Nor will the singular beauty of the chimneys escape the eye of the attentive traveller.
William Wordsworth on the Lake District
The Englishness of English buildings is a slippery idea to catch hold of. There just aren’t that many indigenous architectural features around.
Those sash windows on the rectory have seventeenth-century French origins. That tracery in the cathedral windows was inspired by Gothic churches in medieval France. The Ionic pilasters on the manor house facade came from Palladio’s sixteenth-century palazzi in the Veneto. The rounded curves of its gables are Flemish, as is that crow-stepped arch on the church porch.
Where buildings become archetypally English is in the adaptation of those foreign architectural features – an example of our make-do-and-mend, hodgepodge approach to the visual arts, our taste for the compromise over the grand projet, and our preference for customizing other people’s ideas rather than creating our own.
That classical manor house has a steeply pitched slate roof to deal with all our northern rain; while Palladio’s villas outside Vicenza have flat, or nearly flat, roofs.
The English cathedral will usually be bigger than the French cathedral that inspired it – a reminder of our pre-Reformation days, when we were referred to as ‘the pious English’.
In time, we also developed our own customized English version of northern Continental Gothic architecture: Perpendicular Gothic, which emerged at Gloucester Cathedral in the 1330s, and lasted until around 1530.
Perpendicular Gothic is all extremely tall, wide, straight-mullioned church windows, together with fan-vaulted ceilings. The style bled, too, into the ultra-English, secular, domestic style of the sixteenth century: as seen in tall, blockish Elizabethan houses, such as Longleat and Hardwick, articulated with large, rectangular windows – useful for illumination in our gloomy English winters.
As a contemporary wit put it, Hardwick Hall was ‘more glass than wall’; and the light, airy, Perpendicular churches were called ‘lantern churches’. If southern European medieval churches had been built with as much glass, you’d have roasted to death during summer masses.
The flat-topped towers of Perpendicular Gothic churches are an English anomaly, too; as is the tendency to have a flat end to Perpendicular chancels, unlike rounded Continental ones. The flat, square blockiness of English churches can be traced back to Anglo-Saxon churches; a square blockiness that doesn’t appear so much in churches in Kent – these were influenced more by the round-ended Gothic churches of northern France.
An English tendency for repetition of square and rectangular architectural units is picked up later on, across the country, in the long, unremitting lines of Georgian and Victorian terraced houses.1
In domestic Tudor housing, too, the English could hardly be accused of being internationally unique: they followed a natural combination of timber frames and in-filling that existed across Europe.
But, again, they customized the style in a peculiarly English style suited to the weather, with overhanging, jettied storeys on the first floor – a useful way of sheltering the ground floor and the front door, while producing a dripping edge to drain the upper floors into the middle of the street below.
Climate is also the defining factor behind the crowning achievement of English architecture – the ornamental chimney.
The first surviving English fireplace appeared in the Tower of London in 1081, the first chimneys in the early twelfth century. The earliest decorated chimney anywhere in the world is at Old Sarum Castle, just outside Salisbury. The castle chimneys, built between 1120 and 1140, are extremely ornate.2
Throughout the Middle Ages, chimneys got more sophisticated, reaching the height of complexity on the skylines of Tudor palaces, with red-brick chimneypots twisting into tightly spun corkscrews. In the sixteenth century, chimney styles turned classical, clustering together into groups of Doric columns, as they do on the roof of Burghley House, Lincolnshire, finished in 1587.
Meanwhile on the Continent – even if they indulged in the heights of the baroque and the rococo elsewhere on their buildings – their chimneys remained austere and unadorned.
Much of our architecture is shaped by Continental influences, Italian ones in particular. But the ornamental chimney, at least, is ours; as is the mass-produced, simpler domestic chimney – a late-sixteenth-century agricultural boom led to a chimney boom across the country.
Early industrialization and the mass construction of terraced houses continued the boom into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving us the widest variety of chimneys in the world. The National Clayware Federation’s 1964 catalogue lists 500 different types of chimneypot, from the fluted beehive to the beaded cannon-head.
Chimneys vary distinctly according to county, too: in the Cotswolds and north-east Norfolk, chimney stacks are at the gable ends; in Suffolk and the south-east, they’re planted squarely in the middle of the timber-framed buildings.
How fitting that we should lead the world in chimneypots – it chimes with our taste for the homespun, the unflashy, the slightly jokey, along with the need to keep the chill off, in our damp northern climes.
It is in the idiosyncratic combination and arrangement of buildings, too, that a particular architectural setting looks typically English. The beguiling village combination of church and rectory, for example, doesn’t exist anywhere else in Europe.3
Difficult as it is to characterize all 13,000 English villages in any uniform way, they also tend to be laid out in a limited number of peculiarly English ways.
First, they tend to be extremely old – most date back to the Anglo-Saxons, some as far back as the fifth century. Their sites were chosen for economic reasons – near rivers or springs, and close to fertile soil. They were about the same size and roughly equidistant from each other, with that distance varying from county to county, according to local prosperity and soil fertility. In more remote Devon and Cornwall, villages are around six miles apart; in prosperous East Anglia and the East Midlands, the gap is more like three miles.4
The wealth and fertility of lowland England, in the south-east, also meant that surviving villages are most thickly concentrated there. Deserted villages are mostly found in the Midlands and the east; there are thought to be over 2,000 of them in England – largely the result of the Black Death and the Norman enclosure of the royal forests. From the twelfth century onwards, there was also considerable monastic demolition of certain villages, like Old Byland, North Yorkshire, removed by the Cistercians to build Rievaulx.
This coincidence of age, geography and Anglo-Saxon origins means that ancient villages tend to share a rough ground plan, built along one of three patterns: villages strung along one street, or along two streets at right angles to each other; those arranged around a square or green, often to protect animals from predators; and those with houses thrown together in an apparently random ragbag.5
While cities have expanded out of all ancient recognition, most villages today aren’t that much bigger than they were a century after the Norman Conquest; they still cluster around those ancient ground plans. The average village size in 1086, according to the Domesday Book, was around 150 inhabitants; not that much smaller than today, and about the same size as prehistoric hunter-gatherer clans.
According to the Oxford evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, 150 is also the maximum amount of friends you can conceivably juggle, because the number has been hard-wired into the human mind over the millennia.
Dunbar’s two criteria for his broad definition of friendship are: you must be willing to lend one of these friends £5 and you must contact them at least once a year.6 With more than 150 inhabitants, communities – or groups of friends – grow too large and fall apart. At 150 or below, everyone knows everyone else and is prepared, in theory, to fight for them.
The Dunbar number chimes with the standard size of military units: companies have 100–150 men; platoons are around thirty-strong. At that smaller level, of thirty or fewer – a platoon, say, or among members of an extended family – people are even prepared to sacrifice themselves in defence of the group; a uniquely human trait.
As with higgledy-piggledy villages, so with towns. Symmetrical town planning isn’t a naturally English thing. That’s one of the reasons town planners have brought such destruction to provincial towns in the last half-century, by trying to impose unnatural order and symmetry on pleasingly chaotic street patterns built up over centuries.
There are several factors behind the English opposition to planning: the country’s long history, which leads to a semi-random accumulation of layers of historical development, relatively unaffected by disasters, manmade or natural; the English taste for picturesque shabbiness; and a liking for old things, closely allied to a dislike of change and an opposition to being dragooned into grands projets.
Defence was behind the foundation of the first English towns, the grid-like camps, or castra, set up by the Romans: Manchester, Chester, Colchester and all those other towns and cities with ‘chester’ endings. They were often sited, too, at river crossings, like Cambridge and Canterbury, or at road intersections, like Alcester and Dunstable.
The earliest towns then developed organically and asymmetrically, often around a castle or cathedral standing on one side of a square, rectangular or triangular market place.
This commercial aspect was crucial in the origins and development of most towns. As early as the tenth century, King Edward the Elder passed a law decreeing that buying and selling must be done in a market town, and watched over by a town reeve; thus the number of towns with names like Burnham Market, Market Drayton and Market Harborough. ‘Chipping’ – as in Chipping Norton and Chipping Ongar – and ‘cheap’ as in Eastcheap and Cheapside, come from the Anglo-Saxon cheapen, ‘to buy’.
Markets often dominated an unusually wide main street – as in Marlborough, Wiltshire, originally home to a big sheep market, or Thame, Oxfordshire, site of an important cattle market.
Triangular market places, like the one in St Albans, Hertfordshire, stretched away from one broad end – up against the abbey, or another major building – and then narrowed to a point as the market petered out.
Over time, English towns were moulded into a series of rough-edged palimpsests, building on the foundations of an earlier civilization, with each new layer sprawling wider and wider, part obscuring the older layers. It made sense to construct your biggest buildings on top of, or next to, those of the earlier civilization, absorbing their history and kudos, often incorporating their stones, walls and ditches.
London’s Guildhall is built on the site of the only amphitheatre in the Roman city. The Anglo-Saxon church of St Nicholas, Leicester, was constructed over the palaestra, or wrestling school, of the old Roman baths. The chancel window of St Nicholas practically touches the Jewry Wall, a large fragment of Roman masonry. Dover’s Saxon church, St Mary in Castro, incorporates tiles from the neighbouring second-century AD Roman lighthouse.
Early monasteries were often constructed within Saxon forts; the church at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, is built on an Iron Age enclosure. The street pattern of Devizes, Wiltshire, shadows the walls of the Victorianized Norman castle; The Brittox gets its name from the bretesque, the old stockade on either side of the approach to the castle.
Saxon Bristol is visible in its modern street plan, around Leonard Lane, Bell Lane, St Nicholas Street and Tower Lane – an almost circular boundary that stretches east of the High Street around the site of the ancient castle. Bristol’s thirteenth-century city walls were wrapped around the old Saxon defences.
Oxford (with its walls built in 1224–40), York (with walls from 1250) and Newcastle (with walls from 1265) were encircled at about the same time; not just for defence, but also to regulate booming regional trade.
You could walk across most medieval walled cities in less than an hour; as you could ancient ones – fifth-century BC Athens only extended a few miles beyond the Parthenon. London’s Roman wall, marking the boundaries of the city, was only three miles long, enclosing 330 acres. These cities have of course long outgrown their Roman or medieval city walls, even if the principal Roman cities in Britain were as big as any across the empire; only four cities in Roman Gaul were bigger than Londinium.
You can chart the medieval expansion of British towns beyond their city walls through the pattern of church-building. Ancient churches, built in the days before there were many tombstones, often don’t have a churchyard. Rome only gave permission for graveyards to be built around churches in AD 752; and it wasn’t until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that headstones and tombs were erected in great quantities. Georgian graveyards were often planted with English yews; Irish yews were popular under the Victorians.
Once sanctioned, those graveyards filled up quickly. The mass of bodies built up over the centuries – there are around 10,000 in an average country churchyard, with generation laid on top of generation7 – can raise the level of the graveyard above the surrounding country by several feet.
It was often the church – or abbey or monastery – that led to a town being settled in the first place. Evesham, Worcestershire, grew up around the Cistercian abbey built on a site chosen for the soil’s fertility. The town of Ely expanded around a Saxon monastery and the later cathedral, on a site picked for its remoteness in the fenland marshes. Ely’s medieval isolation was so great that it was effectively ruled by the Bishop of Ely, not the monarch; it was only absorbed into Cambridgeshire in 1836.
These palimpsests of towns and cities developed fresh layers through the medieval period, into the modern age. Still, in many English settlements, the Georgian and Victorian layers are the most visible, particularly in London, and particularly in the form of the terraced house.
After the Fire of London, the rows of new terraced houses migrated west from the City of London – the natural direction for prosperity to spread, with the prevailing wind sending the city’s noxious air off to the east (see Chapter 1). London still remains more built up to the west; and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century terraces in the west tend to be bigger and more expensive than those in the east.
Throw in a declining royal court in the seventeenth century, and an increasingly powerful Parliament, and it was natural that new developments should go up in and around Westminster. The first symmetrical piazza in England was built by Inigo Jones at Covent Garden in the 1630s. The first garden square was St James’s Square, close to Westminster, built in 1661. It was paid for by Henry Jermyn (as in neighbouring Jermyn Street), the Earl of St Albans, held up as the founder of the West End – in the days when the West End was still at the real western end of London.
Garden squares soon spread to the provinces. St James’s Square was followed by Queen Square, Bristol, laid out in 1699, mirroring London’s Bloomsbury Square, with two streets entering at all four corners of the square, each at right angles to the other.
The organic, higgledy-piggledy accumulation of garden squares of differing sizes – across London and other English cities through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is a peculiarly English phenomenon. They also made English cities unusually green. When, in 1828, Earl Grosvenor was building the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair, he asked the developer, Thomas Cubitt, ‘Will you ensure you bring a little country into the town by having garden squares?’
Nikolaus Pevsner thought London garden squares, informally connected to each other in a loose rhythm, were the city’s principal contribution to the history of European town planning; so unlike Baron Haussmann’s boulevards, carved through Paris in the 1860s, the Emperor Trajan’s symmetrical Forum in Rome, or indeed Mussolini’s thumping great triumphal straight roads, sliced through ancient and medieval layers of the city in the 1930s.
On an early trip to England in 1930, Pevsner was particularly taken with the garden squares of Bloomsbury. He liked the way they had been arranged, in haphazard relation to each other, with no focal point – the result of centuries of an independent bourgeoisie developing the city in an organic way, with no overarching plan forced on them from above. The only thing that Pevsner took against was the anti-social taste for fencing and locking up the gardens – a reflection of the English cult of property ownership.
Rows of terraced houses started snaking north of St James’s Palace in the early eighteenth century. By the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, they had spread north and west of Cavendish Square. Development was particularly intense in the square bordered by Portland Place to the east, Oxford Street to the south, Edgware Road to the west and the New Road, later Euston Road, to the north.
Euston Road was built in the eighteenth century by the Duke of Grafton, also the Earl of Euston, then owner of much of the land around the modern Euston Station. He designed it expressly so that, every working day, 1,500 cattle could get to Smithfield Market from the west, without blocking Holborn and Oxford Street. (Cattle transport had a lasting effect on the English landscape, and townscape – many of the lanes that lead into agricultural towns were originally drovers’ roads. You can spot a drovers’ road by its name – there are Bullock Roads, Drove Roads and Cow Lanes across the country, particularly in the Midlands.)
Much of London’s development was at the hands of aristocratic urban landowners like the Duke of Grafton. The Howard de Walden family, the Duke of Westminster, Earl Cadogan and Viscount Portman own vast swathes of the city centre today. The Russell family – in their later incarnation, the Dukes of Bedford – owned most of Bloomsbury between 1175 and 1850, and still control a big chunk of the area.
That continuity of urban land ownership by single families is uniquely British – a reflection not just of the power and wealth of the aristocracy, but also of sustained democracy, respect for property rights, and a lack of revolutions and apocalyptic economic crises. You can add in a near-continuous monarchy for over a millennium, whose landholdings have been astonishingly robust: the Duchy of Cornwall, owned by the Prince of Wales, was set up by Edward III in 1337 and still owns 160 miles of coastline, most Cornish rivers, the Isles of Scilly and more than 54,000 hectares of land.
The lack of English revolutions has astonished those who are more used to them in other countries. Otto Hintze, the early-twentieth-century German historian, said England was made up of living fossils, dependent on a feudal system that had been toppled practically everywhere else in Europe.8
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English cities were largely built by a combination of these landowners, working in conjunction with developers. Because the landowners controlled large stretches of virgin land in the expanding cities, the organized building of long terraces was possible.
Landowners worked hand-in-glove with developers, through the peculiarly English intricacies of the leasehold system. The landowner let plots to the developer, who then paid for the construction of the terraces and sold them to leaseholders. Once the initial lease expired, those terraces became the property of the landowner. On the security of this deal, the developer borrowed the funds to pay the construction costs.
To provide further finance, the developer often built a pub first – that’s why a pub is often on a corner site, because it was the first building in a row of terraced houses. The pub not only brought in money from patrons; it provided a place for builders to eat, drink and sleep in. In extremis, the pub and its licence could be sold off to pay for finishing off the terrace.
When John Nash built the Quadrant, at the bottom end of Regent Street, in the early nineteenth century, he developed several houses for himself. He lent the money for building other properties in the Quadrant to his plumbers, glaziers and bricklayers. They then did work for free on each other’s houses, and on those owned by Nash – now not just the architect, but also the developer, speculator and all-round wheeler-dealer.
The state may have intervened on a massive scale in private life over the last century, and wrecked big patches of our city centres. But, still, our cities – and our sewers, railways and canals – remain essentially Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian; and built by private hands, not public ones, with an unusual degree of freedom.
Because there has been no over-arching planning authority – no Trajan, no Haussmann, no Mussolini – London, and most English cities, haven’t ended up with the straight, wide boulevards of Paris or Fascist Rome.
English cities have few dominating axes or ordered plans. As a result, they present less of a grand spectacle, and look less bewitching from the air than rooftop cities like Paris or New York – no grand avenues, no pleasing grand-scale geometry. But on the ground, at eye-level, they present more surprises – more half-glimpsed side streets, more curves, more variety of scale between alley, dead end and main street.
The unit on which the English city largely depends is the terraced house, multiplied into varied matrices of squares, crescents, circuses and terraces, forming long, looping lines across the cityscape.
On the Continent, fragmented urban land ownership meant mass urban housing couldn’t be built in the same way. Parisian aristocrats owned grander, detached private houses, or hôtels, with walled courtyards separating them from the street. Even the English rich were squeezed right next door to each other in Mayfair terraces, in inflated versions of the terraced houses lived in by the vast majority of the working and middle classes.
Squeezed-together, low-rise, small-scale terraced houses are unusually English. They are often what first strike foreign visitors travelling into London through the suburbs; Spaniards in particular, according to a Hispanophile friend of mine. (They are also surprised by carpets in pubs; paying when ordering drinks; raised railway platforms; people not looking you in the eye; and town centres deserted after 5.30 p.m., except on binge-drinking weekend evenings.)9
Those visitors are struck, too, by the back gardens seen from railway trains; in particular, the contrast between the rough-and-tumble views you get of the back of terraced houses, compared to their neat fronts. The unadorned, symmetrical, Georgian and Victorian fronts of the terraced houses disguise higgledy-piggledy back garden extensions, side-returns and garden sheds, framed by a mesh of washing lines and football nets.
Just as the land-owning structure of England – with large tracts of land owned by individuals – meant terraced houses could be planned in those long lines, their gardens, too, could be neatly aligned with the continuous lines of railway track.
Because Britain was the first country to build railways, those railways were often built before the Victorian, Edwardian and inter-war suburbs that grew up around them. With newer railway lines, like the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, you don’t see so many neat ends of gardens from the train, because the line slices through pre-existing streets.
Foreign visitors are also often surprised by how small the houses are at the end of those gardens. They are indeed small; largely because they’re houses, not flats. Half the new homes in Germany, Italy and France in the 1990s were flats. In England, in 1996, only 12 per cent of new homes were one- or two-bedroom flats; 30 per cent were houses with four or more bedrooms.
On top of that, 65 per cent of British houses are home-owned (2010 figures); in Continental Europe, the figure is half that. This overwhelming English desire to own a house, rather than rent a flat, despite shortage of funds, leads to an inevitable conclusion – smaller houses.
The average new British home is now 76 square metres, compared with 109 square metres in Germany. That pattern has been around for a while: in 1791, a German historian, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, said the English ‘prefer the most miserable cottage hired in their own name, to more convenient apartments in another house’.
It’s no coincidence that British estate agents refer to houses by the number of bedrooms; if they defined them by floor area, as they do in America and much of Europe, we would rumble how short-changed we are. British journalists buttress the convention: our newspapers are unique in recording someone’s wealth by detailing the number of bedrooms in their house.
In our densely packed towns and cities, with old housing stock and limited room for new developments, the logical result is that, instead of building bigger houses, the English add on to existing ones. The average kitchen has almost doubled in size since the 1920s. That’s why you get all those side-returns, loft and basement conversions, and higgledy-piggledy extensions, the ones seen from railway lines that so astonish Spaniards.
You can also diagnose our obsession with home ownership in our complex property law. Gazumping, stamp duty and the 999-year lease are all unusually English institutions.
Particularly that last one – long leases satisfy the British desire for home ownership: both freeholder and leaseholder get to share different types of possession of the same property. A 999-year lease also shows an unusually strong national faith in the enduring strength of a secure, property-owning democracy.
That faith is wrapped up with the long survival of the rule of law in England. A lack of invasions since 1066 – and of civil wars, for over 350 years – has led to a confidence that property rights will last for ever, and so to the high percentage of home ownership in England. The related idea of ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ was first invoked in English law in 1623 by Sir Edward Coke, a jurist and MP. The English language has long been rich in references to an affection for property ownership, like ‘There’s no place like home’ or ‘As safe as houses’.
The Germans and the French may have ways of translating the word ‘freehold’: Freibrief and nue propriété. But the concept is unrecognizable on the Continent, where landowners don’t have the same rights as freeholders; that’s why Napoleonic roads could be so straight, and breezily bulldoze through private land.10 English common law enshrined the protection of private property. And the appearance of Trust Law, from around 1600, provided further protection.
It was the power of the private English landowner that prevented the realization of Sir Christopher Wren’s grid plan for London after the Great Fire of 1666.
Wren wanted a series of wide boulevards radiating from his new St Paul’s Cathedral, interconnecting with a straight-lined grid; like Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards, or New York’s chessboard street plan that gradually spread north through Manhattan Island in the nineteenth century.
But private landowners and developers – who either owned or were responsible for rebuilding the charred ruins of the City – did not approve of Wren’s axial plan. The design would have forced them to dance to someone else’s tune: ordained from on high, it cut across the pre-Fire boundaries of their building plots.
In the end, a new generation of classically inspired, seventeenth-century terraced houses was built on the footprint of the pre-Fire, Gothic, medieval city; but the winding, asymmetrical, medieval street pattern remained almost unaltered. Wren’s fifty-one post-Fire City churches were also mostly built on the site of pre-Fire churches.
The dogged English taste for the small-scale, for natural development, for the unplanned, for curves and slow-revealing views, had triumphed over the symmetrical, overarching grand projet. Today, the City of London, for all its metal, glazed, right-angled skyscrapers, retains its cramped, squiggly, ancient street pattern. You can still comfortably fit the medieval plan of the City on to the modern one.
After the second obliteration of the City during the Second World War, a new financial centre of concrete, steel and glass skyscrapers was erected over the next sixty years – but still on that medieval plan. Then came the ring of steel – the one-way systems, street closures and concrete barriers imposed on the City as a security and surveillance cordon, after the IRA bombed the Baltic Exchange in 1992, and Bishopsgate in 1993. The ring of steel wrapped a roughly circular, ghost barrier around the medieval plan, but those higgledy-piggledy, curving lines remain much as they were half a millennium ago.
Wherever you do see a sudden straight, wide avenue in a medieval English city, it’s likely to be a Victorian ‘improvement’. The ones in London include Aldwych, Charing Cross Road, Victoria Street, Kingsway and Queen Victoria Street (the name Victoria’s a useful giveaway).
These avenues produce the kind of dull, un-English uniformity that Joshua Reynolds diagnosed in the regularity of Wren’s City plan.
The forms and turnings of the streets of London and other old towns are produced by accident, without any original plan or design, but they are not always the less pleasant to the walker or spectator on that account.
On the contrary, if the city had been built on the regular plan of Sir Christopher Wren, the effect might have been, as we know it in some new parts of the town, rather unpleasing; the uniformity might have produced weariness.
Joshua Reynolds, Thirteenth Discourse (1786)
Wren’s defeat by the power of individual property rights was not unusual. Extended prosperity over many centuries in most English cities means that any explicitly geometrical town plans are often obscured by the asymmetrical demands of commerce and private residential development.
You can spot fragments of the old, roughly rectangular Roman Wall of London, but modern streets are often carved through those fragments, as opposed to being aligned with them.
In York, you can still walk the 2.5-mile-long walls of the playing-card-shaped fortification built by the Romans in AD 71 on the north-east bank of the River Ouse. They are the longest, and best-maintained, Roman city walls in England. York’s main streets, too, are laid on top of the Roman grid street pattern. Stonegate follows the line of the Via Praetoria; Petergate runs along the Via Principalis.
Much of York’s Roman grid remains. But the ancient, right-angled tramlines are largely obscured by the much thicker encrustation of medieval Gothic development.
York flourished between 1068 – when William the Conqueror built two castles either side of the Ouse – and the seventeenth century. As the city prospered, overarching Roman order gave way to typically English, faintly shambolic development. Religious, secular and private buildings were constructed independently of each other, at different times, in different Gothic styles.
In 1130, York was the fourth-biggest town in Britain; by the 1660s, it was the third-biggest, behind London and Norwich. Over those 500 or so years, nearly fifty parish churches – in the Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic styles – shot up across the city.
Many of those parish churches have been deconsecrated and converted, or were damaged in the Second World War. But, still, as you ramble through the winding, medieval streets, you keep catching oblique views of Gothic church spires.
For all the stamina of York’s classical city walls, the asymmetrical, medieval street plan – and the bristling, chaotic confection of Gothic, crocketed spires, pointed windows and ogee arches – ultimately conquered the right angles of Roman order and geometry.
Across England, irregularity triumphs over symmetry. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the Sicilian author of The Leopard, said of London in the late 1920s, ‘This city is perhaps the only one that can evoke the same emotions as nature – indeed it isn’t a city, but a wood in which, together with the most dismal trees, houses have grown, too.’11
Even in the stripped-down, modernist age, a love of shambolic, tumbledown shabbiness, allied to a taste for historicism, remains deep in the English soul.
We still prefer the warped, ancient look; the same look that Bram Stoker appreciated in Dracula’s Whitby: ‘The houses of the old town are all red-roofed and seem piled up one over the other anyhow.’
For all the modern tyranny of right angles in steel and glass, England remains rich in these piled-up houses, jumbled up together in pleasingly chaotic streets like medieval Abbey Street, Faversham, Castle Street, Warkworth, or Totnes High Street winding up from the river, looping itself round the castle. Winchester, Wells, Durham, Stamford and Beverley are all entangled with curving, tortured street patterns that have mercifully avoided the town planner’s ruler and protractor.
Irregularity remains the English norm, even when it’s dressed up in the ordered clothes of classicism.
Bath, though pretty much entirely classical, is also very English in the asymmetrical plan of its classical terraces. In eighteenth-century Bath, the two John Woods, a father-and-son pair of architects, took the English terrace – developed a century earlier – and bent and folded it into crescents and circuses for the first time.
While each individual house may be symmetrical and classically inspired, the combination of thousands of houses laid across Bath’s rolling hills in unpredictable loops, curves and lines, set at oblique angles to each other, is thoroughly English.
That said, several Norman towns and cities were started on a regular grid plan, or within rectangular borders: including Bury St Edmunds, planned by its Norman abbot before 1086; Stratford-upon-Avon, which had its original charter granted in 1196; Leeds, whose borough charter was granted in 1207; and Liverpool, also given its borough charter in 1207.
But the clean, straight original lines of these town plans have been largely blurred by later demolition and building. The grid laid down in Cambridge by King Edward in AD 917 has been almost completely obliterated by the university, with only a few fragments surviving. The same goes for the Saxon grid plan imposed on London, now concealed by more than a millennium’s worth of new developments.
These early grids and planned towns were, in any case, the exception in English town-building. It was hard to start a town from scratch without unified ownership of a virgin site by a single individual. However big the landholdings of the aristocrats of London, no single landowner dominated the whole city.
Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, was in single ownership, and so could be designed in an un-English way, with complete top-down control, leading to a unified, symmetrical plan.
A tiny fishing village of thirty houses in 1843, Barrow expanded with the discovery of hundreds of thousands of tons of iron in the neighbouring Furness orefield; by 1876, the town was home to the biggest steelworks in the world. In 1854, James Ramsden, the 23-year-old locomotive superintendent of the Furness Railway, bought the Hindpool estate in Barrow. In 1856, he laid out the surviving, even grid of terraced streets.
Whitehaven, also in Cumbria, followed the pattern – a large patch of undeveloped land wrapped around a small seaside village, owned outright by the Lowther family. From 1666, a grid plan was laid down to house workers in the town’s shipyards and coal port.
Whitehaven, Cumbria, in 1839. A grid plan was laid out by the Lowther family in 1666. The roads leading into the town remain relatively unsophisticated.
A similar degree of control, again combined with undeveloped land, meant the Bishop of Sarum could impose his own new grid plan on Salisbury in the 1220s, when he moved operations from Old Sarum, up on the hill, down to the new cathedral site. That planned grid of streets still exists in Salisbury’s centre.
As England filled up through the Middle Ages – and existing towns and cities sprawled and thickened – there was little opportunity for starting from scratch like this, until the revolutionary garden city experiment of the twentieth century. The same degree of unified planning control held by the Bishop of Sarum, James Ramsden and the Lowthers was exerted over the first garden city in the world: Letchworth, Hertfordshire.
Letchworth was founded with private money in 1903, on the initiative of the garden city pioneer, Sir Ebenezer Howard. It was built on six square miles of virgin land outside Hitchin, bought by First Garden City Ltd, the company founded by Howard. Welwyn Garden City followed, in 1920, using the same model of virgin land, purchased by Welwyn Garden City Ltd, another newly incorporated company.
Because of its healthy supply of virgin land, relatively late development and large private landholdings, Scotland has many more planned villages than England. In England, villages began to materialize on a substantial scale in around the tenth century, and were often founded much earlier; in Scotland, they are usually more recent.
Before the eighteenth century, rural Scottish settlements mostly consisted of clachans or fermtouns – where groups of families shared tenancy of the farmland, and lived and worked in a roughly assembled group of farm buildings and houses, often inhabited by their animals, too. In the eighteenth century, as agricultural yields increased, landlords got more interested in their estates, and began to build planned villages. Among them were Newcastleton, Roxburghshire, built by the Duke of Buccleuch, and Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, built by Sir Archibald Grant.
New planned fishing villages were constructed along the Scottish coast, too, not long after the establishment of the British Fisheries Society in 1786. Rural estates were cleared – like the Duke of Sutherland’s in north-east Scotland, in the Sutherland Clearances of 1807, when his tenants were exiled to newly built seaside villages, while their old land was let to sheep farmers, at higher rents.12
Because these planned towns are so rare in England, we feel instinctively wary of them. We have become so used to towns being a gradual, organic juxtaposition of new and old – of Georgian next to medieval, next to Edwardian – that any town thrown up in a single brief period feels oddly contrived.
The same taste for happenstance, instinctive patterns of settlement over long stretches of time, can be seen in the surviving ancient haunts of London’s professional classes. Barristers are still cloistered in the four Inns of Court near Holborn, as they have been for 600 or so years. The upper echelons of the medical profession are still clustered in and around Harley Street, near Regent’s Park in London, even if the classifications may have blurred a little.
Doctors used to be confined to Wimpole Street, and dentists to Harley Street. Now the Howard de Walden estate – which has owned the land for 300 years (the de Waldens are descended from the Harleys who built Harley Street) – is a little more easy-going, although so-called ‘fringe medicine’, or homeopathic practitioners, are still unlikely to get leases from the estate.
The reason why those doctors and dentists are still there goes back to the eighteenth century, when the Barber Surgeons were founded just down the road in Soho Square. When they expanded north, they sought refuge in the Howard de Walden estate; it was handy, too, for rich patrons moving into nearby Cavendish Square. Marylebone is still home to the British Veterinary Association, the Royal College of Nursing, the General Dental Council and the Royal College of Midwives.
Theatres also moved to the West End after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Before then, theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe were confined to the South Bank, next door to the cockpits and brothels of Southwark, in the so-called Liberties – beyond the cities of Westminster and London, and so beyond the control of the aldermen. Even after the theatres moved to the West End, they were restricted by law. Until the Theatres Act of 1843, only the patent theatres, licensed in 1660 by Charles II to perform ‘spoken drama’, were allowed to put on plays. The two London patent theatres were the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, now the Royal Opera House. The Theatres Royal in Bath, Liverpool and Bristol were also given letters patent.
New professional classes are still making fresh, instinctive claims to particular areas of London. Hedge funders have settled in Mayfair, drawn there by its grandness, central location and architectural beauty. It helps that hedge fund offices are small – and can easily be accommodated in a single terraced house, with no need for the vast steel and glass office blocks of the traditional merchant banks of the City. Hedge funds began in the 1940s in America but took off in London in the 1990s to accommodate the new practice of shorting shares – betting they would go down rather than up. As hedge funds prospered over the last decade, bankers set up funds in Mayfair in their droves; although there was a culling of the herd after the 2008 crash.
The closest the English got to large-scale town planning was with the creation of seaside resorts – an idea invented by the English.
Scarborough, in Yorkshire, was the first seaside town, cultivated for the health-giving properties of the sea from the late seventeenth century. Before then, the idea of prizing the sea for its healthiness or beauty would have seemed distinctly odd – the oldest buildings in Scarborough face each other, not the seafront.13
In the 1620s, a mineral-water spring, with supposedly therapeutic effects, was found on a cliff above Scarborough’s south beach. In the 1660s, a Dr Witte published Scarborough Spa, which suggested that the sea water was a ‘Most Sovereign remedy against Hypochondriack Melancholy and Windness’. It could apparently cure epilepsy, apoplexy, vertigo and catalepsy, cleanse the stomach, and put an end to scurvy, asthma, and black and yellow jaundice.
Dr Witte also advocated bathing every day – a fashion soon adopted by men, who swam naked out at sea, having been taken there by boat; and women, who stuck to the shallow water, safely covered by their bathing dresses, and taken to the sea by horse-drawn bathing machines to preserve their modesty.
The old fishing town soon developed assembly rooms, a bathing house and, in 1826, an iron footbridge across the valley to the new promenade on the clifftop above. Towering over South Bay was the Grand Hotel – the first hotel of that name in the world, and then the greatest hotel in Europe.
Other seaside towns followed, boosted by George III’s patronage of Weymouth in the late eighteenth century: Brighton took off in 1750, its appeal added to by the Prince Regent’s first visit in 1783; Margate in 1769; Melcombe Regis in the 1780s; Bognor Regis in the 1820s. The seaside holiday really became an institution with the railways – Cromer and Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, both mushroomed in the mid-nineteenth century.
The arrival of the chartered railway trip helped. Thomas Cook, the travel agent, planned the first chartered public rail excursion on 5 July 1841, when he arranged for 570 campaigners to travel from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance rally.
In 1871, the Bank Holidays Act – dreamt up by Sir John Lubbock, MP for Maidstone, to give bank workers the chance to watch a day’s cricket – completed the triumph of the British seaside holiday. Charing Cross and Fenchurch Street stations were overwhelmed with day-trippers on the first bank holiday in August that year. By the 1890s, around 360,000 Londoners headed to the coast for the August Bank Holiday.
Through the nineteenth century, seaside architecture was developed to entertain the new tourists. The first bandstand wasn’t actually by the sea; it was built in 1887, at Dartmouth Park, West Bromwich, Staffordshire, near the iron foundries. But the idea quickly migrated to seaside towns.
The first municipal beach hut was built in Bournemouth in 1909 by Frederick Percy Dolamore, the town’s chief assistant borough engineer and surveyor. It survives today; in February 2011, it was given a special plaque, commemorating Bournemouth as the home of the beach hut. Bournemouth now has 1,900 beach huts, and there are 20,000 altogether strung across the British coastline – descendants of the Victorian bathing machines.
Most seaside towns have preserved their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characters, thanks in part to the rise of cheap air travel. Just as concrete tower blocks were spreading across England in the late 1960s, so foreign package tours were getting cheaper and cheaper. The poor seaside towns may have lost custom to Majorca and Tenerife, but they kept their pretty buildings – why rebuild a town that can’t attract visitors?
Seaside towns apart, the English opposition to large-scale planning has continued to the present day, but with perversely disastrous effects. One reason why so many fine towns and villages have a patch of dreary, homogeneous developments on their outskirts is because it is so difficult to get attractive, new, one-off houses past government planning rules. Those rules took up some 1,300 pages of legislation until the Government introduced proposals in 2011 to cut them down to fifty-two pages.
Because it’s hard for private individuals to wade through the petty bureaucracy, only big building companies can afford to fight the planning battle. That battle takes a long time, consumed with endless appeals. During that delay, demand and capacity build up; when the permissions are finally granted, a large-scale, unoriginal, edge-of-town development is often the result.
From the Restoration until very recently, cities expanded outwards, naturally, organically, in a series of low-rise, domestic-scale streets of terraced houses. The English love of the individual family home meant that Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings were kept low-rise – connected to each other horizontally, not vertically. Their scale was reined in, too, by the structural limitations of early building materials.14
In the boomtime developments of London and other principal English cities over the last twenty years, the market has conspired to produce high-density, high-rise developments.
This is partly due to the arms race in show-off projects, trying to outdo each other in pushing the city skyline higher and higher. The London horizon in particular is now dominated by skyscrapers built over the last thirty years: from the NatWest Tower, now Tower 42, the first skyscraper in the City of London, built in 1979, through to the Gherkin, the Cheese-Grater and the latest, the Shard.
The increased vertical axis of English cities has also been a result of planning restrictions. Buildings are constructed on footprints that can’t expand outwards, because of those planning restrictions and the confined, crowded nature of our old cities.
And so the only option is to build upwards. As developers try to realize vast profits, the architect becomes the developer’s frontman, squeezing as much as he can on to the site, in a pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap way. The extreme vertical axis that results is the complete opposite of what has gone on in England for the preceding several thousand years.15
The days of instinctive, improvised development, free from planning control – which produced the haphazard collection of English garden squares that Pevsner admired so much – are gone.
Towns and cities are now developed by dirigiste, centralized diktat, declaring what can and can’t be built. Gone is the instinctive, untrammelled spirit that produced the typical English look: a hodgepodge of periods and architectural features, sprouting up independently of each other, but working together in serendipitous harmony.
Ironically, it is modern nimbyist planning restrictions – a hallowed English ritual you can trace back to the seventeenth-century opposition to Christopher Wren’s City of London grid plan – that have dumped those blockish, right-angled towers of steel and concrete on England’s cities, and sprinkled faceless brick boxes around the edge of its villages.