First and Last Loves

are sitting in chairs on the steps of the boarding-house; behind the front door peeps the inevitable castor oil plant in its china pot. Beside them sit the younger children, unnaturally good and quiet for fear they shall be sent up to bed while it is still light and while the moon rises huge and yellow above the purple bay. The elder children, grown up now, are off to the dance halls. Only a few rejected young men sit sadly on the steps among the ancients and the infants. The girls wear white dancing shoes and that is how you know whither they are bound. Two shillings or four-and-six, somewhere round that, is the cost of a ticket to dance. I like the Palace dance hall best. It has a parquet floor of sixteen thousand square feet and room for five thousand people. It is in a gay baroque style, cream and pink inside, and from the graceful roof hang Japanese lanterns out of a dangling forest of flags. A small and perfect dance band strikes up—ah, the dance bands of the Isle of Man! Soon a thousand couples are moving beautifully, the cotton dresses of the girls like vivid tulips in all this pale cream and pink, the sports coats and dark suits of the men a background to so much airy colour. The rhythmic dance is almost tribal, so that even a middle-aged spectator like me is caught up in mass excitement, pure and thrilling and profound.

And while the dance bands are playing in Douglas and the yellow moon is rising in its bay, on the western, wilder coast the herring fleet is setting out from Peel. The sun sets behind the rugged outline of the Castle and the ruined Cathedral and Round Tower enclosed within its walls. A stiffish west wind is blowing and the sea beyond the breakwater is dark green and choppy. The herring boats are disappearing into the sunset. Out of the harbour, round the castle island, the dying sun shines gold upon their polished sides.I stand alone upon a rock by Peel Castle. The smell of salt and wet earth is in my nostrils, the dark green slate of those old castle walls is at my side. Inland, the last rays of sun are lighting the winding lanes of Peel, the red sandstone of its church towers, and the soft protecting mountains behind it of the Isle of Man. Here, salt spray, seagulls, wild rocks and cavernous cliffs. Beyond those mountains the dance halls of Douglas and the dance-band leader in his faultless tails. An isle of contrasts!A miniature of all the Western world.

7

ANTIQUARIAN PREJUDICE1

I COME to you fresh from Evensong and with my outlook widened. Architecture has a wider meaning than that which is commonly given to it.For architecture means not a house, or a single building or a church, or Sir Herbert Baker, or the glass at Chartres, but your surroundings; not a town or a street, but our whole overpopulated island.It is concerned with where we eat, work, sleep, play, congregate, escape.It is our background, alas, often too permanent.

Gradually, after years of enforced blindness, we are becoming aware of it again. When we wake up one morning and find the view from our windows shadowed by a colossal block of flats built to look like Hampton Court piled on top of itself several times; when we are perhaps driven to live in a flat where the central heating will not turn off, where the picture rail is at the wrong height, where the lift whines like a mosquito at irregular intervals during the night, where Bing Crosby croons across the dark well, where the door won’t shut because the wood has warped, where there is no sun or too much sun, where the nearest station is twenty minutes’ walk; when we go to a village we used to know and find it a town, and a muddled town at that; when we hear, as I heard the other day, of the bay window of a modern Tudor house lifted by a storm from its setting and flung over the opposite house-tops while the family in the parlour was at Sunday dinner; when we hear of another modern semi-detached villa wherethe grate fell out of the chimney-breast and had to be screwed in again, and at spring-cleaning time the family next door found its piano screwed to the wall; when we see the squares of London being transformed into wells for blocks of flats—witness Berkeley Square; when we hear of Mr. Rudolf Palumbo putting up things which will scrape as much of the London sky as the L.C.C. will allow, in places which were left open by the foresight and civic sense of our forefathers; when we see super-cinemas made in the manner of Stockholm Town Hall, and town halls made in the manner of Wembley Exhibition; when we see every field and every hill striped with imitation Tudor or Queen Anne villas; when we learn that these are all owned through building societies, and realise that the luckless occupants will find themselves in a few years’ time saddled with a slum; when we realise that each of these occupants is a landowner of potential slum property which nothing but a change of heart, to be wrought by nothing short of a miracle, will induce him to give up; when we hear of the party politics which hinder any constructive architectural effort of the L.C.C.; when we hear, learn, see all this and a great deal more which would cause this easily written diatribe to continue for the rest of this essay; when we hear all this, those of us with a sense of justice, let alone a love of good building, begin to think that there is something wrong with architecture today. We begin to notice our surroundings.

It would be outside the scope of what I