England stops looking like England. Historical references disappear, as Edwardian Queen Anne gives way to postwar concrete and glass. Extract from Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s ‘Street of Taste’, in John Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste, 1970.
For the first time I feel somehow
That it
isn’t going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be
bricked in
Except for the tourist parts…
And that will be England gone.
Philip Larkin, ‘Going, Going’ (1972)
The man in the white gloves doesn’t have his lunch in the King’s Arms in Oxford any more. Nineteen years ago, he’d be in there every day – pristine gloves, bottle-green suit, cream waistcoat, watch chain, stick-thin, pencil moustache, blanched complexion, in his late forties, a bit like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice.
Without fail he’d have the same thing for lunch – the roast of the day, followed by an apple which he’d carefully slice into discs before eating, gloves still on. I never talked to him but I liked the reliability of his odd presence, and I missed him on my return there recently. But, then again, where would he go these days after lunch? He didn’t look like a Starbucks man.
Oxford twenty years ago, like so many pretty, provincial towns – Cheltenham, Guildford, Bath – was a perfect setting for the odd, the eccentric and the bohemian. I didn’t realize it during my student days, but in 1993 I’d caught the tail end of a process that had been going on for half a century: the genteel decline of Middle England that produced all the right conditions for the down-at-heel yet civilized bohemian.
Those provincial towns long remained much as they’d been since the war – slightly broken-down, a mixture of shabby pubs, second-hand bookshops and antique clothes shops, with a selection of cheap lodgings where your average bohemian could survive, within shambling distance of the town centre.
Architecturally handsome, their medieval and Georgian buildings provided enough amiable places to browse in. The harmless, the talented, the mildly alcoholic, the intelligent yet unemployable eccentrics: they all flocked to the elegantly decayed bits of those towns.
All in all, they were the perfect habitat for people like my friend in the white gloves.
Anthony Powell caught the type in the literary journalist X. Trapnel in A Dance to the Music of Time. Based on the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912–64), Trapnel leads a life of unrelenting observance of the bohemian code – heavy drinking, high-minded squalor, debts, philandering, shuttling from boarding house to hotel. Dressed in a pale, ochre-coloured tropical suit and black RAF greatcoat, dark-blue sports shirt, an emerald green tie patterned with naked women, and grey suede brothel-keepers, Trapnel spends the day drifting from pub to pub in Fitzrovia.
He lives near the knuckle, as Powell puts it, surviving on the odd book review. His lodgings are always disgusting – ‘peeling wallpaper, bare boards, a smell of damp, cigarette smoke, stale food’.1
Classic shabby chic, in other words; and not so heavy on the chic.
What’s particularly striking now is where those lodgings were: Holland Park, Camden, a flat in Notting Hill, a bleak spot in Bloomsbury. Today, the list reads like a gazetteer of fashionable, expensive London.
Trapnel finally washes up in Little Venice, now impossibly grand, but then (the book is set just after the war) it ‘had not yet developed into something of a quartier chic. Before the war, the indigenous population, full of time-honoured landladies, immemorial whores, long undisturbed in surrounding premises, had already begun to give place to young married couples, but buildings already tumbledown had now been further reduced by bombing.’
Since X. Trapnel’s day, soaring property prices have worked their way across London, sweeping away the boho-intellectual world with it. In March 2011, George Orwell’s once run-down house in Gloucester Road, South Kensington – a 1,903-square-foot, Georgian semi-detached house – sold for £2.2m, way beyond the pocket of the modern journalist or author.
The X. Trapnels have long since fled these bits of London, all now pure banker/lawyer territory. Their old haunts, in the haut bohemia of Soho, are also collapsing. The Colony Room Club, second home to Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard, closed in 2008, shortly after celebrating its sixtieth birthday. The Coach and Horses has lost much of its allure since its rude, popular landlord, Norman Balon, saw out his licence in May 2006; the French House is now packed with binge drinkers and tourists.
And the X. Trapnels don’t gather in provincial bohemia any more, either. The very rich, who also like pretty buildings, have taken their place. Hedge fund managers live in the sprawling north Oxford houses once owned by penniless dons. Russian oligarchs fly in by helicopter to their children’s sports days at nearby prep schools.
In the cold, clear light of the credit crunch, it’s easier to take stock of the vast tide of money that rushed through these places over the past two decades. The invasion of the chain shops is well documented. But what’s remarkable is just how saturated these once odd, quirky towns now are with them, and quite how chi-chi these particular chain shops are.
There’s a Farrow & Ball paint shop in what was the rough part of Bath. Seaside towns – which became artistic colonies and, by extension, bohemian boltholes because of their beauty and cheapness – have been cleaned up and turned into kitsch versions of themselves.
Even with depressed property prices, no penniless artist could now afford to live in Newlyn near Penzance, home to the Newlyn School of painters in the late nineteenth century, or St Ives, also in Cornwall, colonized from the 1920s onwards by the potter Bernard Leach and the painter Ben Nicholson. These towns are now the victims of their bohemian fame, the haunts of weekending professionals who like to take in those artists’ works at Tate St Ives.
Jamie Oliver has opened up one of his Italian restaurants in dingy George Street in Oxford. The area hasn’t been as grand as this since the mid-1920s, when the undergraduate John Betjeman frequented the ultra-chic restaurant named after the street. There he spent ‘evenings dining with the Georgeoisie. Open, swing doors, upon the lighted “George” and whiff of vol-au-vent! Behold Harold Acton and the punkahs wave: “My dears, I want to rush into the fields and slap raw meat with lilies.”’
Anything a little downmarket, dusty or cheap can’t survive in the shade of the onslaught of the glossy, the new and expensive. The majestic, rambling second-hand Oxford bookshop opposite Balliol College didn’t stand a chance against the tide of new money. A boutique hedge fund has set up shop on the premises instead.
The old bookshop lingers on, in much reduced circumstances, with smaller premises, in a less fashionable part of the town. The same goes for the book warehouses on the edge of town by the railway station – a once scrubby bit of land, now home to the Business School, a gleaming limestone ziggurat with a green and yellow glass spire, built with £23m from its billionaire benefactor, Wafic Said.
I don’t have anything against Mr Saïd – in fact his ziggurat is attractive. It’s just that the city has changed. In a recent evening spent at an Anglo-German conference in Lincoln College, I met several students from the Business School. One was at the university’s Environmental Change Institute; another doing a doctorate on Vladimir Putin and the possibility that he was setting up a gas cartel along the lines of OPEC.
All this is very up to date and, perhaps, useful. But somewhere along the line, education for education’s sake – a bit of theology, a bit of Greek, anything at all that’s a little interesting and a little useless, a little bohemian, in fact – seems to have gone by the wayside, along with the dusty bookshops and their broken customers.
Even Oxford Prison, a tremendously gloomy nineteenth-century job straight out of Porridge – it was in fact the prison used to house Noël Coward’s Mr Bridger in The Italian Job – has become a hotel.
English beauty was traditionally an under-designed, accidental beauty – like the beauty of the classic English field gate, which happens to have the same aspect ratio (the proportion of a rectangle’s shorter dimension to its longer one) as 35mm film, old-fashioned televisions and human vision.2
That accidental beauty is increasingly being regulated out of existence. In 2010, Herefordshire Council issued a listed-building enforcement notice against Alison Hall and James Rogers, of Acton Beauchamp, near Bromyard, for painting their 400-year-old cottage pink; they ordered them to paint it white like their neighbours.
It’s true that most rural cottages were originally lime-washed and so turned out to be white. But that colour was a combination of accident and pragmatism; it wasn’t laid down by diktat. Now preserved in aspic for long enough, this happenstance beauty has been set in stone by unnecessarily prescriptive legislation.
The antiseptic spick-and-spanification of provincial England has destroyed the pleasing air of decay. Gone with it are the anaemic men in cream waistcoats, the plump red-faced men in tweed jackets, cords and jerseys in Turkish carpet patterns; often gay, usually clever, a bit prickly, working off their hangovers in those bookshops or prep schools up the Woodstock Road, still cursing that doctorate in Anglo-Saxon linguistics they never got round to finishing thirty years ago.
I imagine they still eke out a living somewhere in these pretty provincial towns. It’s not as if the chain stores have had the bohemian class machine-gunned; just that the town centre no longer has anything of interest to draw the bohemians in. The pubs they used to stretch out the day in are still there – but loud music and the smoking ban have driven them out of the snug.
All this isn’t necessarily for the worse. The grey and brown postwar dreariness of Oxford I saw in 1993 was more limited and grimmer in many ways than the spruced-up version of 2011.
In 1945, there was one French restaurant, the Elizabeth, in Oxford, on St Aldate’s, and one curry house, the Taj Mahal, in the centre of town, on the Turl. In 1993, things had barely changed. The Elizabeth was still there, the number of curry houses in the centre of town had doubled to a grand total of two, and there was a new Pizza Express. Nowadays, Oxford is bulging with banks converted into restaurants, a transformation also undergone by Chelsea, once, long, long ago, the bohemian heart of London.
There will always be run-down boarding houses and new-build residential developments in both cities, but they are increasingly on the far-flung fringes of town. Oxford’s last outpost of cheap living is the concrete suburban jungle of Blackbird Leys, and it’s a long time since any self-respecting blackbird chose to roost there, let alone a bohemian aesthete. Bohemians, like blackbirds, cannot survive when their habitats are smothered, by either concrete or by retail outlets.
Will they start flocking back to their old roosts as those shops are wiped out by the credit crunch? I don’t think so. It’s too late. Bohemia has been outpriced, forced into exile, and faces extinction – thanks to that extreme rise in house prices.
That rise has massively affected upmarket rural England, too. Country houses bought for a pittance – four or five thousand pounds – in the 1940s and 1950s, are now selling for two or three million pounds. Fifty years ago, these gold-plated nest eggs were in an awful state, with jungly trees tapping at the leaded window panes, lethal Edwardian wiring and dry rot seeping through the walls. Some of the houses were still scarred by open fires lit by soldiers during wartime requisition.
After the war, people thought these white elephants were doomed to decay and demolition. Thousands of houses fell to the wrecking ball; but those that avoided it have never been in better shape, despite the recession.
A quiet renaissance of the English country house has taken place; owners of big houses have discovered that, if they hold on to their properties for decades, the roof over their heads is a far better investment than shares, bank accounts or premium bonds.
What happened to bring about this great boom? There are two main factors: the sheer amount of money created around Britain over the past decade, much of it arriving in the pockets of foreign plutocrats; and, secondly, the sheer lack of cash in Britain after the Second World War, which sent property prices plunging in the first place. We may have won the war, but we did so at great expense.
Britain was nearly broke after six years of fighting; and that applied to the rich, too, who were selling off and demolishing country houses in their thousands.
When Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited in 1945, he was convinced that ‘The ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century.’
Gradual decay set in through the 1950s and 1960s, accelerated by the decline in domestic staff. But, by the 1970s, central heating was getting cheaper, and easier to install; and labour-saving devices, like Hoovers, had made a huge difference. The prosperity of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and improvements in transport, increased the value of these houses exponentially.
The really big money, though, came in the last decade – a decade of enormous bankers’ bonuses, a decade when London became the international capital of the world.
Ever since the crash of 2008, even more foreign investors have flooded into the property market, as British tycoons felt the pain of the recession. In 2010, only 26 per cent of central London properties were sold to the British; before 2008, it was 40 per cent.3 The new buyers tended to be the international super-rich, the sort with a number of houses across the world. That’s why, if you go through Belgravia at night, you won’t see any lights on in many of the houses.
We might like playing Monopoly in Britain – and owning hotels in Mayfair – but, in reality, Mayfair and all the other trophy locations in London are on the whole owned by foreigners. Just look at one well-known property buyer – Saif Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi’s son, who bought a twelve-bedroom house in Hampstead for £11m in 2009.
Property prices, and the number of homes built each year, are the key not just to the extinction of bohemia, but also to the modern look of English towns. In the last half-century, average British house prices have grown by 335 per cent.
House price growth has long outrun earnings growth. On top of that, the rate of building of new houses has fallen considerably. Thirteen million homes have been built in the last fifty years in Britain, but the rate of building has slowed to a trickle: there were 425,800 new houses in 1968 (the peak year for private and council house building); only 156,816 in 2009. House-building is now at its lowest level since 1946.
The type of new houses has changed enormously, too. The number of new bungalows and semi-detached houses has slumped over the past thirty years, while the number of detached houses has grown. And the amount of single-person households has soared. In 2009, 231,490 couples got married – the lowest total since 1895.4
With the size of the housing stock lagging behind the growth in population – combined with greater single occupancy and the long-standing English preference for houses over flats – not only are more people living in smaller houses, but also more and more cars are piling up on the street outside.
Those new houses and buildings that have been built in the last half-century have vastly changed the look of England, largely thanks to the widespread use of steel and concrete. These materials – which don’t belong to a particular country, let alone a particular county, as stone, clay and timber do – lend international anonymity to the modern townscape.
Iron had been used extensively on English buildings since the late eighteenth century – the cast iron bridge at Ironbridge, Shropshire, went up in 1779. Corrugated iron was first developed in 1830 to make lightweight roofs. Rolled wrought-iron was then used at the Palm House of Kew Gardens in 1848.
Once steel could be mass-produced, thanks to the Bessemer process, the first steel-framed buildings went up – among the first in England was the Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly, built in 1906.
Concrete was first used in England on a major scale by Sir Robert Smirke in 1817 for the foundations of the Millbank Penitentiary in Pimlico, on the site of the Tate Gallery. The first concrete buildings are even prized these days: in September 2010, a derelict 1873 concrete house, in Lordship Lane, Dulwich, listed Grade II, was saved from demolition because of its early use of the material.
Steel-reinforced concrete was used by François Hennebique for the first time, in France in the 1880s. It appeared in England in 1899 in a railway warehouse at Brentford Dock. There’s no reason why the material should necessarily produce ugliness. The Liver Building, in Liverpool, built in 1911 by Walter Aubrey Thomas, remains one of the city’s finest buildings, best known for the pair of pale green copper Liver birds flapping their wings on the towering twin domes.
Clothed in high-Edwardian baroque detail – all Doric pilasters, chunky volutes and deep-shadowed cornices – the Liver Building is, underneath, a distinctly modern building, sophisticated enough to vie with anything built at the time in New York. Beneath the 14in-thick skin of decorative granite lies the steel-reinforced concrete frame. The concrete was mixed on the spot, in the basement, with a new floor completed every nineteen days, showing what a staggeringly efficient material concrete is.
The Liver Building was the tallest building in the city for the next half a century, a slice of Manhattan on the Mersey – the papers at the time certainly called it a skyscraper. But it has none of the bleakness of the tower blocks that followed in its wake.
In fact, England didn’t come off too badly in the 1930s, compared with the Continent. The first white concrete box, New Ways, Northampton, was designed by Peter Behrens in 1925, but the boxes took some time to migrate across the country. Ours was a delayed adoption of modernism – another example of innate English conservatism when it comes to embracing revolutionary artistic and architectural styles.
To begin with, in the 1930s, we adapted those white concrete boxes with traditional, historicist, English accessories: brick and timber cladding. The real horrors only started to appear after the war.
Coventry’s first postwar city architect was pleased to see that the bombs gave him the opportunity to put his brutal plans into action. Air raids on Birmingham and London also opened up yawning acres of building space for the new nihilism. Until 1978, a quarter of medieval Bristol, bombed during the war, was given over to car parks until 1978.
Some sensible postwar urban rebuilding was done, compatible with the surrounding housing stock. Several architects even did the old English thing, and looked to the past. Basil Spence was inspired by Norman murals in a Sussex church when he designed the new Coventry Cathedral after its medieval predecessor was wrecked in the war.
In 1954 came the first tower blocks – the Government’s replacement housing for people made homeless by slum clearances. These were the optimistic days when tower blocks were envisaged as streets-in-the-sky; magical, amenity-crammed, modern alternatives to the old, run-down terraced houses.
The 1957 Park Hill estate in Sheffield set the pattern for the next decade of council house tower blocks across the country. Lifts took the blocks higher and higher; the taller the tower blocks got, the bigger the government subsidies.
England stops looking like England. Historical references disappear, as Edwardian Queen Anne gives way to postwar concrete and glass. Extract from Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s ‘Street of Taste’, in John Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste, 1970.
As well as being plain ugly, the concrete, steel and glass of postwar tower blocks and office buildings don’t vary much – relentlessly right-angled, relentlessly straight-lined. Ian Nairn (1930–83), the architectural critic, coined the term ‘Subtopia’ for this new generation of identikit buildings – ‘Its symptom will be that the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton … Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern.’
That was part of the problem with the twentieth-century council estates: they did away with regional differences. The inter-war housing estates in the Bristol suburbs looked exactly like the ones in Birmingham and Nottingham.
The sheer size of these estates could be overwhelming, too. The 1919 Housing Act, requiring councils to build houses for the poor, was followed more assiduously in some counties than others. Norfolk built so many between the wars and after the Second World War that, by the late 1950s, 40 per cent of Norwich’s population lived in council houses, the highest percentage in Britain.
A council building boom also meant fewer people lived in each house; 3.1 people per house in Norwich in 1957 was then the lowest rate in the country. All good news – if only the new wave of council houses had been built with more variety and beauty.
The earliest rural council houses, built just before the First World War, usually close to the middle of the town or village, often had a vegetable patch at the back and a decent front garden. Those high standards progressively declined. Massive demand, combined with misguided architects, led to cheap, concrete mass housing. The destructive views of those fashionable architects defeated the residents’ natural desire for beauty and privacy – a desire much better accommodated in those inter-war suburban houses, so mocked by withering intellectuals.
In the 1960s, English town planners and city architects began to embrace, with plenty of zeal, if not much sophistication, the new minimalism of Le Corbusier’s International Style, and Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus School. Simple, stripped-down buildings that might just about work as small, stand-alone houses – like Le Corbusier’s 1929 Villa Savoye in Poissy, France – did not work when inflated on to a vast tower-block scale, overpowering the low-rise terrace scale of England’s Georgian and Victorian cities.
The damp northern climate had its effect, too, on our versions of modern architecture. The white walls that are so effective, and reflective, in southern heat, became stained and riddled with damp; the flat roofs leaked.
Not built for English weather: the flat roofs and white walls of Osbert Lancaster’s Twentieth-Century Functional.
Planners weren’t content with just erecting tower blocks. Alongside them, they lined up the other three horsemen of the apocalypse – the ring road, the urban highway and the shopping centre.
These didn’t just hit the big cities – like poor Birmingham with its soul-destroying Bullring, a far cry from its medieval origins as an arena for bull-baiting; or London, deeply scarred by Westway, the continuation of the A40 that sliced through the city centre in 1970.
Regional towns got it in the neck too. In the early 1960s, High Wycombe got the full works – in 1960, a big chunk of the oldest part of town was demolished and replaced by a ring road and hideous shopping centre. Two years later, another part of the old town centre was hacked away, to house the horrible County Offices and another soul-sapping shopping centre.
Similar treatment was meted out to Norwich in the late 1950s and 1960s, through the savage dreams of H. C. Rowley, the City Engineer and Planning Officer from 1944 to 1966. Slough got hit, in 1968, by the architects, C. H. Elsom and Partners, who replaced the High Street – the old Bath Road – with shopping malls.
The soul of Leicester, an ancient Roman town, was all but extinguished by Vaughan Way, the urban motorway which in 1968 cut off the Saxon-Norman church of St Nicholas – and the Jewry Wall, the largest surviving fragment of Roman architecture in the country – from the rest of the town.
One of the wicked side-effects of the ring road – familiar, too, in American city developments – was the ‘ring of blight’ around the city. After the war, St Paul’s and St Jude’s in Bristol were both cut off from the rest of the city by an English version of the Boulevard Périphérique – the 1973 ring road around Paris that isolated the outer suburbs and so created marooned, heavily criminalized areas.
Slowly the tide turned. In 1967, government subsidies were removed from the tower-block council estates. The peak year for tower blocks was 1968, when 160 residential towers over 150 feet were built.
Then, in the same year, Ronan Point tower block in Newham, east London, collapsed, only two months after it was built. The golden days of the tower block had come to an end. The early 1970s saw a change from unadorned concrete council blocks to buildings with fewer storeys, and a more cottagey look, with brick walls and pitched roofs. In 1978, not a single tower block over 150 feet was constructed.5
Council houses also got bigger and more comfortable under the Parker Morris standards, imposed from 1969. Under the standards, flushing toilets and central heating were obligatory, and a semi-detached or end-of-terrace house for four people had to have a floor area of at least 72 square metres. The legal requirement for Parker Morris standards was removed in 1980, by the Local Government, Planning and Land Act.
Gradually, many of the horrors of previous years have been demolished: in April 2011, demolition began on the Heygate Estate, the 1974 block for 3,000 residents in the Elephant and Castle, in south London. Hailed as a neo-brutalist masterpiece when it was built, it soon became crime-ridden and dilapidated. In its final days, it became a popular film set, used for the Michael Caine vigilante film, Harry Brown, and for episodes of The Bill.
The tower block had turned into an outdated yet iconic image of hellish urban living, as people returned to the English ideal, combining historicism and land ownership – the suburban semi-detached, with its own front door opening on to the street, and its own patch of garden at the back.
That stripped-down, modernist look was deeply unpopular on a mass, state-built, cheap model. But it has survived on the individual, privately built, expensive model; as applied to grands projets and small housing conversions alike.
Only recently, I met an enthusiastic, newly qualified architect, her eyes brimming with excitement at the prospect of turning ideas into buildings.
‘What’s your dream building, the one you’d build if you had all the money and all the time in the world?’
‘A glass box.’
‘Erm … any particular glass box? Any features you might add to it? Anything you might want to put inside it?’
‘No. Just the perfect glass box.’
The drive towards nothingness has been accelerated by the end of the traditional teaching of architectural history in architecture degrees. The architect who was so keen on glass boxes was shocked when I asked whether the classical orders of architecture were taught during her degree.
‘Oh no – I’m not sure they’d be very useful these days,’ she said, in a tone which subtly implied this sort of knowledge was not only an old-fashioned, fogeyish perversion, but also a positive impediment to free-thinking originality.
A few organizations are fighting a rearguard action against this nihilist philosophy – Prince Charles’s Foundation for the Built Environment among them – but they are in a tiny minority. If you visit a rich, fashionable British household these days, you’ll see something that has never existed before in the civilized world – an active dislike of any objects that belong to a human civilization previous to their own.
Nature may abhor a vacuum but, oh, how the modern rich adore one. The stripping of the altars in the Reformation had nothing on this.
Whether it’s a sprawling Victorian hotel in Bournemouth, converted into loft-style apartments for Grand Designs, a tumbledown Georgian rectory in the Cotswolds turned into a boutique spa, or a byre-cum-bijou-bolthole in the Black Mountains, the answer’s the same – strip out anything old and shabby, and slop white paint all over it.
Richard Rogers, arch-nihilist of the age, has done it in Chelsea, taking two lovely Georgian houses and knocking them together into one big echoing void.
Take a look at a back garden in a fashionable bit of England, and you will now see mini-versions of the Rogers approach. Attached to the detailed, varied, jumbled-up silhouette and relief of the Victorian terraced house, you’ll find new, long, low, rectangular boxes of steel and glass: the minimalist side return.
This nihilism is now the style of the international rich – with its straight lines and abhorrence of wild nature, minimalism is essentially a foreign style, its roots formed in Bauhaus architecture in 1920s and 1930s Germany.
Kitchens become pristine laboratories; flat expanses of steel, glass and slate, with no food on show, or any sign that anything’s ever been cooked or eaten there. There’s great attention to cleanliness, too, with a bathroom per bedroom, each one a practical exposition of modern plumbing techniques, with free-standing baths and multiple sinks, all connected to gleaming copper pipes.
Back gardens have none of that horridly asymmetrical, unfashionably green grass or those ragged-edged, shambolic borders. The wild tradition of English gardening has come under attack on many fronts – from pared-down, symmetrical, minimalist fashion; from dictatorial makeover programmes. Planned grids of garden rooms and acres of decking and slate are interrupted by the odd square patch of flowers, planted in symmetrical matrices, grown to uniform height. English borders haven’t been so geometrical since the Elizabethan knot garden.
The nihilist’s desire for control, order and blankness, and his dislike of beauty and the past, mean there’s nowhere calming or beautiful for the eye to rest; no magazine or book by the sofa; no way of putting your feet up on that sofa without compromising its snowy virginity. The house is on permanent standby for the estate agent’s surprise visit. It is forever Year Zero. Old, pretty things have given way to new, ugly nothings.
A similar hollowing-out of the English High Street has taken place, too – not because of minimalism; but through a combination of the recession and the triumph of the chain shop. In 2010, Cambridge was declared King of the Clone High Streets. Of the fifty-seven shops on its main shopping street, all but one were chain shops. The most diverse high street was declared to be Whitstable’s, in Kent.
Just as with the minimalist terraced house, the removal of detail from the High Street leads to the removal of variety. You end up with the repetition of street patterns across the country – and the arrival of the identikit High Street, with the same repeated units of chain shops and shopping malls.
The English taste for large-scale, enclosed shopping spaces can be traced back to the first Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian shopping arcades, themselves inspired by the glassed-in gallerie and galeries of Italy and Paris.
John Nash’s Royal Opera Arcade, off Pall Mall, was England’s first covered shopping arcade, built in 1818; emulated the following year by Burlington Arcade, a few paces north, off Piccadilly. Town-centre shopping malls and out-of-town megastores are their hulking great descendants.
The English High Street is a fairly recent creation; few modern High Streets, fully equipped with lines of shops, date from before the 1870s. Soon after, shopping arcades took off, reaching new heights in 1890s London, when the shopping parades of Muswell Hill, Acton, Crouch End and Streatham High Road, and the Palladian arcade in Bromley, all went up.
Their profits were improved by advances in lighting technology. Godalming, Surrey, was the first town with an electric light system in Britain, installed in 1881. Electric Avenue in Brixton, built in 1885, was one of the earliest shopping streets lit by electricity. (Pall Mall, central London, was the first street lit by gas, in 1807.)
At about the same time, the first shopping chains put down their roots: Marks and Spencer was founded in 1884, Sainsbury’s in 1869. The thing about chain shops is that they tend to be extremely cheap shops, and the English have always been keen on a bargain. Unlike Continental Europeans, we prefer to spend money on housing rather than on High Street shopping – thanks to our long-standing obsession with home ownership. Seventeen per cent of our household income was spent on housing in 2011, much higher than Continental figures.
Because Britain has rarely been invaded or had revolutions, property ownership has always been pretty secure; safe as houses and all that (see Chapter 5). That leads to the great British pride in the home, our endless property-selling and home improvement programmes on TV, and our obsession with house prices and climbing on to the property ladder.
Throughout the twentieth century, while the percentage of British owner-occupier households soared, the English High Street grew more and more uniform as the chain stores began to dominate. In our time-poor society – with our relative indifference to fresh food – we have fallen more for the supermarket than our Continental neighbours have.
We spend a smaller proportion of our income on food than any other EU country; partly because of that preference for supermarkets over individual, family-owned, idiosyncratic shops. British supermarkets account for 97 per cent of food sales; and 76 per cent of the sales go to the big four supermarkets – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda.
As the big four battle for market share, their discount wars mean a basket of essential household items costs less in the UK than it does in, say, Carrefour in France or Edeka in Germany. But it also means our supermarkets are that much more dominant, and our High Streets that much more uniform.
Supermarkets have had a knock-on effect, too, on the look of English motorways. The M25 is ringed with vast depots, owned by pension funds, leased to the supermarkets, and run by logistics companies like Kuehne + Nagel. Internet shopping has accelerated the increase in depots – Amazon has built seven mega-warehouses near British transport hubs since 1998.
The supermarket’s impact on the landscape is particularly extreme when you consider how tiny their landholdings are. In 2010, Waitrose was the biggest landowner, with 4,095 acres attached to its 231 shops, but that includes the Leckford country estate, in Hampshire. Next comes Tesco, with 2,545 shops spread over a mere 768 acres – about the size of a single, decent-sized, but by no means enormous, farm.
Thanks to better weather on much of the Continent – and a less powerful attachment to the home – Europeans also spend more time out of doors than the English; and that includes time spent on the High Street. Because they aren’t spending all their money on their houses, they have higher disposable incomes, the current eurozone crisis notwithstanding. They’ve always tended to rent more, and to spend more on themselves and the bella figura – the sort of spending that the badly dressed, self-denying English have historically looked down on as self-indulgent.
And so England ends up as a world leader in chain retail shops; specializing in selling, among other things, cheap clothes – another reason we don’t look as good as our Continental cousins.
English High Streets also end up with more low-budget shops than in Continental Europe: more charity shops (helped by tax breaks), cafés, fast food outlets, financial services shops, hairdressers, second-hand shops and pound shops. Poundland, 99p Stores and Greggs have all done extremely well during the recession: there are now more pound shops than bookshops in British town centres.
Our desire for cut-price pleasure is one of the few factors creating new life on the High Street. Between 1997 and 2010, Britain lost 3,460 pubs, 7,500 post offices and 1,310 public lavatories. Over the same period, it gained 1,270 bookies and 276 lap-dancing clubs.6
Chain coffee shops, too, have proliferated. The origins of our taste for coffee grew from different strands: the 1650s coffee houses of Oxford and London, the coffee taverns set up by the temperance movement in the 1880s, the Edwardian coffee houses of Soho run by Greeks, Italians, Turks and Arabs, and the milk bars of the 1940s. But the real boom came in the last twenty years, with the emergence of chains like Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffè Nero.
The carnage on the English High Street has been so brutal that even some chain shops have been destroyed. In April 2011, Oddbins went into administration, following in the footsteps of Victoria Wine, Unwins, Threshers and Bottoms Up – all wiped off the High Street by the big volume buyers of the supermarkets. In March 2011, one in seven shop units in Britain were empty; the figure rose to one in four in badly hit places like Stockton-on-Tees, Margate and Altrincham.
Even the great retail success of the late twentieth century, the Asian-owned corner shop – not normally on a corner, incidentally – has been in slow decline for twenty years. From 1992 to 2002, the number of Asian-owned small shops in Britain fell by 23 per cent, to around 11,500.7
Those corner shops that survive are also less likely to be run by Asians, as Turks in particular take over. Hindu men – once the cornerstone of the corner store – are the second most advantaged social group in the labour market after Jewish men. Social mobility has taken them out from behind the counter.8
Meanwhile, the French and Italians have managed to hold on to their local bakers, butchers and fishmongers. The French have a law that nothing can be sold for less than it cost the farmer to make it, meaning small shops can’t be undercut by supermarkets running loss-leader products.
Some French supermarkets have even designed their aisles to be wide enough to accommodate the tractors that periodically roam up and down them, protesting against cuts in agricultural subsidies. Because of measures like this, you can find Continental charity shops – but they’re usually on the outskirts of town in industrial estate sheds.
There is another major change to the English High Street over the last half-century – in the people who live and shop there.
In March 2011, Brian True-May, the producer of Midsomer Murders, got into trouble for saying that the programme worked because it had no ethnic minorities in it. However insensitive he may have been, he was certainly accurate about the make-up of the country: in 2011, 98.6 per cent of rural England was white.
The first black man in the English countryside was Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born slave who moved to Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 1792, dying in 1797. Not too many of his compatriots have followed in his footsteps to the English countryside; even if hundreds of thousands of white Londoners have, migrating in particular to Essex and Kent – a classic example of so-called white flight.
Still, the ethnic make-up of England has undeniably changed over the last half-century. Between 1997 and 2009, 2.2 million more people came to live in Britain than left to live abroad – the largest influx Britain has ever seen. In 2011, almost one in eight people living in Britain – 7 million altogether – were born abroad. The biggest groups of foreign-born immigrants come from India, Pakistan and Ireland.
Immigration has had an effect on the look of England for centuries. The first curry house, the Hindostanee Coffee House in George Street, Mayfair, was founded in 1809 by Sake Dean Mahomed, from Bihar, India. It offered a place ‘for the nobility and the gentry where they might enjoy the Hookha with real Chilm tobacco and Indian dishes of the highest perfection’. There are now 10,000 curry houses across the United Kingdom, with an annual turnover of £3.6bn.9
The Chinese, too, have had an enormous impact on our High Street, and our diet. In 1900, there were around 500 Chinese people in England; in 2000, there were 100,000 in London alone. A migration that began as a trickle in the seventeenth century increased in the eighteenth century, boosted by the trading activities of the East India Company and the nineteenth-century Opium Wars. The first Chinese settlements were in the docks, notably in Limehouse, east London. Wartime bombing and the decline of the docks shifted the Chinese population west to the cheap housing of Soho, now London’s Chinatown.
Liverpool’s Chinatown – the oldest Chinatown in the world – also grew out of a dockland settlement of the 1830s which migrated to the city centre as the docks declined. Newcastle – Britain’s newest Chinatown, founded in 1982 – followed Manchester (whose first Chinese restaurant was set up in 1948) and Birmingham, with its first restaurant opening in 1959.
Waves of immigrants have continued to come ever since – from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s, with the first Jamaicans arriving in large numbers on the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948; and, in the last twenty years, from eastern Europe, particularly Poland.
In recent years, successful second- and third-generation immigrants have migrated to the suburbs, with their better schools and employment prospects, and lower crime rates. Sri Lankans have settled in the south of London, in New Malden and Mitcham; Greek Cypriots in the north, in Palmers Green and Southgate; Sikhs in the west, in Hounslow and Southall; and Hindu Indians in the north-west, in Harrow and Wembley. One in four people living in Harrow now have a Hindu surname.
The destination of one particular group is often sparked by one significant early migration. When the South Korean embassy moved to Wimbledon in the 1970s, the South Korean community followed: now 8,000 South Koreans live in nearby New Malden, the biggest South Korean population in Europe. There are twenty South Korean businesses in New Malden; the local Tesco’s branch sells more fresh fruit and vegetables than any other outlet in Britain, because of the South Korean, and Sri Lankan, taste for healthy food.
Immigration has a self-evident effect on sociological history. There is, for example, more sectarianism in Scotland because of its immigration history. In Scotland, Catholics of Irish origin account for 12–15 per cent of the population; the figure is much higher in the west of Scotland. In England, the Irish population never got higher than 3.5 per cent, in the 1860s and 1870s.
Liverpool, whose port is so close to Ireland, was the most Catholic city in England, with its population reaching 25 per cent Irish or second-generation Irish in the late-Victorian period. Manchester’s Irish population was less than half that, and Birmingham’s even less. The Catholic population of Ulster in the early twentieth century, at around 35 per cent, was, of course, appreciably greater.10
Still, because immigrants tend to come from the poorer end of society, they have had relatively little effect on the architecture and landscape of England.
Yes, there are more Catholic churches in Liverpool than in Norwich. There are temples in Southall, known as Little India because two thirds of its 70,000 population are South Asian; Southall is home to London’s largest Sikh population. The vast Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu temple was erected in Neasden, north-west London, in 1995, to accommodate the large population of Hindus, many of whom arrived in the 1970s after being expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. And there are newly built mosques in city suburbs across England, too.
But, because recent immigrants have usually made their way to ready-built English cities, they ended up living mostly in Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses. Their places of worship are often housed in places once held sacred by Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian – and Christian – residents. In Brick Lane, east London, there is a 1743 Huguenot church, later the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, and now a mosque, the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid. It’s no different to the widespread Renaissance practice of incorporating ancient Roman temples into Christian churches in Italy.
In Clitheroe, Lancashire, in 2007, there was an almighty row when local Muslims applied to convert the town’s 1888 Mount Zion Methodist chapel into a mosque. The row was given added piquancy by a distinctive L. S. Lowry picture, A Street in Clitheroe, with the Gothic chapel on prominent display.
Clitheroe remains majority Christian by population, but the number of Muslim residents is growing. Still, their arrival isn’t reflected much in the look of the place – hidebound, as much of modern England is, by planning restrictions. A condition for granting planning permission for any change in use of the old chapel was that there should be no domes, minarets or any call to prayer. So the look of the place will remain much as it was when Lowry painted it, even as the sociological make-up of the town changes.
Modern immigration, with its mass arrival of people, and minimal change in architecture, has the opposite effect to what you might call architectural immigration. The early seventeenth century brought Italian Renaissance architecture to England, but very few Italians. French neo-classicism brought plenty of French-inspired buildings to London in the eighteenth century, but not many French people.
The last time mass immigration coincided with mass architectural change was when the country was actually taken over by invaders. In 1066, the Normans brought Norman architecture with them across the Channel to Hastings. Gothic architecture, also a French import, followed a century later.
English architecture usually changes its look according to who’s in charge, rather than who’s just arrived – unless they’re one and the same person.
Until the Reformation, the Church was the great builder of England – 99 per cent of surviving pre-Reformation buildings are churches, cathedrals or monasteries. Henry VIII changed all that, with a religious revolution that had an extreme effect on the look of certain counties.
Because Kent was so central to English Christianity, much of the county, previously owned by religious foundations, was sold off or given away after the Reformation. In places like Oxfordshire, never rich in abbeys or monasteries, there were few opportunities for these kinds of sales; thus the shortage of Elizabethan and Jacobean palaces in the county. Other once-prominent religious cities went into decline after the Reformation – Reading’s flint monastery was destroyed, and the city began its sad journey from medieval jewel to run-down railway city.
Some historians have maintained that the Reformation provided a crucial underpinning to the modern English economy. Private ownership of newly released land was more productive than religious or state control. In France, a land ownership law, vaine pâture, allowed free grazing on other people’s land, meaning you could leave your cows to roam freely. But that also meant that your next-door neighbour’s cows could eat your turnips – a bit of a blow to your farm profits.11
After the Reformation, noble families and the monarchy became the principal patrons of England’s greatest buildings, with the odd exceptional religious building constructed by the newly established Anglican church.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, was horrified at the change from Catholic England to Protestant England.
The Monster [Lampedusa’s self-applied pseudonym], a Roman Catholic and one of the pillars of the Church, weeps at the thought that this country, in which the Christian centuries erected such superlative monuments to its zeal, has escaped from the paternal authority of St Peter’s successor; it has besides been punished artistically, because when it was outside the fold, the wonders of Ely, Lincoln and York were superseded by their papier-mâché St Paul’s.12
Lampedusa shouldn’t have been so upset. Religion still dominates plenty of preserved, rural landscapes that haven’t changed much since the Reformation.
The church, often built before the Reformation, usually remains the biggest building in the English village; its spire the village’s tallest structure.
There are still 47,000 churches in Britain; four times the number of village halls or post offices. And there are 4,700 Church of England schools, too, attended by a million children; a quarter of all primary schools and 6 per cent of secondary schools are run by the Anglican Church. Churches still dominate the English horizon, despite the century-long decline of the religious fervour that built them.
Even in the nineteenth century – when a whole new layer of Victorian, mostly Gothic, churches was built across England – the support behind them was dying away.
‘The common people are without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries,’ George Orwell wrote in 1941. ‘The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities.’13
One inevitable result of over-zealous church-building and under-enthusiastic churchgoers is derelict and converted churches and chapels, a feature of the English landscape from as early as the First World War.
By the late nineteenth century, the state had begun to take over as Britain’s main builder of non-domestic buildings. Schools are a good example. Until 1870, churches and charitable institutions were responsible for building schools, particularly after the Napoleonic Wars. National Schools were run by the Church of England; British Schools by the Nonconformists.
The Government provided grants for building schools after 1840, until the 1870 Act gave local School Boards the responsibility for building schools. They were usually built in handsome Queen Anne style, in red brick and white stone, with Dutch gables and enormous windows – their dimensions laid down by law, to produce as much light as possible for Victorian schoolchildren to work by.
By 1876, elementary education was compulsory, and the Government gradually assumed responsibility for making bigger, uglier schools. The same went for health. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Government took over the role of the local boards of the Poor Law Guardians, set up in 1834. Many hospitals today are on the site of old workhouses, such as Lambeth Hospital, Kennington, and St John’s Hospital, Battersea.
Needing to economize – and dictated by pragmatism, rather than a desire to produce beauty, or the need to show off – the state has built progressively uglier, more stripped-down buildings. Minimalism by necessity, you might call it.
It is urban England that looks less and less like the bewitching England of legend these days, assaulted by the ugliness of state minimalism, boilerplate housing developments and the march of the chain shops and the supermarkets.
Meanwhile, out of town, rural planning restrictions – even tighter than urban ones – have kept intact the beauty of much of the English countryside. The strange survival of rural England goes right to the heart of the English character.