The population is being moved out of the crowded streets near the station. Some are being moved into council houses put up on a nice but rather waterlogged site near the Abbey. Others who can afford it are going into some of the lovely new villas which are being erected all round the town. Each one is different, the beams being very cleverly arranged. Stained-glass windows may be found in all of them, parlour or non-parlour type. True the walls are thin, the wood of the doors is unseasoned, the foundations are bad, the chimneys smoke, there is not enough accommodation, but, on the other hand, every garden has a low wall and crazy paving, and the interior fittings are in an up-to-date jazz modern style.
There are hardly any prosperous local tradesmen as the big shops are all run by London combines. Motors have brought prosperity to the Georgian Dolphin Hotel, which has rebuilt itself in the Tudor style in order to keep up with the times.
The Institute is not doing so well now that culture comes via the wireless and cinema.
I am afraid we have not much time for art in Boggleton, though art criticism is quite popular with some of us. A Frank Brangwyn of a steel works was bought out of trust money by the Committee of the Municipal Art Gallery, but it was thought a little old-fashioned. Several young artists have been painting the viaduct for their Commercial Art course. The Boggleton Surrealist has found the large canvases in the Art Gallery interesting. Art, like the rest of the town, is controlled from London; there is no distinctive native talent, just as there is now no native craftsmanship.
Boggleton itself takes up much more room than it should do. In 1837 you could see the meadows and elms between the houses in the High Street, now you will have to go at least a mile in any direction to see a tree at all—and even then the fields will have a municipal appearance and the burnt grass will be bright with pieces of paper.
1 This is by no means the only reason for the market place being here. Mystery plays, and later fairs, were held near this space.
2 I now see that this is not true. L’art nouveau was a romantic escape into simplicity. Mackintosh’s beautifully drawn houses are Beardsley-esque Scottish Baronial.
12 VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE
VICTORIAN BUILDINGS will never become as smart as Georgian ones are today. Georgian architecture is the last product of a settled agricultural civilisation when craftsmanship was understood and enjoyed, and rules of proportion were widely known among builders. The jerry-building of Georgian industrialism has hardly survived, and where it does exist, as at Coalbrookdale and here and there in the older industrial towns of the North and in the Stroud valley in Gloucestershire, people who look at it do not think of it as “Georgian” but as simple and dateless. Most of what is Georgian that survives is well-made and easy to look at. Our minds carry in them a coloured aquatint, be it landscape or street, to form a suitable background to a Georgian building. Then Georgian is nicely and cheaply faked. Blocks of flats, all London over, have Regency beds and Brighton-Pavilion curtains, out of scale with the cupboard-like rooms in which they are placed, no doubt, but unmistakably Georgian. Even an estate agent knows what Georgian means, and I have seen the word used in terms of praise of a house in a serial in The Symbol, the paper that is bound up with our parish magazine.
But Victorian can never be smart. It will even defy the analysis of the “doctors” busy classifying everything around us. You have to use your eyes when looking at it.
Much Victorian architecture is really bad and shoddy. That famous drawing of Doré’s is a true condemnation of much Victorian industrial building.A modern Doré, I should add, could equally condemn our own jerry-building in the period between the wars and in the present glorious age of prefabs.
I think the chief objections to Victorian architecture are being overcome by time. No one likes the architecture of his immediate predecessors, and most of the writers of architectural books are the children of Victorian parents. Indeed, most widely-read writers from H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy to Berta Ruck and Denise Robins, are writers of the age of reaction from Victorianism. They like few ornaments, plain walls, pastel shades, open windows and as little decoration as possible, or, if there is any, a sort of diluted Swedish such as may be bought at Heal’s. Again, twenty years ago, young men prided themselves on having social consciences rather than æsthetic perception. Victorian building was utterly condemned and stood in their minds for back-to-back houses in Leeds and those soulless stacks of Dwellings for Artisans which were built with the idea of class distinction. And oh! how horrible class distinction seemed to be in those class-conscious days twenty years ago.
The Victorians very much enjoyed decoration, and decoration in the ’thirties was considered immoral. The Tower Bridge was the symbol of all that was sentimental and therefore wicked.
Finally, Victorians were condemned for not planning. But this last condemnation is based on ignorance. There are throughout England industrial estates very carefully planned, as well as middle-class and upper-class neighbourhoods which now may well have become slums owing to the poverty of our people, but which in those days were not so drab as modern town planners’ brochures like to make them appear.
On the credit side, the Victorians were allowed to have produced some good buildings provided no architect had been near them. Civil engineers were, we were told, the great Victorian architects. The Crystal Palace was the first prefab, and this is quite true. Engineering triumphs by Brunel, Stevenson
