7. A Love of the Picturesque

Are Britons here? They go abroad, feel calls
To trace old battlefields and crumbling walls.

Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust (1832)

In March 2010, a competition was held to find Britain’s most picturesque street.¹

The winner was the accurately named Shambles in York – a fourteenth-century street of old butchers’ shops, with timber-framed, jettied upper storey, leaning at drunken angles, teetering over the street from either side and practically kissing each other in mid-air above your head.

It’s serendipitous that the Shambles should win a picturesque competition. In its natural, organic, literally shambolic beauty, the street captures many of the ideals of the eighteenth-century Picturesque movement – which contributed, and still contributes, enormously to a peculiarly English type and sense of beauty.

As first defined in the 1703 Oxford English Dictionary, picturesque literally meant, ‘in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture’. The word is derived from the Italian, pittoresco, meaning ‘in the manner of a painter’. ‘Landscape’ was originally an artistic term, too, derived from a Dutch painter’s term, landskip, meaning a picture of a view, as opposed to the view itself.

But you don’t have to know the eighteenth-century origins of the term to understand that there is something more to the meaning of picturesque than mere suitability to be painted. The word encompasses an apparently happenstance, wild, accidental beauty, even if the beauty is choreographed by a hidden human hand. An asymmetrical, tumbledown Cotswolds village is picturesque; the imposing, ordered splendour of, say, Versailles isn’t.

The English aren’t good at immaculate, idealized beauty – whether it’s in their clothes, their art or their teeth. The beauty that springs up, unbidden, from apparent neglect is more their thing.

Their ideals remain those of the Picturesque movement; particularly when it comes to imitating Nature – better a splodge-shaped lake fringed with shaggy-profiled oaks than an arrow-straight canal flanked by a thousand-yard avenue of pleached limes. The English countryside as a whole – apparently wild, but in fact manicured for centuries – is innately Picturesque.

The specific aesthetic, upper-case term ‘Picturesque’ only took a proper foothold in 1782, when the Rev. William Gilpin published Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770.

But that Picturesque taste for the natural, wild, romantic look began earlier in the century. In 1711, Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, ‘For my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriance and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is … trimmed into a mathematical figure.’

At about the same time, Queen Anne did away with the symmetrical box hedges at Kensington Palace, because she didn’t like the smell. Before the natural look took over, English gardens and landscapes had been controlled with martial precision – geometrical walls shadowing those lines of clipped box hedges, alongside rectangular grids of paths and flowerbeds.

Alexander Pope, writing in 1731, suggested that the English landscape should be rich in curved lines, obscurity and variety, an evocation of rough, wild nature.

    To build, to plant, whatever you intend,

    To rear the column, or the arch to bend,

    To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot;

    In all, let Nature never be forgot.2

On the Continent, nature and surprise were alien concepts in the manmade landscape; and symptomatic of the Englishness of English literature, too, according to Voltaire.

Up to now the English have only produced irregular beauties … Their poetical genius resembles a closely grown tree planted by nature, throwing out a thousand branches here and there, and growing lustily and without rules. It dies if you try to force its nature and trim it like the gardens of Marly [a small royal palace on the edges of Paris, with elaborate, geometric gardens].

Voltaire had spotted the emerging roots of a consciously wild tradition of English gardening. That tradition had many manifestations over the next three centuries: a revolt against anything too artificial – iceberg roses, say – created by horticulturalists; a taste for the nearly wild Tenby daffodil over louder, new, pink-centred species; the popularity of English cottage gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show.

The tradition culminated in today’s ultra-English garden look: ragged-edged borders, teeming with apparently unruly plants, with rough-mown paths curving through overgrown grass dotted with wildflowers.

This natural look progressed through several degrees of cultivation. ‘English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors,’ Tom Stoppard wrote, in Arcadia, ‘Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil.’

We like to think of ourselves as a cool, level-headed, northern race, but a streak of the warm, wild south runs through our landscape. Take a look at some of Claude Lorrain’s paintings of Greece and Italy, and you could be forgiven for thinking you were in deepest Wiltshire.

Claude was a Frenchman – born in around 1600 in the Duchy of Lorrain; thus the name – who lived in Rome for most of his life. And yet several paintings, like his Landscape with the Judgement of Paris, look distinctly English.

Rambling, deciduous trees tumble down to a gently bubbling, rock-fringed lake, flanked by a ruined folly. If it weren’t for Paris’s toga and the goddesses’ topless gowns, you’d hardly believe it was ancient Greece. Greece, ancient or modern, never looked as dark green as this. This similarity – between rural England and rural Greece painted by a Frenchman to look like seventeenth-century Italy – is no coincidence.

Fifty years after his death (in 1682), Claude was central to the English appetite for contrived wilderness. Other artists also inspired the new generation of English gardens: Poussin, Gaspard Dughet and Salvator Rosa among them. Roman poetry, by Ovid, Virgil and Horace, encouraged the movement, too, as Tom Stoppard pointed out.

But it was Claude’s paintings that dominated the scene from the 1730s onwards. Twenty-seven of his paintings were sold in London auction houses between 1731 and 1759. Frederick, Prince of Wales, hoovered up as many Claudes as he could. In the early 1740s, engravings of forty-four Claude landscapes were snapped up by the public from an enterprising Covent Garden printmaker. Another successful set of Claude engravings appeared in London in 1772. As late as 1794, a drawing room in Butcher Row, east London, was painted with a mural copy of Claude’s Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus.

His Arcadian vision was copied across England in the parks of country houses, from Blenheim Palace to Stowe. At Stourhead, Wiltshire, Henry Hoare, of the banking family, was so keen on Claude that some historians have suggested the whole garden is a copy of Claude’s painting Aeneas on Delos. These new landscapes were designed to look natural: clumps of trees wrapped round lakes, clearing to reveal views to the far horizon; and, just like in Claude’s Judgement of Paris, dotted with temples.

Claude’s pictures had a particular influence on Capability Brown’s managed landscapes. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown cultivated a natural look, even if it was a carefully contrived natural look; the nickname came from his confident assertion to potential clients that their acres showed tremendous capability for improvement.

By the 1740s, Capability Brown was hard at work, following Pope’s advice and emulating Claude’s brushwork, removing walls, canals, tree-lined avenues and centralized fountains, ripping up flowerbeds and topiary, and making straight lines wavy.

A Brown-style park attached to a country house became an essential feature, with thousands of them landscaped through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, right up until the agricultural depression of the 1880s. Brown’s 280 commissions ended up covering more than 123,000 acres of Britain.

His ideas inspired gardeners across the world for a century and a half: in Les Jardins Anglais of France and the Englischer Garten of Munich; even in Central Park, New York, whose designer, Frederick Olmsted, emulated Brown’s pastoral Arcadia. Sheep were only removed from Central Park in the 1930s; Sheep Meadow, a big, open space used for concerts, demonstrations and sunbathing, survives today.

To foreign sensibilities, the English landscape, whatever it gets called in different countries, is asymmetrical, untethered and faintly shambolic, with serpentine lakes, winding drives and paths, and trees grouped in apparently random clumps around an off-centre lawn.

Brown’s intention was that you shouldn’t notice quite how contrived the ‘natural’ look was. The resulting look – still surviving at dozens of stately homes – was a smooth, rounded one, with vistas of intertwining hills, and ornamental lakes.

The newly cleared landscape was articulated with those clumps – or plumps – of exotic trees. These clumps were originally planted in deer parks in the early eighteenth century as fox coverts and game cover. Gradually, they were shifted, for scenic effect, to hilltops – where many of them survive. They’re often made up of beech trees, like the Seven Sisters on Cothelstone Hill, in the Quantocks, or Wittenham Clumps, near Abingdon, painted by Paul Nash in 1943–4.

Nature was artfully manipulated: those hills were often sculpted out of gentle slopes; the lakes formed by damming thin streams – at Petworth, West Sussex, Brown moved more than 60,000 tons of earth and laid a mile of underground brick plumbing to feed the lake.

Brown’s serpentine lakes (he designed 150 of them) and rivers were a reflection of the taste for curved lines over straight ones and, in particular, for the ‘line of beauty’, the term coined by William Hogarth in 1753 for the shallow, elegant, undulating double curve threaded through English landscapes, and English buildings.3

That same swerving line runs right back to the swirling, intertwining line of window tracery and stonework in Decorated Gothic work of the early fourteenth century, and feeds into the curving lines of Georgian lakes, paths and lawns.

‘There’s none of your straight lines here,’ wrote David Garrick and George Colman, in The Clandestine Marriage, in 1766, ‘but all taste – zigzag – crinkum crankum – in and out – right and left – to and again – twisting and turning like a worm, my lord.’

In Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, written in 1797, Xanadu’s gardens were ‘bright with sinuous rills’.

The dislike of the straight line continued into the early nineteenth century. In the 1830s, Sir George Tapps Gervis, a local landowner, started developing Bournemouth; his aim was planned asymmetry along Picturesque lines. He laid out a series of Italianate and Tudor villas, well spaced around broad, tree-lined streets that had to wind along irregular lines. There is still no formal promenade in Bournemouth for this reason; and the older bits of town are criss-crossed with curving roads and footpaths today.

By the 1750s, Capability Brown took to bringing the park, thinly disguised as countryside, right up to the walls of the house. The trick was perpetuated by the ha-ha – a hidden ditch that kept animals from the house, but allowed views to run, apparently uninterrupted, all the way from your front door to the horizon.

The ha-ha was a French device, first used in England at Stowe in 1730. Stowe was typical of a new desire for a selection of different sculptures, buildings and viewpoints scattered across the landscape. There were so many at Stowe that Horace Walpole referred to ‘the Albano glut of buildings’ there.

Stowe was where the architect and designer William Kent first ‘leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden’, as Walpole put it in 1735. All the same, it was a natural garden that demanded some pretty heavy-handed planning: in 1710, thirty-two houses and 180 people were removed, mostly to the nearby village of Dadford; the bishop refused to remove the church and so it remained at Stowe. Across England, villages were razed to make way for new parks and country houses, such as Castle Howard and Harewood House in Yorkshire, Milton Abbey in Dorset, Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire and Nuneham, Oxfordshire.

‘The omnipotent magician Brown appears,’ said the poet William Cowper of this kind of vast landscape surgery, all done with wheelbarrow and spade, ‘He speaks, the lake becomes a lawn, woods vanish, hills subside and valleys rise and streams as if created for his use.’

Others were less admiring. Even when Brown was alive, his over-designing was criticized. Another poet, Richard Owen, said he hoped he would die before Brown, because he would like to ‘see Heaven before it was “improved”’. In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard says of a Brown landscape that it’s manicured down ‘to the right amount of sheep tastefully arranged’.

Uvedale Price, one of the guiding lights of the Picturesque movement, said of Brown, ‘Whoever views objects with a painter’s eye, looks with indifference, if not with disgust, at the clump, the belts, the made water, and the eternal smoothness.’

Inspired, too, by the landscape architect Humphry Repton (1752–1818), the Picturesque movement promoted a new, rougher, wilder approach.

Landscapes should be irregular, with asymmetrical patches of trees. Repton took against right angles – his favourite approach to a house was at a 45-degree angle. Landscapes should be designed like paintings, with a foreground, middle ground and background. The garden in the foreground was allowed some ornamental planting and geometrical shaping, or dressed ground, as Repton called it. Beyond the flower beds and lawns, often marked off with a ha-ha, the middle and background should be infused with wildness and nature, full of irregularity, contrast and surprise, as opposed to predictability and symmetry. These characteristics transfer easily into human ones, peculiarly English ones – oddness, quirkiness, freedom, humour and a relaxed shabbiness.

The Picturesque movement also began the tradition of the touring holidaymaker, the igniting spark behind the modern caravan and the holiday cottage. In 1770, William Gilpin and Thomas Gray, the poet, made a trip down the Wye in search of ‘nameless beauties’, settling on the view of Goodrich Castle, Herefordshire, from the river as ‘correctly picturesque’.

Twelve years later, Gilpin published the travel book Observations on the River Wye, which formally enshrined the Picturesque movement. The Wye Valley soon became a popular holiday destination. The heritagization of the country for the benefit of the city dweller had begun; and so had the myth that rural life was a thing of bucolic pleasures, not back-breaking poverty.

Foreign holidays, too, were taking their first tentative steps, building on the established tradition of the Grand Tour. Tourism is a relatively modern creation: Thomas Coryate (b.1577) is said to be the first Englishman to have travelled purely for the sake of travelling. By the late eighteenth century, English gentlemen were travelling in droves to the Continent, clutching their Claude glasses – small, tinted mirrors which instantly converted any scene in the Roman campagna into a mini-Claude painting.

That apparently rough and ready Picturesque look wasn’t confined to the country; it crept into English towns, too. Compare the Tuileries in Paris – vegetation-free paths, dead-straight lines of geometrical parterres, and lime trees manicured to look like topiary, running at right angles to the long, straight Rue de Rivoli – with, say, St James’s Park; where willows dip clumsily into the water, and snaking, pitted paths follow the undulating line of the lake; where the oaks are left to their messy, shifting outlines, part obscuring, part shaping the ever-changing views of Buckingham Palace and the Foreign Office.

The contrast between Continental neatness and English roughness is still enshrined in the Continental mind. A friend tells me that, near her house in Zutphen, Holland, the untidy local Dutch farmer – with his ripped bin bags and defunct agricultural machinery crowding his farmyard – is known as the Engelse boer, the English farmer.

And it’s not just Dutch farmers who are neat, my friend tells me; even the builders wear neat, clean jeans and ironed shirts – unlike their English counterparts. That idea of Dutch cleanliness goes right back to seventeenth-century Delft – to domestic scenes painted by Pieter de Hooch of the town in the 1660s, with mob-hatted women dusting wood-panelled drawing rooms and scrubbing down dairies, lined with easi-clean Delft tiles.

Wrapped up with the Picturesque movement and its affection for unmanicured nature was the new cult of the ruin; and the emerging English conviction that old things are better than new ones, particularly if they’re a little battered.

There’s nothing we like more than the crumbling remains of a village deserted after the Black Death, or a field’s ridges and furrows that have survived since the Middle Ages; nothing, perhaps, except a great old building that’s been left to rack and ruin.

The English cult of the ruin goes back at least as far as 1613, when John Webster wrote in The Duchess of Malfi, ‘I do love these ancient ruines: We do never tread upon them, but we sette Our foot upon some reverend history.’

Sir John Vanbrugh, architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, was the first Englishman to campaign for the protection of threatened ruins. Preservation of old buildings is now a sacrosanct pursuit in England; but Vanbrugh was considered distinctly odd in 1709 when he tried to save Woodstock Manor, the decaying medieval pile opposite the site of Blenheim.

Old buildings, Vanbrugh said, ‘move more lively and pleasing reflections than history without their aid can do’. Invoking the same principles as the Picturesque movement that followed, he added, of the manor, ‘It would make one of the most agreeable objects that the best of landskip painters can invent.’

The Duchess of Marlborough, Blenheim’s patron, did not agree, ordering the demolition of Woodstock Manor. But the taste for ruins had begun. At nearby Rousham, Oxfordshire, in 1740, William Kent continued the trend, using two Gothic ruins as ‘objects in a landscape’.

‘The British Character. Passion for Ruins’, by Pont in Punch, 8September 1937.

This taste for ruins bled into an eighteenth-century taste for follies, too. Somewhere, buried deep in the English artistic mind, is the overpowering English desire to crack a joke. Follies are a punchline in stone – the little building on the horizon that takes the edge off the grandness of the great Palladian pile in the valley below.

There are follies all over the world, but Britain remains the international folly capital. Stowe, begun by the Temple–Grenville Whig dynasty in the eighteenth century, has more follies than anywhere else on the planet. Among the highlights are pavilions by Gibbs, Doric and Corinthian arches, a menagerie, Dido’s Cave, Vanbrugh’s Rotondo, Queen Caroline’s Monument, and temples to Venus, to Ancient and Modern Virtue, to Friendship and to British Worthies.

The taste for classical ruins was borrowed, too, from earlier landscape painters – particularly, again, from Claude Lorrain, who took a cheeringly free approach to classical archaeology.

In one picture, Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, Claude transplants the ruined arch from the Forum at Rome, and slaps it next to some of the greatest hits of imperial architecture – the Colosseum, Claudius’s aqueduct and the Ponte Nomentano. He then lumped all of this together into an elegiac, rural capriccio, very much the same effect the landscape architect Charles Bridgeman was striving for at Stowe.

Follies were originally just that – foolish buildings that showed folly in the builder. The first folly was reputedly a castle in the Welsh borders, built in 1228 by Hubert de Burgh. No sooner had he put it up than it was ordered to be demolished because a new peace treaty had been signed with the Welsh. The mix-up meant the building was given the Latin name, Stultitiam Huberti – Hubert’s Stupidity, or Hubert’s Folly.

By the time the folly craze got going in the early eighteenth century, the word had lost its critical undertone. It came to mean what it usually means now – an entertaining building, rather than a stupid one.

Fawley Court, Buckinghamshire, until recently the Divine Mercy College for the Marian Fathers, a Polish Catholic institution, is the spiritual home of the folly. And its spiritual father is John Freeman, Fawley Court’s owner, who, in 1731, was responsible for the earliest building to combine all the classic folly elements. Fawley’s sham Gothick ruin has a genuine Perpendicular Gothic window punched into a tumbledown wall. At its heart, a charming domed room is decorated in faux-primitive style with knucklebones and pebbles, its floor tiled in a swastika pattern in the days before the Hindu symbol was hijacked by the Nazis. Statues on plinths once lined a processional route leading to a chunk of altar from the ancient Greek city of Pergamon on Turkey’s Aegean coast.

The ingredients of the ideal British folly were fully realized at Fawley – a mixture of the antique, the Gothic and the jokey. Freeman’s greatest joke of all survived even his death. In 1731, he built a sham long barrow, near Fawley, at Henley. Perhaps the folly lost its comic value for the archaeologists who excavated the barrow two centuries later, when they came across an urn with an inscription carved by Freeman, admitting responsibility for the prank.

For all the pleasure of follies, they needn’t be entirely fanciful. Their beauty can outweigh their humour; as at Virginia Water, in Windsor Great Park, home to the best ancient ruins in the country – the second-century AD columns from Leptis Magna, Libya, artfully rearranged in a ruinous tableau in 1826 by Sir Jeffry Wyatville for George IV. Some columns lie broken on the ground; others stand alone, bereft of their capitals, as if this damp, forgotten corner of the Roman Empire on the Berkshire–Surrey border had been sacked by Vandals just yesterday.

The Virginia Water ruins are definitive English folly material: combining an affection for the past with a romantic attachment to decay. This peculiar love of old things overlaps with an English architectural conservatism and revivalism, entrenched more recently in our strict planning laws.

Our obsession with history is unusual, even when it comes to its academic study. Political science is a much more popular subject across the Continent. In Germany, in around 1900, political science was deliberately substituted for history – then considered to be an ungainly mixture of anecdotes and pointless articles. In many other Continental countries, history is a subject that stops at the end of primary school.

Even our electricity pylons hark back to a pre-electric age. The first generation of pylons was introduced in Britain in July 1928, in Bonnyside, Edinburgh; the last of the 26,000 pylons was installed in the New Forest in September 1933.

Planners insisted the new 150ft-tall pylons should be prettier than existing Russian and American designs. So Sir Reginald Blomfield, the conservative, classical architect who built Lambeth Bridge and the Menin Gate at Ypres, was brought in to design gradually narrowing, steel-lattice pylons – evoking the shape of the original ancient pulon, the Egyptian-style doorway that’s narrower at the top than at the bottom.

The poet Stephen Spender described the Blomfield pylons as giant, nude girls. In October 2011, it was announced that the next generation of pylons would be rather slighter girls – a third shorter than the old ones, built to a simpler, T-shaped design, designed by Bystrup, a Danish firm.

Throughout recent design history, the English have been unusually given to repeated imitations of a previous age. Three of the great national clichés – the double-decker bus, the black cab and the red phone box – all satisfy the English desire for old-fashioned things.

The double-decker, unchanged from its 1954 original design, lasted on London streets until 2005. Boris Johnson’s replacement, unveiled in February 2012, is directly inspired by it.

Even the curved top of the phone box – the red K6 designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1935 – was in conscious imitation of the early-nineteenth-century ‘trampoline ceiling’ in Sir John Soane’s house, now the Sir John Soane Museum, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

And the current black cab, the TX4 (2007 to date), and its predecessors (the TXII, 2002–6, and the TX1, 1997–2002) are in direct imitation of the Austin FX4, the definitive cab, produced from 1958 to 1997. That in turn was an imitation of the even more old-fashioned Austin FX3 (1948–58).

This taste for historical revivalism has been strong in England for centuries. It’s remarkable, even if we don’t remark on it much, that the train stations of the great new railway age in the mid- to late nineteenth century were built to look like medieval Gothic cathedrals. John Betjeman pointed out that Liverpool Street Station was built on the Latin Cross plan of a Gothic cathedral, complete with triplets of Early English Gothic lancet windows; the original station canteen was exactly where the altar would be. St Pancras’s train shed has a pointed Gothic arch, while its attached hotel, the Midland Grand, was a confection of Venetian and Lombardic Gothic, combined with details borrowed from Westminster Abbey, and from Winchester Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral.

Historical revivalism was at work through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. England’s Palladian country houses were inspired by Andrea Palladio’s late-sixteenth-century palazzi in the Veneto; Victorian Gothic Revival churches happily imitated fourteenth-century designs – and the Gothic Revival appeared in England half a century before it materialized on the Continent.

It doesn’t matter much if those historical styles are mixed up in the same building, either. Perhaps the most famous building in the country, the Houses of Parliament, is a mixture of Perpendicular Gothic, in its detail, and classical symmetry, in its plan, reflecting the tastes of its two architects: the arch-Gothic revivalist, A. W. Pugin, and the classically minded Sir Charles Barry.

St Paul’s Cathedral, for all its vogueish, early-eighteenth-century classical skin, is built on the archaic Latin Cross ground plan of the Gothic cathedral; and it’s supported by another Gothic device, the flying buttress.4

Jokey historical buildings, follies included, go down particularly well with the English – like the McDonald’s on the London Road, leading out of Oxford, done up in gleeful OTT Mock Tudor style.

England was the first country, in fact, to mix architectural function and form so dramatically. Nineteenth-century cotton warehouses in Manchester and Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs, like the Reform and the Travellers, were dressed in the clothes of Genoese merchant palazzi. Victorian Holloway jail, in north London, was disguised as a medieval castle. The 1762 summerhouse at Kew Gardens was designed by Sir William Chambers as a ten-storey Chinese pagoda. Those ten storeys also expose the knockabout, carefree English approach to architecture; genuine pagodas are supposed to have an odd number of storeys, the implication being that only God can provide the perfection associated with an even number.

The English love to pump up the fantasy in these playful buildings. In places like Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, the Gothic Revival got much more fantastical than its original medieval inspiration ever did, reaching Disneyland extremes of inflated machicolations, gingerbread crenellations and the sort of candle-snuffer towers designed for wimple-wearing maidens to let their hair down from. But, still, this is essentially high-camp larkiness; the innate artistic conservatism of the English means they are reluctant to create, or fully embrace, serious, revolutionary artistic and architectural styles.

So, our foray into baroque architecture at the turn of the eighteenth century produced some fine, original architecture by Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Wren and Thomas Archer. But it barely matched the frothy excesses of German and Italian baroque. Evelyn Waugh said of the baroque that it ‘has never had a place in England; its brief fashion was of short duration; it has been related to the holidays – a memory of the happy days in sunglasses, washing away the dust of the Southern roads with heady southern wines’.5

Hogarth thought the baroque never took off properly in England because ‘Religion, the great promoter of this stile in other countries, in this rejected it.’ For much the same reason, austere, iconophobic English Protestant churches are short on the paintings and frescoes that fill Italian Catholic churches.

That innate conservatism explains, too, why we never hit the heights of German, wedding-cake rococo. Our monarchy and aristocracy, reined in by the Civil War and an increasingly democratic Parliament, didn’t have the Continental degree of untrammelled power; power not only over the people, but also over interior decoration. In those countries where baroque and rococo decor ran riot – Austria, France, Italy, Spain and the constituent parts of Germany – their blue-blooded patrons ended up paying for their excesses with their heads, or at least with their political power.

Our architectural ardour is also cooled by our geographical position. Before the early-seventeenth-century arrival of Inigo Jones, the first British architect to understand classicism, England was essentially a northern Gothic country.

Until Inigo Jones, our towns and cities were more Germanic- and Dutch-looking than Italian; more curly gables and higgledy-piggledy half-timbering than symmetrical columns and neat pediments. Compare that look with ultra-classical Rome, which still today has only one Gothic church, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, also Rome’s first Gothic church when it was finished in 1370.

There had been earlier bursts of classicism before Inigo Jones. There’s a strong classical feeling to the tomb of Henry VII in the Henry VII Chapel, in Westminster Abbey, sculpted by an Italian, Pietro Torrigiano, in 1512. The pilasters on the Christ Church Gateway at Canterbury, dated 1517, are among the first substantial classical architectural details in the country.

Still, Jones was the first English architect to build English classical buildings which completely, and correctly, absorbed the rules of classical architecture as they had been developed in ancient Greece and Rome, and Renaissance Italy.

For some time after Jones’s first buildings went up – the Queen’s House, Greenwich (1619), the Banqueting House, Whitehall (1622), and the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace (1627) – England remained a Gothic country.

Claude de Jongh’s 1630 painting of London Bridge shows a Gothic city of medieval, half-timbered houses with pointed gables. In the whole cityscape, there is just one classical building, on the river bank; the building, on the site of Cannon Street train station, no longer survives.

Within 200 years of this picture being painted, England had become a classical country, principally through the enormous success of the classically proportioned terraced house. These days, very few of those pre-1600, Gothic buildings, churches apart, survive in our big cities – they are now largely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical metropolises, notwithstanding the survival of Gothic cathedral cities, like Norwich and York. We had been obsessed with classical literature since the Middle Ages; after Inigo Jones, we became obsessed with classical architecture, too.

Despite all this, we retained elements of that northern, Gothic coolness in our architecture. Our medieval churches and cathedrals of course remained Gothic – and the Victorian imitations of those churches, during the Gothic Revival of the mid-nineteenth century, are necessarily Gothic, too. The rural skyline is still punctured by Gothic church spires; much of the urban skyline, too.

In his fifty-one City churches, built after the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren may have used classical features, principally Doric and Ionic pilasters, but those pilasters were wrapped around the essentially Gothic skeleton of a spiky spire, an outline never seen in ancient Greece or Rome.

English villages, which mostly avoided bombing or modernization through the centuries, are more likely to be filled with pre-1600 cottages. That’s why a Brueghel, painted in Gothic northern Europe, can be easily imagined in a rural Suffolk village or the Yorkshire Dales; less so in Birmingham or Leeds.

But even those Gothic, pre-Inigo Jones houses were part-classicized a long time later. The biggest alteration was the replacement of the diamond-paned, casement window – pointy and Gothic in feeling – with the even, symmetrical, classical sash window, introduced from France in the late seventeenth century.

When Charles I was beheaded at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, in 1649, he stepped to his execution out of a first-floor casement window on to a raised stage, in order to raise viewing figures and ensure that word got round that the king was really dead. Half a century later, those windows were replaced by sashes, which remain there today.

This bodged combination of classicism and northern Gothic, of the fiery south and the cold, puritanical, conservative north, makes for an unusually English look. That English conservatism, along with what you might call English preservationism, also means that building styles tend to last for unusually long periods.

Charles I stepped through a casement window to be executed at the Banqueting House in 1649. Inigo Jones designed the steeply pitched roof to cater for the English rain.

In 1362, Henry Yevele, Master Mason of the King’s Works, designed the nave of Westminster Abbey in almost exact imitation of the earlier Gothic part of the building that had been started a century before. English Gothic architecture barely changed between Gloucester Cathedral’s chancel in 1350 and its Lady Chapel in 1450. The principles of Palladian architecture, too, remained much the same from 1715 for a century or so.

For all their foreign origins, both Gothic architecture and Palladianism morphed into idiosyncratically English styles. They worked, and can even be considered archetypally English, because they were playful, instinctive impersonations of foreign influences, which were then adapted to accommodate the English weather, English taste and the logistics of everyday English life.

That peculiarly English, alluring accommodation of influences doesn’t come through in more carefully planned, consciously old-fashioned, modern pastiches, executed in a short time. That’s the problem with somewhere like Poundbury, Prince Charles’s model village in Dorset, begun in 1994 to a plan by Leon Krier, and still expanding.

Poundbury may be built in imitation of the classic organic hodgepodge of the traditional English town, with curving, asymmetrical streets, alongside a mock-eighteenth-century, Palladian fire station and a faux-medieval town hall. But what jars at Poundbury is the impractical, slavish imitation; like the installation of modern windows, blocked up in emulation of original windows elsewhere that had been blocked up from 1696 to 1851 for a genuine reason – to dodge window tax.

You get the same awkward shiver down the spine in the new generation of American suburbs, designed to look like a series of Victorian villages, and blended together to produce seamless, sprawling developments. Something that feels harmonious when it has been built up naturally and organically over several centuries feels artificial when it’s all built in one go. The English like oldness – and modern tributes to oldness – but they don’t go for elaborate, over-designed tweeness.

This desire to copy or adapt the old, rather than plunge headlong into the avant garde, is for a simple reason: England is an old country, still full of old buildings, despite the modern horrors inflicted on many towns.

It also helps that England can still, just about, afford to be proud about its past. For at least the last century, it’s been on the right side in its conflicts, certainly in the First and Second World Wars, anyway. There’s little need for an English equivalent of the German compound noun Vergangenheitsbewältigung – ‘coming to terms with the past’. Germans have had to use the word rather a lot since 1945.

A preponderance of old stones in this country makes it harder to insert new stones among them and still achieve any sort of harmony. The childish steel and glass tower blocks recently built by the Candy Brothers at One Hyde Park in central London – or the bright-orange one built by Renzo Piano at Central St Giles near Tottenham Court Road – look particularly hideous and infantile, when surrounded by older, more sophisticated, low-rise buildings.

New York and Chicago – for all their beauty – can absorb modern ugliness better because they are modern cities that have been high-rise for almost a century; the edges of their uglier skyscrapers are literally eclipsed by their taller neighbours, as opposed to standing embarrassingly proud of a predominantly low-slung cityscape like London’s.

Most English cities have been scarred with some modern ugliness – more scarred than, say, French or Italian ancient cities. But the long continuity of monarchy, government and property rights in England means that few other countries have as ancient and continuous an administrative skeleton buried beneath the surface, ugly or not.

Much of that skeleton is dictated by geology or medieval law. Many parish boundaries, including hedges, earthworks and roads, were built by the Anglo-Saxons and Romans, and some date back to the Iron Age. A long stretch of the border between Lincolnshire and Leicestershire still runs along the Bronze Age track connecting the River Trent with the River Welland. The Roman road of Watling Street marks out the boundaries of twenty-five parishes.

As early as 1180, the parish boundaries of England were largely settled. A zig-zagging parish boundary suggests the land was divided into fields before the boundary was laid down, with the boundary tracking the ancient field edge. Earth banks in the middle of ancient woodland often mark parish boundaries, too.

Parish boundaries were also dictated by agricultural needs. On the Berkshire Downs, a single, long, narrow parish might stretch from the damp clay on the valley floor right up to a patch of field, high on the chalky uplands.6 In the Yorkshire Dales, the long, thin parishes are defined by the natural lines of the river’s edge and the watershed at the top of the hill; an area that neatly encompasses summer and winter grazing, as well as access to water.

Other boundaries, like the banks and ditches built by the Anglo-Saxons to mark the edge of their property, also survive; not least Offa’s Dyke, which runs in an impressively straight line through the swerving, chaotic boundary of the modern Welsh border. Armourwood Lane, near Thorverton, in east Devon, follows the seventh-century boundary of Exeter Abbey’s estate. The border between medieval monastery estates in Yorkshire, once owned by Fountains Abbey and Bolton Abbey, are still marked with ancient stone walls.

Other countries may have older buildings and landscape features, but they are less likely to be used for their original purpose, because of a greater incidence of war, revolution and invasion. England has been much battered by development since the Second World War; still, before then, it was remarkably unchanged. Queen Elizabeth I would have recognized much of England in 1945; even Queen Boadicea could have found her way round large areas of the country.

A surprising number of ancient English buildings retain their original use. Windsor Castle is the largest and oldest occupied castle in the world – there are older castles, but none that has survived for so long, largely intact, with their gilded occupants still in situ. There are more ancient parks than Richmond Park, south-west London; very few that have been so protected for so many centuries that, like Richmond, they have never been ploughed.

This liking for the past – for keeping things as they used to be – is reflected in our house-buying patterns. Only in England can oldness be sold as a term of approval by estate agents. ‘Georgian’, our favourite building style, is, after all, just another word for a building that’s more than 180 years old.

The British pay a 27 per cent premium, an average of nearly £50,000, to live in spa towns, with their older, prettier buildings: properties in Boston Spa cost 85 per cent more than homes in the rest of West Yorkshire. Across the country, houses built before 1919 have risen in value by more than 450 per cent over the last twenty-five years, more than any other type of property: partly because there are fewer of them, they’re bigger and they’re in better locations, but also because we so much prefer older styles.7

We even prefer our new buildings to look old. The first twentieth-century building to be acquired by the National Trust, in 1974, was a mock-medieval castle – Castle Drogo, Devon, finished by Edwin Lutyens in 1930 – rather than an archetypal modern building, like, say, a Bauhaus block of flats or a nuclear power plant. The rebuilding of Shakespeare’s Globe on the south bank of the Thames in 1996, the first thatched building to be built in London for 330 years, was another archetypal blast from the past.

Our love of old things leads to another English anomaly: living in a conservation area actually adds value to your house, even though it imposes restrictions on what you can and cannot do to your home.

Introduced by the 1967 Civil Amenities Act, conservation areas are designated by local authorities and English Heritage. Those authorities then control all demolition or developments, including the protection of trees. Any residents must get permission before they can make even small changes to the area’s appearance: like cladding, new windows or satellite dishes visible from the street; all considered a bit déclassé, precisely because they’re just too new.

Only in England is there something a little naff about having too sophisticated a hi-fi or too many television channels. Only in England are you more likely to find satellite dishes on a poor home than a rich one. In America, it’s the other way round: richer houses have cable; poorer homes can only afford terrestrial.

Still, everything new grows old some day. Things that were hated when new become cherished once they’ve developed the patina of age. When gasometers were introduced to England in 1812, with the founding of the London Gas Light and Coke Company, they were thought to be horrible eyesores. By the time they were dismantling them at King’s Cross to build the new Regent Quarter in 2011, there was a massive, and successful, conservation campaign for them to be reinstated.

The last 1,600 gas lamps in London are much prized, too: the ones outside Buckingham Palace, with royal crowns on top, are now listed. A similar turnaround in attitude applied to early electric street lamps, first introduced in London in 1878, and, indeed, for the power stations that produced their electricity.

It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station, now Tate Modern, was built in 1947 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott to burn oil right on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s, in the heart of the City. The era when central London was rich in industry seems remarkably recent; not least since Gilbert Scott’s other great power station, Battersea, built in 1929, was less than a mile upstream. In the 1970s, more than 1.1 million people in London, almost a third of the workforce, worked in manufacturing; in January 2011, 117,000 did, 2.5 per cent of the total.

There were objections when both power stations went up. But now, given the passage of time – not very much time; just over sixty years in Bankside’s case – both power stations have been admitted to the pantheon of much-loved English buildings.

This conscious preference for old over new has been around in England since at least the seventeenth century. In 1625, Charles I fitted out Dover Castle in suitable style for his new queen, Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV, King of France. The queen was clearly disappointed. ‘The castle is an old building made à l’antique,’ wrote Leveneur de Tillières, the queen’s chamberlain, ‘where the queen was badly lodged with worse furnishing and her train treated with much less magnificence than was appropriate, considering the importance of the occasion.’8

That antiquarian taste is also allied to a reluctance to embrace creature comforts. When it comes to plumbing, we have lagged behind America for over a century. When the Savoy opened in 1889, it was the first British hotel to have electric light throughout instead of gas, hot and cold running water, and en suite bathrooms. Still, only some rooms were en suite – there were sixty-seven bathrooms for 250 apartments. All these creature comforts were introduced long after they had become standard in much humbler hotels in America.

One reason why the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, reopened in 2011, had to close in 1935, after only sixty years in business, was because it didn’t have any en suite bathrooms. It originally only had eight shared bathrooms for 300 rooms. The newly renovated building has just thirty-eight rooms, but they all have en-suite bathrooms, swimming with unguents.

The English still love old buildings, like the Midland Grand, that look charmingly asymmetric and picturesque on the outside; it’s just that they’ve lost the taste for shambolic plumbing on the inside.