I say this having fallen into topographical traps of a like nature myself in the course of writing guide-books.
The church is the one building in the village of no interest at all. It was so generously restored by our peer that any of the Perp., E.E., etc., features remain in such a rebuilt state as to be almost new. The piscina was left out by the architect, Mr. G. E. Street2—and consequently left in the N. Porch It now consists of some pieces of decayed stone which may well have come off the vicarage rockery.
Apart from Tomcat Park, the only objects of interest (notice the phrase) are the people. But antiquarianism is not interested in people.
I fear that this disquisition from ecclesiastical matters to topographical writing may have caused you to lose the thread of what little argument there was before.Back again, then.
We have three more groups of architecture to consider in the green cathedral-glass light of antiquarian prejudice. Here the light is less direct, less obviously antiquarian, but none the less depressing.
By monumental architecture I mean public libraries, town halls, banks, swimming-baths, offices, railway stations. We have many fine examples of buildings in the monumental style from the past—Greenwich Hospital, Somerset House, St. George’s Hall (Liverpool), Euston Hall and great Arch, the Houses of Parliament, King’s Cross Station, each representing the best of the various phases of English secular architecture. Why is it that the twentieth century has produced not a single monumental English building of any real excellence? Why is it that Waterloo Station is a grandiose muddle of pre-war sculpture stuck on to an honest industrial building? What makes the new Regent Street such a grimy joke? Why is South Africa House so hideous? Why do we dread every steel scaffolding for what is going to be spread across it? First, there is the timidity miscalled “tradition,” but really antiquarianism, which enslaves be-knighted architects. You are told that it is the Building Acts which cause every London building to be cloaked with Portland stone. This is not so, but even if it were so the Building Acts would not prescribe Corinthian columns and commercial Baroque to be sculpted on as well. “Tradition” has been aptly described by the late A. R. Powys as digested experience. Can it be, then, that all contemporary architects of English monumental work have been suffering from indigestion? Yes, it can. And it is as unpleasant for them as it is for us. All of them, except perhaps Sir Reginald Blomfield, must realise that their banks and libraries are somehow not quite like St. George’s Hall, Greenwich Hospital, the Fitzwilliam, the Louvre, or whatever they intended them to be like—in spirit, of course, not in plan. I think the failure comes from “antiquarianism”; they think that columns and swags are “traditional”; really these appendages become antiques, unless they can be moulded into an individual style which none of the knighted architects—except now and then Sir Edwin Lutyens—has the genius to do. On the other hand, to go to the opposite extreme and let the new frightening materials, that they never knew when they were young men, do the job for them as Paxton let cast iron or glass do his job at the Crystal Palace, this savours of Bolshevism. For an antiquarian reason, to which the present state of architecture in U.S.S.R. gives the direct lie, an honest, plain structure of steel, glass, and/or reinforced concrete is considered Bolshevistic or international. And, of course, since the new materials have burst on the world more or less simultaneously, and since everyone who experiments with them is bound to produce work similar to that in a country hundreds of miles away, the style is bound to seem international. But no more and no less international than the graves of the Bronze Age men or the fortresses of the Middle Ages.
I must add here a parenthesis. Upholders of new methods of building are inclined, in their enthusiasm, to think that no further use can be made of the so-called traditional styles; that brick and stone, columns and swags are finished. As far as big office blocks and monumental secular architecture of any size are concerned, they are. St. George’s Hall and the Houses of Parliament are final examples of the brick and stone architecture—and there is a good deal of cast iron in them. But these buildings are satisfactory because they are built out of materials to which this decoration, whether structural or not, was suited, and because they were built by men of genius capable of moulding a style of their own.
We all know the antiquarianism that besets the third group, domestic architecture. So well do we know it that it is hardly worth while trotting out the old jokes. Walk, some sunny afternoon as I have done, through any post-war suburb—and almost any place you visit in England is a post-war suburb. Look up, while the perambulator creaks beside you and the children skip over the squares of paving to the too-distant park, look up at the quiet houses that flank the interminable avenue. In poorer districts only a variation in the stained glass of a front door, the juxtaposition of gable beams, or greater or less repulsiveness in the texture of rough-cast differentiates one house from another. In twenty years’ time, when the building societies have got more than their money back, only the standard roses dwarfing the Cotswold sundial, the flower-beds lovingly filled with tested seeds, will improve the appearance of the road. Bay windows will be falling out, foundations crumbling,
