Town planning schemes, large Georgian and Regency houses in gardens, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century churches, the few surviving parks with their grottoes and temples, are considerations beneath the notice of the Royal Commissioners or, as they would term it, “outside their scope.”
This survey is not only absurdly inadequate, it is also definitely harmful. It has all the authority of His Majesty’s Stationery Office, and the well-sounding names of the Royal Commissioners behind it; it is sold at so low a price that one can only conclude that the work has been subsidised: it is just the sort of book that will be used as a Bible. Arrogant and ignorant county councillors and avaricious builders will use it as an excuse for pulling down more and more worthy architecture: “Uxbridge Town Hall, Mr. Chairman, is not mentioned in the Historical Monuments Book. It has therefore no historical interest or architectural merits.” “Very well, Mr. Tudor Beam, we will make an order for demolition.”3
After all this, imagine the position of the modern architect. Picture the young fellow to be put into a “profession” because trade is considered beneath him (another antiquarian prejudice). The young fellow hasn’t exactly got a legal mind, like father; he’s not much good at essays, so he can’t write; he faints at the sight of blood, so he can’t be a doctor. What is there for him to do? Architecture, of course. Architecture has registered itself as a profession. Unlike Art, Architecture is practical and respectable. Why, I know architects who, as they’re good at business, go far, just like ordinary men. Where shall we send the fellow? To an architectural school of course, where he’llmeet a lot of other healthy-minded youngsters and learn to turn out prize-medal drawings to be judged by Mr. Maufe, and learn to make letters in all the latest type-faces, and elevations in all the latest mannerisms, and to cast simply lovely shadows down his elevations.
Are you surprised that with such people as this, frightened on the one side by the “dry-as-dust” antiquarian, tickled to death on the other by all the jolly tricks of a rebellious moderne, futuristic, Swedish, cubistic, yet tasteful nature—are you surprised that architecture in England is what it is? With an Ealing veneer of antiquity or moderne-ity.
The time-honoured system of apprenticeship and practical experience, of being articled to an architect who either repulses you so much you react against him as Bodley did to the elder Gilbert Scott, or evolve from him out of admiration as Soane did from the younger Dance—that system is over. That system created individualists, great men of whom Comper, Voysey, Ashbee, Lutyens, Baillie Scott and a few others survive.4
A man must be a great man, or a movement must be a disinterested one, to be able to ignore the noise of antiquarian prejudice shouting at its bastard, jazz-modernism. Down every street the bawling goes, from Selfridge’s to Lilley & Skinner’s, from Drage’s to Waring & Gillows, from Ouitoo to Grosvenor Court; the roads slide with motor cars, the chasms are blue with petrol fumes, the sky roars with aeroplanes, deadly insects whose drone is like a dentist’s drill in the brain; the pavements belch with the noise of radio shops, the public passages are too narrow, the public faces too pinched, the public food too inedible, the public mind too frightened; a ticket for this, a form for that, a set opinion about this, a standard dream of the unattainable. No wonder we lose our heads, no wonder we escape into the past. No wonder the old men are antiquarians and the mediocre diddled. I hopeI have shown how antiquarian prejudice has something, but not all, to do with it. Greed and Careerism have much more. What will give us time to think? What-will give us an opportunity to act? A Ministry of Fine Arts? A change of government? or a change of heart?
1 Originally delivered as a lecture (1937) to the Group Theatre and published as No. 3 of Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets.
2 I have now learned that Street was a severe but not merciless restorer and he was dead by 1881. One of the Fowlers of Louth is more likely to have “restored” a Lincolnshire church.
3 This state of things is now altered. Salaried antiquarians on behalf of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning now schedule some Georgian work.
4 Comper alone survives (1951).
8 THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTERTAINMENT
IF there is one word which can safely be applied to the constructions for entertainment it is the adjective impermanent. Fire consumes and fashion changes, new and more hideous structures arise on the sites of older and less hideous, as we continue to slide into deeper depths of barbarism. One day, no doubt, something more blatant than the tower of the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square will challenge comparison with the steeple of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. For the present we must gaze at the pseudo-functional monument of the serious ’thirties, watching it grow more and more dated every week, while the steeple of St. Martin’s glows in its white Portland stone perfection, a dateless memorial of more settled days.
The architecture of entertainment, of fairs, exhibitions, concert halls and theatres may be considered alongside church building. Like churches, places of entertainment are where people go for short spells only—all except for the cleaners and permanent staff who may be compared to the nuns and priests of churches, and very heartily they may laugh at the comparison.
