In the richer districts Queen Anne vies with Tudor, as in St. John’s Wood where some of the most arrogant, staring, badly-planned travesties of Queen Anne architecture flare up in place of the decent Early Victorian stucco which once made that district a sun-reflecting half-village among laburnums and pollarded limes. I think of two couplets from Longfellow’s “Lady Wentworth,” describing the dream-mansion of American riches, they describe the dream-mansion of England today:
“It was a pleasant mansion, an abode
Near and yet hidden from the great high road,
Sequestered among trees, a noble pile,
Baronial and Colonial in its style.”
If ever antiquarianism disguising itself as “tradition” has affected the English landscape, it has affected it in domestic building. Though willing to be crushed in an argument on the subject, I am ready to admit that in certain villages of limestone, chalk or brick, the old methods of building are the right ones.The pitched roof, a harmonious building material, even leaded lights (though not diamond panes) are permissible. But for our suburbs, that is to say for the bulk of our population, it can only be a form of bogus traditionalism backed by certain sinister influences in the building trade which has permitted the present system to continue. Building can only be carried on in fine weather. The houses once built, however badly, cannot be removed except at very great expense. When the focus of the population shifts, many London suburbs will be deserted and terrifying like the pit villages of the north, from which much of London’s new population has come. They will be useless as agricultural lands, and hardly a worthy memorial of our so-called civilisation to yet more archæologists in the future.
Every day one sees in the papers advertisements of portable houses. Hideous indeed they often are. But that is the fault of architects. Architects have been too wrapped up in “style,” in bricks and foundations and whatnot, to devote their attention to the only solution of the housing problem—the production of decent and convenient mass-produced houses. These houses should be pre-fabricated, as was the Crystal Palace, they should be and could be as well planned, as sound and weather-proof as the best brick-built house. Pre-fabrication would make it possible to remove these houses from one place to another when they were wanted, and the land they had occupied could go back to agriculture. Experiments in houses of this sort have been made successfully in Germany and America. I see no hope for the majority until they are made here. Lord Nuffield had a wonderful opportunity to make them at his pressed-steel works at Oxford. He missed it, and many of his workers are housed in some of the worst speculative estates to be seen. Perhaps I am reading too much into antiquarianism to attach it to such inertia as this.
Lastly comes planning, and with this I am too, perhaps, stretching a point by laying the stress on antiquarianism. But planning (though it comes last in this essay, it is the most important) is riddled with various schools of thought. Schools of thought? First comes the School of No Thought. The L.C.C. pulled down Waterloo Bridge for reasons which it would be libellous to go into. Were they planning a great road north and south, quite straight? If so, why? Does the L.C.C. realise that motor cars do not mind going out of their way to avoid traffic halts? That circular roads would be cheaper and more practical? That horse traffic, to which the shortest route was the quickest, is now almost defunct?
Another example of the School of No Thought is that which puts up hefty blocks of flats, of the wrong height, in places where, for all we know, flats will not be wanted in ten years’ time—the School of No Thought, which builds before it plans, is found in every English local authority. Only someone with the myopic eyesight of an antiquarian would put up houses and clear others away before some concerted scheme of planning, traffic, railways, was made. As it is, the estates are built, and transport at great expense and to the confusion of everything else comes lumbering along afterwards.
Perhaps it is antiquarianism, too, which dreams of England as a series of self-supporting garden suburbs surrounded by green belts. These antiquarians would have to go to Northumberland and Durham, the Welsh mountains or the distant “shires” before they could find a belt of any desirable width which could be called really green—any beyond that of leather which girdles up their own homespuns.
Finally, my mind switches to the last fruit of the excessive antiquarianism to which we are subject—the educated reaction from it, which results in “jazz-modern.”
“Jazz-modern” is the product of insensitive minds. It is the decoration of art-school students. You all know it. The “modernistic suites” to be seen in hire-purchase catalogues, the dashing milk-bars which have dispensed with the need for capital letters. The monogram and new buildings of the G.W.R. at Paddington. In the 1920’s jazz-modernism consisted of cubes, triangles and arrows in “poster colours”; everything from the frosted glass above the windows of a shop to the cushion in a punt was in this emancipated jazz manner. Perhaps even the arrogant modern designers who dared to think they could create mouldings and motifs, which it has taken centuries to evolve, perhaps even they grew afraid. Anyhow,
