Old Boggleton and New Boggleton became a large town of 100,000 inhabitants and the only remains of Old Boggleton were the Town Hall and the Quaker Meeting House, while some cottages near the church still survived in a derelict condition as a memorial to the oldest Boggleton of all.
The Machine Gets into its Stride
The tradition of craftsmanship was supplanted by the machine. The Great Exhibition of 1851 had shown that many objects could be made by machine at a quarter the cost and just as well as those made by hand. The set rules of colour and design pervading in 1836 had not been forgotten and the exhibits of 1851 in the late-lamented Crystal Palace were still worthy of the study of the fastidious. It is fashionable now to laugh at the Great Exhibition. It is a pity that this humour does not extend to the exhibits displayed today in the windows of the multiple stores.
While the machine was still a symbol of progress (whatever progress might be) to the majority, it was terrifying to many intellectuals. The Oxford Movement in the Church had given Gothic architecture official approval. Gothic was medieval. The Middle Ages were the days of craftsmen and Christianity. Therefore the machine was un-Christian. Classical architecture was pagan. Individuality was sacred. Pugin and, later, Ruskin supported this reaction from the machine. The pre-Raphælites, now established, were the men of the moment. Art had caught up with literature. Even railway stations were built in the medieval style. The Grand Tour was supplanted by a visit to Belgium and the Gothic cathedrals of France. Venetian Gothic was imitated even in the main streets of London.
1907
About this time the Radicals in the town decided to improve the lot of the workers in the packed streets down by the railway works and other factories. An Evening Institute was founded, built in the New Art Style of Gothic (by the architect of the new Wesleyan Church). Lectures were given on the ruined Abbey (which was carefully patched up and the grass round it mowed and planted with beds of geraniums, a small admission fee being charged), on Italian painting, socialism, eugenics, eurythmics, hygiene, economics and other important subjects. The old cottages near the church were rebuilt in an even more ancient style than they had been in before.
The Conservatives decided to improve the civic dignity of Boggleton. The plain town hall was pulled down and a handsome edifice in Portland stone and in the Viennese Baroque manner arose in its place, surmounted by a tower with illuminated clock faces.
Ivy was planted along the buttresses of the railway viaduct to make it harmonise with the Abbey. The false stucco villas by the Abbey were at last taken down: a terrace of houses was put up by a speculator on a site nearer the Abbey itself, so that they would have commanded no view, anyway.The tram service was extended to the Abbey gates.
The rector’s wife was an artistic woman and taught blob work (water-colours) in the Institute and sent her daughters to Bedales. The Municipal Art Gallery made her and her daughters laugh.
Boggleton had changed the colour of its buildings, just as it had changed the colour of its politics, to pink. Only the Quaker Meeting House remained the same. The Morris Movement
The Classical tradition never died. Greek in 1837, Italianate in 1867, “Queen Anne” (Norman Shaw) in 1897, neo-Renaissance (Blomfield, Sir Ernest George, Belcher, Alfred Drury and various other sculptors of public monuments) in 1907.
The Gothic revival transmogrified itself. There could be too much medievalism. William Morris realised that the movement needed a political as well as a religious background. Guild socialism was the result. But Morris’s insistence on hand processes, though often admirable for those rich enough to afford the price, led to various repulsive imitations. Sham beams, sham lanterns, sham Morris wallpapers spread rapidly. The productions of the Kelmscott Press, never legible, did little good to the few lingering traditions of English printing and typography.To counterbalance these bad effects, the Morris movement really did stimulate reaction to and criticism of many machine-made products, particularly furniture. The movement simplified designs and insisted on the simple life. From it sprang the Garden Cities, the C. F. A. Voysey, early Lutyens and Baillie Scott small houses, and later the Art Nouveau Movement. Daring radicalism, fresh air, the works of H. G. Wells, unstained oak, white nurseries, child welfare work. There was no hint of the Oxford Movement about the new Gothic revival.Much more a hint of free thought.
The art nouveau people are responsible for contemporary architecture at its best. George Walton and C. R. Mackintosh, who came from the famous Glasgow School, built in a style which was soon taken up in Germany. Only in its decorative features, such as ironwork and stencilling, did their architecture seem any different from the truly modern architecture of today.2 It is ironic that the simplicity of the Crystal Palace should have been reached out of a movement indirectly inspired by that Gothic revival which was, in its inception, inimical to the machine age which the Palace glorified.
1937
Boggleton’s period of prosperity was nearly over when orders for armaments brought temporary relief to some of the factories. The Adamsbecs have sold their country house as a building estate: their pictures fetched very little. The trams have been replaced by buses. Two of the Nonconformist Chapels have been sold to chain stores. The Bedalian daughters of the late rector have opened an “olde” tea place in one of the cottages near the church.
