680s had. The idea was that a terrace should appear as a unity.

TRACKING SHOTS OF VICTORIAN TERRACES: THE GARDENS SE22, NIGHTINGALE LANE SW4, THE CHASE SW4, ONSLOW SQUARE SW7, ETHEL TERRACE, MORNINGSIDE, ETC. SHOW IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. KELMORE GROVE, OAKHURST GROVE, SE22

During the six decades of Victoria’s reign the notion of the terrace as one grand construction was gradually thrown out. And so was any attempt at consensus. Individuality was all. There was perpetual revolution. Or, rather, revolutions.

IN FRONT OF FACTORY GATES

There was the Industrial revolution – continued.

JM IS OBLITERATED BY PUFF OF SMOKE AND SOOT. COBBLED STREET – JM PTC SOOTY FACE

There was social revolution.

JM IS OBLITERATED BY MOB OF CARDBOARD CUTOUTS WHO RUSH IN FROM ONE SIDE AND TRAMPLE HIM. COBBLED STREET. JM PTC AS HE PICKS HIMSELF UP

There was political revolution.

JM OBLITERATED AGAIN BY MOB RUSHING IN FROM OTHER SIDE WITH FLAGS. LEGS AND FEET IN FRONT OF HEDGE: JM’S AND MAN, WOMAN, CHILD AND PIG IN MUDDY COUNTRY CLOTHES AND BOOTS

There was demographic revolution.

BUCOLIC VOICE:

This the way up Lunnun then?

JM:

It is indeed. That’s a fine specimen – should fetch a fair price . . . and you’ll doubtless get a few bob for the pig too.

HURSTPIERPOINT, WEST SUSSEX. HEAVILY ARMED CAMOUFLAGED CLERGY SINGING ‘ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS’. THEY PASS JM

There was religious revolution.

PARODY OF WARHOL’S MAO WITH VICTORIA AS SUBJECT – THE ENTIRE SCREEN IS FILLED WITH MULTIPLE VICTORIAS AS IN THE MAO SILKSCREENS

There was cultural revolution.

Victorians wanted to start from zero. They selfconsciously defined themselves as belonging to a new age. They thought of themselves as new. They belonged to new social classes.

MONTAGE OF VICTORIAN INVENTIONS. LIFT ASCENDING. NEW THINGS SHOVED IN AT EACH FLOOR BY UNSEEN HANDS. JM AMIDST THEM. CLOCKS TICKING. NOISE OF STEAM

They were surrounded by new things.

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, OXFORD. JM WEARING APE MASK

They were subjected to new thoughts.

ST PANCRAS INTERIOR. JM IN RABBIT MASK WITH WOMAN AND TEN CHILDREN IN RABBIT MASKS

They bred new people at an extraordinary rate.

CAMERA TILTS DOWN TO SHOW DEAD RABBITS (REAL ONES) ON FLOOR.

There were stillbirths, however.

SUBTITLE: ‘FEWER THAN SIXTY ANIMALS WERE INJURED IN THE MAKING OF THIS FILM’. MONTAGE OF:

a) PECKFORTON CASTLE, CHESHIRE

They built new buildings. Victorian architects fretted publicly about the need to create a distinct and specific Victorian architecture, an architecture fit for their age.

But the architecture fit for their age had also been fit for other ages.

Their new buildings were also old buildings.

They belong to the centrally heated Middle Ages.

b) ST PANCRAS

They belong to the age of steam and chivalry.

c) LANCING COLLEGE CHAPEL, W SUSSEX

They belong to the age of gross superstition and applied science.

d) KINGSWOOD HOUSE, DULWICH, WITH BULL TETHERED OUTSIDE AND GIANT JAR OF BOVRIL

. . . to the age of battlements and Bovril

e) GLASGOW – GREEK REVIVAL CHURCH: WELLINGTON CHURCH, UNIVERSITY AVENUE; NEAR NAKED BOYS DRESSED IN GREEK LOINCLOTHS HOLDING LYRES, AND HEAVY PETTING ON STEPS

They belong to the age of gaslight and ancient Greece.

They all belong to the age of Victoria.

f) MEMORIAL HALL, 14 ALBERT SQUARE, MANCHESTER

Which was also the age of Venice . . .

g) HARRINGTON GARDENS, SW7. DUTCH WOMAN IN VERMEER/VAN EYCK DRESS APPEARS FROM DOOR:

Schpliff? You want good schpliff?

. . . and of Vermeer

h) ENTRANCE OF WANDSWORTH PRISON

. . . and Vanbrugh.

TEMPLETONS, GLASGOW GREEN

It’s as though not content with colonising half the globe Britain wanted also to colonise the past – its own past and everyone else’s past too. It coveted time as well as space. Anything seemed possible in that first glorious moment when all the old certainties dissolved.

Britain in the nineteenth century was land of the future as the USA was in the twentieth century, but its buildings are three-dimensional oxymorons.

ST FRIDESWIDE, NOTLEY ROAD OSNEY, OXFORD

The might and potency of Victorian architecture derive from this preposterous desire to be in two places at once, in two centuries at once, and from the tension between these two irreconcilable goals – which were pursued with absolute conviction, absolute irreason.

This was dressing up for real – if you pretend to be something for long enough you become it. This was serious fantasy contaminating primary reality, usurping primary reality. This was the manifestation of a pathology.

JM GOES OUT OF DOOR

Nothing was done whimsically. When Alice Liddell carved this door she did it in absolute earnest – just as Lewis Carroll wrote in absolute earnest.

ST PANCRAS INTERIOR. JM RETURNS AS WHITE RABBIT: OFF-WHITE RABBIT WITH MYXOMATOSIS AND NICOTINE-STAINED TEETH, A NASTY COUGH AND WHEEZE, RUBS CROTCH PERSISTENTLY. HOLDS TIN OF LAUDANUM MARKED ‘DRUGS’

What you lurking about here for then, my babas?

DRINKS FROM TIN

Fancy a tipple any of you?

OFFERS TIN

Ooh I couldn’t half do with a spot of executive relief – I don’t suppose . . .

CUT TO JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: CHORUS OF WHITE RABBIT LOOPED – ‘FEED YOUR HEAD, FEED YOUR HEAD’

ALTON CASTLE, STAFFS (SHOT FROM LODGE INITIALLY, THEN CLOSE BY), CHEADLE CHURCH, STAFFS

The Victorians didn’t borrow from the past. They stole. They grave-robbed.

Not, they claimed, for aesthetic reasons. Not because it looked good. But because it would do them good. For spiritual reasons: supposedly. They deluded themselves just as feng shui’s pitiful adherents delude themselves today.

Augustus Pugin was the catholic architect and propagandist who made what should be acknowledged as a great English invention. He understood that his essentially philistine compatriots were loath to be appealed to on aesthetic grounds.

So he devised what might be called The Pietistic Excuse or The Mask of Righteousness:

It is not, he realised, sufficient to tell the English: I design this way with pointed arches and tracery because I happen to like the geometry . . . No, I design this way because pointed arches are holier than round ones and spires will take us closer to god than round arches and domes will. Aesthetic preference has to be disguised as moral and sectarian necessity.

PETERSHAM HOTEL, NIGHTINGALE LANE, RICHMOND. CAR PARK. RED VW WITH PRIEST IN DOG COLLAR. WHITE Citroën WITH SEEDY WHITE RABBIT. FRONT ON TO CAMERA. CAMERA TRACKS FROM VW TO Citroën. IN VW PRIEST PLAYS WITH ROSARY. IN Citroën A HEAD BOBS UP AND DOWN ON RABBIT’S LAP

Pugin’s invention is specious – it’s like justifying a preference for red cars over white cars by stating that red cars are decent while white cars are degenerate . . . But you never can tell -

SWIFT WIPE TO KING’S CROSS RED VW KERB-CRAWLING BESIDE WAIF ON PAVEMENT. JM IN DOG COLLAR LEANING FROM WINDOW. PixelATE FACE AND REGISTRATION NUMBER

Hey little boy – d’you wanna make a bargain?

Come for a ride in my Volkswagen?

I am forty-four and you are only ten,

But I’m the kind of man that likes you little men.

LANGFORD PLACE, NW8 – SPIKY, CREEPY GOTHIC HOUSE. NIGHT

An inanimate object such as a car or a building cannot possess moral or immoral properties, for those properties are human and a building is merely a construction of brick, stone, glass, iron and so on.

But humankind can invest a building with such properties. Humankind can infect a building by association, by propaganda, by persuasion. We can say: This looks creepy. This suggests evil. And all because of an over-attenuated gable and a window like a diseased eye.

CAMERA GOES THROUGH WINDOW INTO DARKNESS TO SHOW A DISEASED EYE AND THENCE ON INTO BRAIN. OUTSIDE OPTICIAN IN MACCLESFIELD. JM WEARING OPTICIAN’S TESTING SPECTACLES

Or is there more to it than that? Is there a part of the human brain which decrees that these very shapes are the shapes of perfidy. In which case – why were they so lavishly employed?

KINGSTON CLINIC, EDINBURGH. NIGHT

So far as architecture was concerned reason went to sleep throughout Victoria’s reign. Or maybe reason was put to sleep.

VICTORIA V/O

Sleep tight my little princes . . .

VELVET PILLOW GRIPPED BY VICTORIA’S HANDS – SHE IS GREEN-VEILED: THEY ARE LIKE CLAWS. FILLS FRAME AND COMES OVER CAMERA AS THOUGH SMOTHERING IT. OUT OF THE DARKNESS – A FAINT IMAGE OF A FROCK-COATED MAN SEEN THROUGH THE GAP BETWEEN HEAVY CURTAINS, THIS GAP COVERED BY A MUSLIN CURTAIN. HE IS INITIALLY BENDING FORWARDS AS THOUGH TO SMOTHER CHILDREN, THEN HE SLOWLY STRAIGHTENS HIMSELF WITHOUT TAKING HIS EYES OFF THE UNSEEN CHILDREN. UNEARTHLY SOUND.

JM PTC WEARING VULTURE MASK

Victorian architecture explicitly acknowledges that the human appetite for all that is inexplicable is greater than the appetite for reason.

KEBLE COLLEGE CHAPEL, OXFORD

Like the baroque of the counter-reformation, the Gothic was a weapon. It was an instrument of anti-Enlightenment zeal and of a powerful, reactionary church which preyed on the fears of an uneducated, superstitious populace susceptible to nonsensical ritual and absurd mysteries.

And he certainly does move in mysterious ways: the chapel at Keble was paid for by guano – bird shit.

LOUD SCREECHING OF GULLS. FLASH FRAME OF GULLS ON TIP – THE FRAME IS FILLED BY THEM. CUT BACK TO JM COVERED IN BIRD SHIT

KEBLE COLLEGE, OXFORD

The Gothic was also a means of turning the secular sacred, of contaminating daily life with religion, of making god omnipresent in the most literal way, of rendering holy a place of learning – forever: materials that won’t weather or mellow suggest a yearning for permanence.

MONTAGE OF RAGSTONE CHURCHES – COURTFIELD GARDENS SW5, ONSLOW SQUARE SW7, REDCLIFFE SQUARE SW10, ST BARNABAS, PIMLICO ROAD SW1

At any given period 1 per cent of architects are goats, and 99 per cent are sheep. The majority merely follows fashion irrespective of what the fashion is supposed to represent.

The same goes for fashions in ideology, political thought, religious conviction and, of course, clothes.

What was the bustle if not a device to emphasise the sexual primacy of the buttocks? It was thus an aid to contraception. It promoted anal penetration. And no one, as we all know, ever got up the duff from a meat suppository. But is that how the hundreds of thousands of women who wore them thought of them . . .

ANIMATRONIC BUSTLE WHICH MURMURS ‘BUY ME AND STOP ONE’.

ELVETHAM HALL, HARTLEY WINTNEY, HANTS

Fashions are also occasioned by the means of their production. Things come into being not because they are needed but because the technology exists to create them.

Again – the mania for revivalism and retrospection can be regarded as an extreme, pathological, form of escapism. The quotidian reaction to quotidian experience was to attempt to dress it up, to disguise it – anything to avoid the actuality of the real. It is as though an entire nation was involved in trying to hide something from itself. Architecture’s role was to sweep actuality under the carpet, to euphemise, to lend a literal front of propriety and respectability. Respectability was more than a social nicety, it was a moral imperative.

LOW BACKWARD TRACKING SHOT OF JM’S FEET PEEPING OUT FROM A TABLE CLOTH.

BARCLAY BRUNTSFIELD CHURCH & BRUNTSFIELD LINKS – PEOPLE GOING TO CHURCH ON SUNDAY. JM DRINKING FROM LAUDANUM BOTTLE – SIX-PACK OF RING-PULL CANS WITH LEGEND DRUGS OR LAUDANUM OR L. JM AS MR HYDE AND DR JEKYLL. PTC IN UNISON

‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ may be read as a representation of this ur-Victorian imperative. As a child Stevenson could walk out of the front of his parents’ house into the aggressive rectitude of bourgeois Edinburgh.

Or he could walk out the back into the close where the family’s servants would make extra money by letting the rooms above the stables. They let to mumpers . . .

JM BEGGING ON EDINBURGH STREET – ALBERT MEMORIAL – SITTING IN GRAND ARMCHAIR (HIDDEN CAMERA). JM REFRAIN TO PASSERS BY:

Can ye spare a florin for a cup of tea, Jimmy.

. . . They let to scaldrum dodgers . . .

JM STILL BEGGING, NOW WITH SOILED BANDAGE OVER HEAD AND ONE EYE PATCHED. JM TO PASSERS-BY:

Can ye not see it’s a running sore I got and pox of the head. Spare us a florin for a cup of tea.

. . . They let to bludgers.

JM IN ALLEY. HITS PASSING BUSINESSMAN – GILES GORDON – OVER HEAD WITH SPADE AND TAKES HIS WALLET AND BRIEFCASE. BLOOD EVERYWHERE. JM ADDRESSES UNCONSCIOUS FIGURE:

I gave you a chance to gimme a florin. No prisoners, Jimmy.

SUBTITLE: ‘DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME – BUT IF YOU DO, WEAR A CONDOM’.

MEWS. COUPLES FUCKING. OUTDOORS ORGY. PEOPLE SHOOTING UP, DRINKING, ETC. JM WALKS BETWEEN THEM

Thus the back of the Stevensons’ house was a thieves’ pantry. It was the very obverse of respectable. The opposing worlds existed within yards of each other. The nether world preyed on the visible, official world – which tried to deny its sordid sibling’s existence even though it knew it was everywhere. Sounds familiar?

Here’s Long John Silver or, rather, W. E. Henley, Stevenson’s inspiration for that celebrity pirate:

Madame Life’s a piece in bloom

Death goes dogging everywhere

She’s the tenant of the room

He’s the ruffian on the stair.

ST THOMAS’S HOSPITAL, LONDON SE1. WAIF WITH SYMPTOMS OF THESE DISEASES, PILING UP ON TOP OF EACH OTHER

The ruffian was always on the stair. Death did go dogging everywhere. Victoria’s reign began and ended with smallpox epidemics – and in between cholera and typhus manifested with extreme regularity. There was a protracted outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1850s. Diphtheria, dysentery, encephalitis were all virulent. There was yellow fever, scarlet fever, blue fever, mauve fever – any colour fever. A lot of people were in a lot of pain a lot of the time.

TINY COFFIN – WREATH THROWN ON IT.

ST THOMAS’S HOSPITAL. JM SWIGGING FROM LAUDANUM TIN

Diseases were, of course, blown by malevolent zephyrs, carried on miasmas, vectored by fallen angels, spread by satanic bodies. Or maybe diseases were retribution, god’s wrath.

The utility and modest ornament of hospitals betrays their low status in the architectural hierarchy. And, evidently, the sick’s low status too. The sick are generally powerless and the architectural pecking order was based on power – whether that power be ecclesiastical, mercantile, aristocratic or political . . .

So how did a building display high status and power?

JM MOVES OUT OF FRAME TO REVEAL: PALACE OF WESTMINSTER (PARLIAMENT) ON OTHER SIDE OF RIVER – ZOOM ACROSS WATER

Ostentation mixed with piety always helped. An explicit show of plenty. Plenty of everything. Plenty of size. Plenty of ornament. The primitive conviction that more is more.

INTERIOR OF THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER

And within – the more like a fence’s lair the better.

Which is apt here since governance is a euphemism for legalised theft, for self-sanctioned peculation, for the redistribution of wealth – among cronies.

The material expression of temporal power was doggedly literal. The adoption, so early in the reign, by the architecture of public polity of this robber-baron mentality set an eagerly followed example.

INTERIOR OF CARDIFF CASTLE

At both personal and public levels status was in direct proportion to the energy expended on ensuring that no space was left unfilled, no surface left blank. Status was in direct proportion to the quantity and richness of acquisitions, to the aggregate of things: and there were more things in the world than ever before.

ST PANCRAS INTERIOR. VICTORIA AT PHOTOCOPIER PRINTING OFF SCORES OF PICTURES OF HERSELF: THEY ARE SPEWED OUT (SPEEDED UP SLIGHTLY) AS THEY FALL ON TO FLOOR COVERED BY HERALDIC FLAG

There were more ways of making things. There were more ways of copying an original and making multiples: oleographs, Stevengraphs. There were more people to make them. There were more factories and works to house machines to make anything and everything. Britain mass-produced for the world.

SILHOUETTE OF FIGURE WITH SMALL AXE

Where did the Sioux and the Cheyenne get their tomahawks, scalping for the use of?

FIGURE IS LIT TO REVEAL ROY WOOD IN INDIAN HEAD-DRESS AND WARPAINT WITH TOMAHAWK AND SCALP IN FORM OF A PERMED WIG

They got them from Birmingham

RW – STRONGEST BRUM ACCENT POSSIBLE:

Why don’t thou drop by for a cup of tie and a pow-wow?

GUNNERA AT ELVETHAM, BICTON MONKEY PUZZLES, RHINEFIELD RHODODENDRONS, BIDDULPH, STAFFS

The more you owned and displayed the higher your position in society, and the better and holier your soul – apparently. There was so much that might be possessed. And not merely manufactured things but exotic flora, exotic fauna.

The equation of temporal plenty with godliness was indeed a symptom of a medieval mindset.

EAST HORSLEY TOWERS, SURREY

Perhaps that should be a neo-medieval mindset. No matter how much Victorians might have wanted to live in the fourteenth century, they didn’t. They lived in the nineteenth. A medieval house built in 1861 belongs to that year – not to 1361. The 1361 that 1861 was interested in was a fiction. 1861 wanted 1361 on its own terms. It wanted 1361 to be Victorian, to be the 1361 they’d have created then had they had the good sense to be Victorian.

LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, WEST FRONT. JM SUCKING PixelATED LOLLY IN FRONT

And just as the present was infected by the past, so was the past infected by the present. The past was there to be remade in the Victorians’ image. A medieval cathedral is likely as not an on-site recreation of that cathedral by Victorian restorers. It is a copy of itself mediated by the taste of several hundred years after it was initially built. The west front of Lichfield cathedral, for instance, is a creation of the 1860s. It was medieval in a manner suitable to Trollope’s generation.

BIG BEN: POSTCARDS, MODELS, HP SAUCE BOTTLES – ROW UPON ROW OF THEM

All Britain was being re-branded. Big Ben became one of its logos: it came to stand for London, hub of the Empire, capital of the most powerful nation on Earth. It stood also for the paramountcy of clock time: obey parliament’s clock as you obey parliament’s laws. Until the industrial revolution, sun-up and sun-down had sufficed for the great mass of the populace. Precise horological knowledge had been vouchsafed only to the few. Time had been a luxury item. Factories and railways made it a necessity. A fob watch became a mark of respectability, responsibility.

HIGHBURY – CHURCH AND CLOCK TOWER, THE LATTER IN FOREGROUND

A borough, too, lent itself respectability by the construction of a clock tower. Time-keeping was a civic virtue.

PORT TALBOT STEELWORKS – POSED SHOTS OF BARDS, HARPS, DECLAMATORY SPEECHES IN WELSH, WELSH COSTUMES. JM SHOUTING TO MAKE HIMSELF HEARD

Big Ben was named after Benjamin Hall, the plutocratic Welsh MP who oversaw the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster. For which he was rewarded with a baronetcy. His wife Augusta, Lady Llanover, was equally busy – creating Welshness, a form of Welshness appropriate to the new age. The profits of heavy industry were spent on the construction of a bogus past: myth systems, festivities, rituals, romantic national costume, national songs, national dishes. None of this simply happens. It doesn’t come out of the ether. It has to be created because it is needed: the newer a society, the more obsessed it will be by its supposed roots, by its presumed ancestors, and the more anxious it will be to track them down like a foundling looking for its mother.

LULULAND, BUSHEY, THE FRONT DOOR

The man who created the bardic costumes and thus the image of Welshness was not himself Welsh. He was a German, living in Hertfordshire, in a house designed by an American: he was the painter Hubert von Herkomer and this is all that remains of that house, Lululand, the only English work of the Bostonian H. H. Richardson.

CAMERA MOVES PAST JM THROUGH DOOR INTO THE BRITISH LEGION CLUB BEHIND – PEOPLE PLAYING BINGO, ETC. EXTERIOR CARDIFF CASTLE

The Anglican creators of Welshness did not devise a specifically Welsh architecture. They imported English idioms. There was, of course, a chasmic gap between romantic notions of Welshness and the Welsh themselves . . .

CLASSICAL CHAPELS: MERTHYR TYDFIL, PORT TALBOT, PONTYPRIDD, THE HAYES, CARDIFF

. . . who already had a specifically Welsh architecture, and a specifically Welsh building type – the chapel.

The chapel was the emblem of the real, non-conformist Wales – which was not preoccupied by fancy dress and harps. This Wales embraced the classical survival rather than the Gothic revival.

CASTELL COCH

The Gothic revival in Wales was a form of cultural colonialism. It was the architecture of an immensely wealthy entrepreneurial caste. None of them wealthier than the third Marquess of Bute, a singular patron with a sense of humour. He once employed the notorious paedophile Frederick Rolfe aka Baron Corvo to run a boys’ school.

The greatest beneficiary of his patronage was William Burges.

ROSTRUM: LES TRES RICHES HEURES AND NORTHERN GOTHIC PAINTINGS

Just as classical architects based actual buildings and landscapes on the imaginings of painters such as Claude, so did Burges build actual castles that derived from the idealised illustrations in books of hours and from northern Gothic paintings. Thus were medieval fictions made Victorian fact.

CARDIFF CASTLE

Between them Bute and Burgess suffered religious mania, opium addiction and tertiary syphilis – the trinity of afflictions that made high Victorian architecture glorious. It was religious mania that determined the styles that were acceptable. But it was laudanum and venereally founded madness that determined the manner of their interpretation.

END OF PART ONE

 

HOTEL DU VIN SMOKING ROOM. COMMERCIAL FOR LAUDANUM

WHITE RABBIT

Laudanum – for after shave, after shower, after anything

 

PART TWO

Laudanum is a suspension of opium in alcohol. It was the most widely used drug of the nineteenth century. Victoria herself used it – though late in life cocaine was her tipple of choice.

FLASH FRAME OF VICTORIA ROLLING UP A BANKNOTE WITH HER HEAD ON IT. LINES ON A TABLE

You could buy countless proprietary brands of laudanum in any chemist’s or corner shop without a scrip.

FLASH FRAME OF JM PUSHING SUPERMARKET TROLLEY FULL OF BOTTLES, TAKING MORE OFF SHELVES. PA ANNOUNCEMENT: ‘THERE ARE 25 REWARD POINTS ON A LITRE OF PAYTON’S PAREGORIC THIS WEEK. ENJOY’

It goes without saying that the toleration of such drugs ruined Britain, prevented it from creating the world’s greatest ever empire, prevented it from becoming the most powerful nation on Earth. Today, of course, we‘ve licked all our problems by banning everything.

Cardiff Castle shows us inside Burges’s stoned brain. Inside his diseased brain too – tertiary syphilis presents with hallucinations, delusions, a gamut of retinal disorders including, eventually, blindness – it has that in common with masturbation, which is an effective way of avoiding syphilis. It also prompts a condition in which the arithmetical faculty is impaired.

THE DECOR SEETHES AND TURNS INTO BUBOES, SORES ETC.

There was no cure for the French disease – all diseases get blamed on someone else. And there were at least 80,000 female and 30,000 male prostitutes working in London in the 1860s – many of them children. Who knows how their great-great-great-grandfather made his start in life?

WALLACE MONUMENT NEAR STIRLING. VICTORIA WITH MOP AND BUCKET

OUTSIDE KEEPER’S HOUSE

My great-great-great-grandfather may very well have hawked his brawn in the close behind Stevenson’s house. He may have been a catamite to the manse. He may have gammed sailors in Leith at threepence a time. The age of consent, incidentally, was twelve, in implicit acknowledgment of life’s brevity. In 1870, at a salary of £20 per annum, he became a key player in the North British janitocracy when he was appointed first keeper of this – the Wallace Monument. The monument to bogus Scottishness. And a typically Scottish structure: the crown at the top is a device which originated in England . . . But that should be no surprise.

HARRINGTON GARDENS, LONDON SW7

For tartan is originally Flemish -

DUTCH OUTFIT IN TARTAN INC. CLOGS.

ST PANCRAS INTERIOR

. . . the kilt was invented by a Lancastrian ironmaster.

FRAME WITH VICTORIA KNEELING SO THAT HER HEAD IS BENEATH THE KILT

And haggis is French.

VICTORIA APPEARS FROM BENEATH KILT HOLDING TWO HAGGISES

Victoria who did more than anyone to propagate it all was an English queen with a German husband . . .

So it’s entirely apt that Mel Gibson should be an Australian.

BRAWNY SCOT WALKS INTO FRAME CLUTCHING TELEGRAPH POLE:

Will you no’ toss my caber laddie?

SCOTTISH BARONIAL HOTEL IN POLLOKSHAWS, GLASGOW. KILBRIDE CASTLE

Still, unlike bogus Welshness bogus Scottishness – Walter Scottishness – created a plausible architecture which attempted to validate the romantic fabrications associated with it.

The baronial style was lavish, butch, brutal, mad.

FLASH FRAME OF ROOM ENTIRELY HUNG WITH ANTLERS

It took the Victorian obsession with restless skylines to an extreme. It obviously alluded to the auld alliance – it is often wholly French in inspiration.

BLAIR DRUMMOND NEAR STIRLING

These buildings try to evoke a warrior caste. They may be luxurious, they may be second homes or aggrandised shooting boxes.

FLASH FRAME OF MONARCH OF THE GLEN – PULL BACK TO SHOW JM SHOOTING AT IT. BLOOD EXPLODES FROM IT, NOISES OF EXPIRING STAG

But they dissemble their sybaritism. They put up a convincing show of anticipating or even inciting armed attack.

BLOW-UP OF BRAEMORE HOUSE (DEMOLISHED)/FORTH BRIDGE, LONG LENS. JM IN FRONT OF BLOW-UP. HE IS IN SHARP FOCUS, THE HOUSE BEHIND IS FUZZY SO IT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY APPARENT THAT IT IS A BACKDROP

This is the house of the engineer John Fowler.

JM SLASHES AT THE PHOTO TO REVEAL THE FORTH BRIDGE BEYOND

And this is his greatest work.

Why would the author of this prodigy of cantilevered construction, one of the marvels of Victoria’s reign, elect to live in a house of make-believe?

Well, a bridge was one thing, a gentleman’s house quite another. A bridge was blue-collar. There was as much a structural hierarchy as there was a social hierarchy. The idea that this bridge might ascend the structural hierarchy as John Fowler had ascended the social one was a non-starter: the social hierarchy was a climbing frame. But structures were bound to their position in the hierarchy by their use.

GLASGOW. CENTRAL GRIDIRON BUILDING, CA’ D’ORO

Urban Scotland was defiant of metropolitan English practice. Glasgow, second city of Empire, belongs both architecturally and sentimentally to northern Europe rather than to an English-dominated union. It recalls the Cities of the Baltic and, even, of north America.

NECROPOLIS

During Victoria’s reign it expanded at an exponential rate. Its population increased by 100,000 every ten years.

CO-OP WAREHOUSE, MORRISON STREET, GLASGOW

Glasgow is built on the superhuman scale common to small nations with a point to prove – the silicone enhancement of the nationalistic impulse.

GLASGOW TENEMENTS/FLAT BLOCKS: BALMORAL CRESCENT OFF QUEENS DRIVE; FOTHERINGAY ROAD AND TERREGLES AVENUE; VARIOUS STREETS IN PARTICKHILL (E.G. LAUDERDALE GARDENS) AND IN MARYHILL

It’s tall because its inhabitants learnt, as England’s were unwilling to, that you pay for the privilege of living in a city by living vertically. Glasgow’s Victorian tenements were once as reviled as 1960s tower blocks. But if any sort of building is left unmanaged it will deteriorate, especially if the inhabitants bubble coal gas through milk before drinking it.

JM DOING THIS IN SOME BAR:

Backlands Bree. It really fucks your head.

SUBTITLE: ‘DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME: MILK WHICH ISN’T TRANSFORMED INTO CHEESE CAN BE TOXIC’

CALEDONIA ROAD CHURCH; ST VINCENT; MORAY PLACE; 200 NITHSDALE ROAD;

THE ENTIRE THOMSON OEUVRE . . .

What Glasgow had most of all was Alexander Thomson – Greek Thomson. It is, of course, unlikely that a revenant from ancient Athens would take him for a compatriot.

His work is unique in Britain. And because he was so widely copied, Glasgow itself is unique in Britain. Glasgow is what all British cities would have looked like had ecclesiastical medievalism not spread like a virus through their fabric and had a continuum with the pre-Victorian classical tradition been maintained. Glasgow was the last British city to engage with reason.

Classicism is essentially urban and formal. It embodies civic properties.

Glasgow owes its coherence as a city to the centripetal impetus of its classical suburban buildings: they reach in to the city’s core rather than out to the country around it.

ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH/FOREIGN OFFICE, LONDON SW1

The major division in Victorian architecture is habitually represented as being between classical and Gothic. The fact that George Gilbert Scott designed both St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh and, at Palmerston’s behest and against his wishes, made the Foreign Office classical, demonstrates merely that Scott, a principled propagandist for the secular use of Gothic, possessed a healthy respect for the commercial advantage to be gained by flexibility in those principles.

MORNINGSIDE PARK, EDINBURGH OR STEWART’S MELVILLE SCHOOL, QUEENSFERRY ROAD, EDINBURGH

Architects always have and always will move from one style to another according to a client’s whims and to the demands of professional survival. Frederick Pilkington did the same – though in Pilkington’s case the style was always one of his own invention, his knack was to make buildings which, whatever gamut of devices they employed, always seem on the point of uttering a silent scream.

JM STANDS BESIDE HORSE’S HEAD (FRESH FROM EQUINE ABATTOIR).

ELVETHAM MANOR, HARTLEY WINTNEY, HANTS

The same goes for Samuel Sanders Teulon, whose indifference towards the canons of harmony and proportion perplexed even his most hardened contemporaries. The combination of brutality and apparently wilful perversity that his buildings displayed was known as go!

Go! – a term first applied to horses – came to mean hard-edged, harsh, muscular, polychromatic, endlessly energetic – there is always a lot happening, much of it counter-intuitive. Such architecture begs the question why? Why would anyone design a house like this – and how did they arrive at such a resolution? Teulon, too, suffered tertiary syphilis which may be a clue. Was go! a symptom? Was there a syphilitic school of architecture?

OXFORD NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, THE PARKS

Go! transcends style. It has much more to do with the bloody­mindedness of an individual architect.

Gothic revival buildings can be infected with go!

WELLINGTON COLLEGE

So can baroque ones . . .

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD

And early Victorian ones can . . .

PALACE HOTEL, OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER

. . . and those of the 1890s – by which time the word go! was hopelessly out of fashion. But the quality it signifies has not disappeared. It comes around now and again. It was everywhere in the 1960s, which like the 1860s were also inclined towards sexual abandon.

SPLIT SCREEN: DETAILS OF THE FOLLOWING RATHER THAN WHOLE BUILDINGS

No, the real division in Victorian architecture – in all regions other than Scotland – has nothing to do with style. It is, rather, the division . . .

PRUDENTIAL, HOLBORN/HOLBORN UNION, CLERKENWELL ROAD

between hard and soft . . .

FETTES, EDINBURGH/PORT SUNLIGHT

between artifice and naturalism . . .

ROCKMOUNT CHURCH ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD/PORT SUNLIGHT

between vigour and douceness . . .

WADDESDON MANOR, BUCKS/WADDESDON VILLAGE

between the worldly and the would-be humble . . .

LAMMERBURN, NAPIER ROAD EDINBURGH/COTTAGES OPPOSITE ENTRANCE TO NAPIER UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

between the candidly industrial and the hand-made . . . the apparently hand-made.

MULTIPLE SCREEN: SIX FRAMES SHOWING THE FIRST OF EACH OF THE ABOVE PAIRS (I.E. PRUDENTIAL, FETTES, ETC.)

The two strains existed side by side. But it is the first category, the grandiloquent, the rhetorical, composed of materials which age gracelessly, that we think of as quintessentially Victorian, ur-Victorian.

CRIMEA MEMORIAL AND STATUE OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, WATERLOO PLACE, SW1

The Victorians mythologised themselves. They were hero-worshippers.

PEOPLE KNEELING AS THOUGH AT PRAYER

Florence Nightingale’s lamp which lit her rounds at Scutari was nothing like the one she holds here – but this one links her to Rome, to classical antiquity. And long before Tennyson sought to invest The Charge of the Light Brigade with dignity and nobility, William Russell had begun the sentimental glorification of cannon fodder in his eye-witness report for The Times . . .

READS FROM THAT DAY’S TIMES FRONT:

‘CHRISTIAN BOMBS KOSOVAN TODDLERS’

. . . with a halo of flashing steel above their heads, and with a cheer which was many a noble fellow’s death cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries . . .

This was an eye-witness account. Yet it makes no acknowledgment of the squalor or the humiliation – it’s just euphemism and unwitting mock-heroism. This was another way of sweeping things under the carpet.

WEDGWOOD INSTITUTE, BURSLEM

There was such an appetite for gods that the months of the year were granted figurative form for the improvement of the Potteries.

Before the Wedgwood Institute was finished, one of its designers, John Lockwood Kipling, left to take up a post in Bombay. With him went his wife and, in utero, his son, who would be named after the place of his conception, a lakeside resort a few miles from the Potteries called Rudyard.

Rudyard Kipling embodies all that our era, in its moral superiority and manifest righteousness, finds distasteful about Victorian England. He’s the archetypical DWEM. He transcends such fashions as anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-talent. Has our conscience-stricken government issued an apology for him yet?

CHARTERHOUSE SCHOOL NEAR GODALMING

Almost seventy years after it was written, Kipling’s If. . . was appropriated by Lindsay Anderson as the title of his movie about rebellion in a public school – which was still, in 1968, essentially Victorian: in its mores, its cruelty, its wretched team spirit, its morbidly muscular Christianity and, unmistakably, in its architecture.

These places were part seminary, part tribal initiation, part OCTU. They were intended to instil notions of duty, obedience, valour. To harden the body and the soul. To produce character not cleverness.

It’s heartening how often they failed.

Their ideal product was Newbolt Man, a creature hymned by the risible poet Sir Henry Newbolt:

To honour, while you strike him down,

The foe that comes with fearless eyes . . .

 

Henceforth the school and you are one

And what you are, the race shall be . . .

 

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote:

‘Play up, Play up and Play the game’. . .

Oh the sheer, murderous infantilism of it all . . .

LANCING COLLEGE CHAPEL

The apogee of self-abnegating piety was reached in the schools founded in the 1850s and ’60s by the Rev. Nathaniel Woodard. They were intended for shopkeepers and tradesmen who wished their sons to be turned into Christian gentlemen. These austere schools were emphatically not the grimpons and picks of social alpinism. Keep ‘em humble might have been their motto had they not had a better one – Onward Christian Soldiers.

HURSTPIERPOINT COLLEGE. CLERGY WITH GUNS, GROUND TO AIR LAUNCHERS, HELMETS WITH CAMOUFLAGE BRANCHES AND GRASS TUFTS, A BARBED-WIRE CROSS, SINGING ‘ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS’

This hymn was written by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould who taught at Woodard’s Hurstpierpoint. To take holy orders in the mid-nineteenth century was to enter rather than, as today, to preclude oneself from the mainstream.

Baring-Gould was an energetic and fecund man. He had twelve children: the wife didn’t wear a bustle then. He wrote a hundred books. And he collected and bowdlerised thousands of folk songs.

JM PICKS UP MUSICAL BOX/TANKARD THAT PLAYS ‘WIDDICOMBE FAIR’ SONG AND DANCE NUMBER IN ‘THE YOUNG GENERATION’ STYLE: THE RUSTICS IN ONE-PIECE STRETCH OUTFITS WITH HAYSEED APPLIQUÉ. JM IN FOCUS, BEHIND HIM, SO OUT OF FOCUS THAT IT IS JUST A BLUR, A GREY PANTO HORSE WITH SEVEN YOUNG RUSTICS AND TWO OLDSTERS, ALL OF THEM TRYING TO GET ON IT

Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend I thy grey mare

For us to go to Widdicombe Fair

With Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan’l Widden, Harry Hawk and Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all . . .

If Onward Christian Soldiers and public schools are all High Victorian go!, Widdicombe Fair belongs to the later Victorian reaction against it.

MULTISCREEN OF EXTREME HIGH VICTORIAN EXAMPLES: ROYAL DOULTON’S, LAMBETH HIGH STREET, SE1; MILFORD HALL, SALISBURY; GERRARDS CROSS CHURCH

For twenty-five years from about 1850 the mainstream of architecture was uncompromisingly harsh – it exploited new technologies and it exploited the railways’ capacity to free buildings from a reliance on local materials.

ECCLESTON PADDOCKS, ECCLESTON NEAR CHESTER. DUKE OF KENT SCHOOL, EWHURST, SURREY

Now this sort of architecture did not disappear. Indeed some of the most aberrantly dissonant buildings of the reign belong to its late years . . .

BROMPTON ORATORY; WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL

Pugin turned in his grave when the two most prominent Catholic churches in London were built – Brompton Oratory in the Jesuit- approved style of Vignola . . . and Westminster Cathedral like an import from Byzantium.

STANLEY HALLS, SOUTH NORWOOD

Mr Stanley endowed – and designed – a technical school and a concert hall with the money he had made from the Stanley knife . . .

FLASH FRAME OF TATTOOED SKINHEAD WITH BLEEDING FACE AND EYE DANGLING FROM SOCKET. FRAME WIDENS TO SHOW VICTORIA SMILING, FEELING THE BLADE OF A BLOODY STANLEY KNIFE. GRINS AT JM.

ROYAL HOLLOWAY COLLEGE, EGHAM. VICTORIA WITH PILLS THE SIZE OF EXTRA STRONG MINTS AND VET SYRINGE, JABS HERSELF IN ARSE

Mr Holloway founded a college with the money he had made from patent remedies . . .

But by the time he built it this free-booting vigour was a thing of the past. What happened to the spirit of sod-you-ism, to the wild experimentation, to the refusal to be ingratiating. What happened to that self-confidence . . .

LEICESTER SQUARE/PENSHURST, KENT/HAMMER FIELD, PENSHURST – ‘ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL’

It gave way to self-consciousness and to prettiness of the sort that George Devey specialised in. Devey took the picturesque to new heights of naturalism and fakery. His houses – cottages suffering elephantiasis – give the impression of having been added on to down the centuries, of having been based on the foundations of older houses. Each of his works has a bogus history incorporated into it.

GRIM’S DYKE, HARROW

But coyness and sweetness were not enough.

At one level Victorian architecture was akin to late twentieth-century conceptual art: it required a text to lend it purpose. To make coyness earnest and sweetness serious.

Enter William Morris.

You know the type. He was a cerebral Conran [FRAME OF CONRAN AT TABLE LAID WITH DESIGN OBJECTS] who propagated the art of living in the Middle Ages rather than the art of living in France. He was the River Café with a beard [FRAME OF R. ROGERS AND R. GREY WITH BEARD].

THE RED HOUSE, BEXLEYHEATH

He was a rich luddite who commissioned his own house at the age of twenty-four – the well is a telling touch. He was an entrepreneurial socialist who hoped to change the world with wallpaper, a manufacturer who abhorred machine production.

OXENFORD GRANGE, SURREY. DEEPEST ENGLISH LANDSCAPE, SOUNDTRACK OF CHILDREN PLAYING, VASELINE ON LENS . . .

His life was a protracted exercise in nostalgia – whose literal meaning is the longing for a lost home. Morris was forever trying to recreate his childhood which had been a prelapsarian commune with nature, baking hedgehogs in clay and riding a pony dressed in a suit of armour – as one does.

FLASH FRAME OF CHILD ON A FALABELLA PONY DRESSED IN ARMOUR, POSED LIKE THE MILLAIS PAINTING SIR ISUMBRAS AT THE FORD WHICH IT SEGUES INTO

We all had a childhood. What was peculiar about Morris was his desire to inflict his childhood on a nation. What was even more peculiar is that he succeeded.

Morris’s ideal was the supposedly unselfconscious tradition of local building.

FLASH FRAME OF THE STONEBREAKER BY JOHN BRETT

He considered manual labour ennobling rather than demeaning – sure proof that he had never had to rely on it for a living.

The irony of his position was that his example was so appealing that he was himself an effective mass producer – of technophobic nostalgia. He turned nostalgia from being a private pining into a shared yearning that could be acquired by subscription to the Morris aesthetic.

EXAMPLES OF THE WORK/PORTRAIT OF ALL THE FOLLOWING, EACH WIPING ITS PREDECESSOR OFF THE SCREEN

Morris connected well. His close circle included: The architects: Philip Webb

OAST HOUSE, CROYDON ROAD, HAYES COMMON

and George Edmund Street

HOLMBURY ST MARY CHURCH, SURREY OR ST PHILIP AND ST JAMES, WOODSTOCK ROAD, OXFORD

whose pupil he had been.

The painters: Edward Burne-Jones (who was Kipling’s uncle by marriage)

ANY PAINTING – THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME

Ford Madox Brown

PAINTINGS: WORK OR THE LAST OF ENGLAND

Dante Gabriel Rossetti – who died of chloral addiction

PAINTING OF DANTE AND BEATRICE

Rossetti’s wife Lizzie Siddall – who died of a laudanum overdose.

PAINTING: OPHELIA BY JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

Along with Morris’s wife Jane she was one of the pre-Raphaelite muses who were known as stunners – proving that there is nothing new under the sun – or in The Sun.

ST JOHN, SYLVAN ROAD/AUCKLAND ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD. JM BUYS PAPER FROM WAIF. PLACARD: ‘DRUG DEATH RIDDLE OF TRAGIC STUNNA’. PAGE-THREE PRE-RAPHAELITE. JM ‘READING’ THE SUN AND MOVING LIPS – THE NEWSPAPER IS PRINTED LIKE MORRIS WALLPAPER

Tragic Lizzie’s ambition had been to work with animals and to open a chain of boutiques for world peace in the twentieth century.

SCREEN DIVIDES INTO FOUR. LAW COURTS, STRAND TAKES UP FIRST QUARTER OF SCREEN, SHOT FROM OXO TOWER

During the boom years of the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s there was a consensus that while cities might be prey to crime, disease and poverty these were not insoluble problems, that they could be tackled by the law . . .

SECOND QUARTER: LANGSIDE INFIRMARY, GLASGOW

by the provision of hospitals . . .

THIRD QUARTER: ABBEY MILLS PUMPING STATION, ABBEY LANE E15

by the provision of effective sewerage . . .

FOURTH QUARTER: PEABODY ESTATE, PEAR TREE COURT AND CLERKENWELL CLOSE, EC1

by the provision of adequate housing.

RYLANDS LIBRARY, MANCHESTER

It was in their mercantile interest to constantly improve the lot of their people. They made life better for many people who became materially and intellectually far better off than their rural peasant forebears. Cities civilise.

GUSTAVE DORÉ ILLUSTRATION

Morris – like William Cowper and William Cobbett before him – was convinced that cities were dehumanising to the point where the only reaction to them could be to reject them.

KINGS CROSS. WAIF SELLING SEXUAL FAVOURS, PICKING AT BLACK BAGS, PULLING OUT LAUDANUM BOTTLES

The greatest human creation was deemed expendable, there were apparently alternatives . . . Alternatives whose ramifications would be felt all over England throughout the twentieth century and on into this one.

England was the first country to industrialise and urbanise.

LEAFY ROADSCAPES: AUCKLAND ROAD AND BELVEDERE ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD

But, more importantly, it was the first country to react against industrialisation and urbanisation – and that reaction has afflicted England for a century now.

It was as though it was England’s lot to make the mistakes the rest of the continent would learn from.

1910, 1920, 1930 SUBURBS: SOUTH EDEN PARK ROAD, VILLAGE WAY, WICKHAM WAY, THE AVENUE, LINKS WAY – ALL IN BECKENHAM

William Morris, utopian socialist, propagated the idea of flight from cities, which meant in practice suburbs, which would sprawl in their attempt to connect with the country rather than with the inner city.

And his namesake William Morris of Cowley, the precocious automotive engineer, provided the means which allowed the aesthetically squalid and environmentally disastrous burbs to spread.

PORT SUNLIGHT. MORRIS MEN

When it was initially turned into tiles and beams, Morris’s vision – traduced and misinterpreted, of course, but visions always are – was a pretty enough sham, a sort of merry England for the middle English and Morris dancers. Rusticity without the middens. Bucolicism without the rural poor. As sanitised as a Baring-Gould folk song: thus the maypole was topped with a crown rather than with a glans.

WESTBROOK, WESTBROOK ROAD, GODALMING, SURREY

The generation of architects born in the 1850s and ’60s – Voysey, Prior, Ashbee, Mackmurdo and above all Lutyens – was, alas, one of the most gifted Britain has produced . . . I say alas because they designed with such imaginative invention and such persuasive charm that the generations which followed them aped them – badly and persistently.

VICTORIA IN CARDIGAN AND SLIPPERS SMOKING PIPE IN GARDEN

Innocence and lack of worldliness are no more virtues than chastity is. Cosiness and a yearning for pre-industrial society are banal forms of escapism. How pitiful it is that this generation of architects should be so afflicted.

DETAILS OF ARTS AND CRAFT BUILDING: BLACKHEATH CHURCH NEAR GUILDFORD

MUNSTEAD ROUGH NEAR GODALMING; LONG COPSE, PITCH HILL, EWHURST; (CHURCH COTTAGES, SHERE, SURREY), DETAILS OF BRICKWORK, ETC. – ALSO A GERTRUDE JEKYLL GARDEN

They buried their heads in the sand, and cement, in the handcrafted bricks, in the folk-woven tiles, in the artisan-wrought metal, in the bespokely hewn stone, in the roughcast, in the old English cottage gardens, in hollyhocks and lavender.

HOUSES BY VOYSEY: HOLLYBANK, GRANGE ROAD AND MERRYHILL ROAD, BUSHEY, HERTS

They built a twee fiction – and they built it beautifully.

Voysey’s clergyman father was tried for heresy. He denied god’s wrathfulness: that is, he denied the high Victorian god’s essence. He believed in a nice, soft god. The son believed in nice, soft houses – and his vision spoke to some deep-rooted little English longing.

VICTORIA SITTING OUTSIDE CHEYNE WALK HOUSES READING PORNO MAG CALLED ‘ONE’S SUBJECTS’ HUSBANDS’

Ashbee’s father was the most prolific and energetic of high Victorian pornographers – his pseudonym: Pisanus Fraxi. The son reacted by espousing an ascetic and puritanical socialism, by doing good works, by founding a craft guild, by espousing sandalled vegetarianism.

HOUSE ATTACHED TO BACK OF PETER JONES, SLOANE SQUARE, HANS ROAD SW1, 25 CADOGAN SQUARE SW1, OLD SWAN, SLOANE STREET SW1. ROSTRUM COVER OF WREN’S CITY CHURCHES

Mackmurdo didn’t have a problem father. He introduced Shaw to Wilde. But in 1900 he effectively abandoned architecture to compose tracts advising that human society should take as its model the beehive.

STILL OF HUMAN HEAD COVERED IN BEES

He is also credited with having made the first art nouveau design – though this may be a desperate English attempt to stake a claim in a movement which largely passed this country by.

KNUTSFORD, CHESHIRE

Why didn’t the English adopt art nouveau when it was such a craze in the rest of Europe? Maybe for that very reason – the English have always wished to be out of step with Europe, even if it means seeming backward . . . especially if it means seeming backward.

And much art nouveau was the rococo revived, and the rococo had never taken off here.

Then again, art nouveau is an urban idiom reliant on machine production – indeed it celebrates machine production.

It was the opposite of the arts and crafts. It didn’t pretend to grow out of the earth. It didn’t dissemble its artifice.

The most singular concentration in England, the only concentration, Richard Harding Watt’s work at Knutsford, has nothing to do with any indigenous idiom – it derives from Genoa and Livorno and Rome.

LUTYENS HOUSES: MUNSTEAD WOOD, MUNSTEAD ORCHARD, ORCHARDS MUNSTEAD (ALL NEAR GODALMING), TIGBOURNE COURT NEAR WITLEY (ALL IN SURREY), GREYWALLS, GULLANE NEAR EDINBURGH

The young Lutyens was the greatest English architect since Vanbrugh.

He designed 200 houses and 500 of them are in Surrey.

ESTATE AGENTS FILMED OUTSIDE THEIR PREMISES, EACH SAYING THE LINE:

‘IT IS BY LUTYENS – HONESTLY.’ THE ESTATE AGENTS IN ONE HALF OF FRAME, A HOUSE IN THE OTHER

More than any one else he invented what would become the idiom of the first half of the twentieth century.

That early work of the 1890s is delicate and gay and light. For all its eagerness to please it is touched by genius and by the very un-English quality of sheer cleverness. His multitudinous followers patently lacked genius . . .

’20s AND ’30s ARTERIAL ROAD SUBURBS: KINGSBURY (OR EALING, WEMBLEY, GREENFORD, ANYWHERE). JM V/O BUT IN FRAME LISTENING TO SELF ON HALF-TIMBERED RADIO

. . . and they weren’t too clever either. They merely aped his mannerisms, with increasing inaccuracy . . . And so caused the aesthetic tragedy of twentieth-century England.

JM SWITCHES OFF RADIO

But it is not actually this architectural coarsening which is of such moment. Lutyens and his contemporaries established not only a stylistic model but an aspirational one too.

In place of the economical terrace they created the kind of land-hungry ersatz-rustic dwelling that became the cynosure of English daydreams.

COWS, GOATS, SHEEP IN FRONT GARDENS OF ’30S HOUSES, PEASANTS IN SMOCKS, KIDS THROWING CABBAGES AT PERSON IN STOCKS, PEOPLE CUTTING THEIR LAWNS WITH SCYTHES, NEWSPAPER BOY ON HORSEBACK

No matter that the rusticity grew ever more bogus, no matter that machine production was made to imitate handcraft.

Successive governments anxious not to offend the electorate permitted the creation of suburbs which spawned suburbs of their own which spawned suburbs of their own – and so on, without end. This is what comes of every Englishman and woman getting a castle, the only civil liberty the most proscribed country in western Europe seems interested in.

FLASH FRAME OF ’20s CASTLES IN BUCKS LANE, KINGSBURY NW9

The ultimate paradox of the back-to-the-land impetus is that there is now no land left to go back to.

It is not, however, the prodigal squandering of the country, of green fields, which is our most poisoned inheritance.

JM IN CAR PTC WAIF WITH SQUEEGEE, TOTALLY SOAPED WINDSCREEN:

Get back to when you came from.

SCREEN MIRACULOUSLY FREE OF SOAP. URBAN DERELICTION FROM CAR. SUCCESSIVE SHOTS MOSTLY MANCHESTER

The greatest damage is to cities themselves: England is the only country in Europe where ‘inner city’ is synonymous with crime and deprivation. But no wonder – the cities were neglected in the race to get out of them.

It was this insatiable appetite for escape which buggered up England.

Those countries which embraced the machine as the machine achieved a quality of urban life which this island with its perpetually post-protestant, perpetually post-puritanical mistrust of the city has not begun to get the knack of.

Even today, a century after Victoria died, the pitiful English desire is still for a house which is a counterfeit token of old England.

Though the people-mover we clean at weekends is not half-timbered, is not tile-hung, and its windows are not leaded lights.

MACCLESFIELD 1990S/2000 ESTATES OF ‘CLOSES’, LEADED LIGHTS, TUDORBETHAN DETAIL. ELVETHAM HEATH/HENLEY COURT

The ultimate architectural legacy of Victoria’s reign is not the buildings that surround us. Not the clapped-out hospitals, the mercantile palaces, the ubiquitous terraces, the purposeless churches.

The true architectural legacy is not physical.

It is, rather, the collective mindset founded in the late Victorian conception – a misconception as it happens – of cities as morally and physically corrupting, and in the false promise of a better life outside them.

We greedily inherited the wrong bit of that Queen’s England.

 

END