Ghastly Good Taste

by John Betjeman

  The arch was discovered: this is the noblest improvement in the building art; an invention which enables man to bridle the mighty river, to raise aloft the self-balanced pile, and cover with the pensile vault the vast area of a temple of all the Gods. But it may be doubted, whether the arch, though enlarging the powers of construction, has not, in fact, been detrimental to Architecture, considered as a fine art. The system of Grecian Architecture is, as has been observed, founded upon the principles of wooden construction, but the arch may be said to be the natural style of stone: the use of the arch therefore introduced a new and inconsistent principle of imitation, degraded the simplicity of the original model, and caused a confusion of ideas, of forms and practices, from which Architecture has never recovered.

  On the revival of arts and letters, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Architecture re-appeared in Italy. The vast remains of Roman magnificence were disinterred from the ruins and obscurity which had so long covered them, and excited an admiration ardent and enthusiastic. Then was the hand of every artist employed in copying and measuring, and his mind in arranging and systematising. The Orders were discovered, and numerous treatises offered theories and delivered rules for their execution. From Italy the mode spread over the other countries of Europe; the Italians had imitated the Ancients, but other nations imitated them; and in every country arose ambitious rivals of Italian villas and cathedrals. The Architecture of the Middle Ages was branded with the appellation of Gothic, and condemned to an indiscriminating contempt, which only in our own country, and in our own times, has been dispelled.

  The comparison of ancient and modern Architecture will rather present contrasts than resemblances, although the latter professes to be the disciple and follower of the former. In the remains of ancient edifices, the greatest simplicity, and even uniformity, prevails in the general plans and dispositions, and an infinite variety in the details; so that it would perhaps be impossible to find any two examples of an Order precisely similar in proportions, forms, and ornaments. At the same time, this exuberant fancy is so well restrained within reasonable limits, that the whole collection of columns, with very slight exceptions, may be resolved into three characteristic Orders, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. Possessing three expressions, the strong, the elegant, and the rich, the Ancients knew that it was all that Architecture could say distinctly, and any attempt to enlarge would but weaken and confuse her language. The details were committed to the fancy or taste of the individual artist, but the general dispositions appear to have been determined by rules, which none dared or wished to violate.

  Modern Architects, on the other hand, while they permit themselves a boundless license in the general plans and forms of buildings, have attempted to fix inviolably the proportions of the Orders; each artist recommending such as his peculiar studies have caused to make a favourable impression on his mind, either attempting to average the varieties of ancient models, or fixing on some one example for a standard; as if to change a moulding or ornament were a capital crime against Architecture.

  The Gothic style of Architecture, though decried and condemned in words, has exerted a secret and powerful influence on the forms of modern buildings. Hence the affection of extraordinary height, hence the multiplicity of parts, of projections, of angles. Steeples are wholly of Gothic origin; and it may be confidently asserted, that the generality of modern churches, though dressed with columns, entablatures, pediments, and other members belonging to antique architecture, have really a much greater affinity to Gothic building.

  Columns were regarded as a necessary decoration to every building which had any pretensions to beauty or magnificence; but, no longer suffered to form colonnades, they were generally engaged in a wall; and thus, deprived of all use, the column was degraded to an idle and ostentatious ornament. This may be regarded as the prominent and capital fault of modern Architecture…. The plain and evident use of columns is to form porticoes, ambulatories covered at the top and open at the sides; exactly the kind of walks that warm climates require, which, while they shelter from the sun and rain, leave a free passage to the air; and this destination is pointed out by every ancient edifice. Who would build a colonnade for the purpose of walling it up? Then what folly to produce that appearance, by attaching half columns to a wall!

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  The pediment is an important and original member of Grecian Architecture: it is the gable end of a roof, and thus considered, its origin will point out its proper use and application. But in modern buildings the pediment is generally employed as a mere decoration, and has undergone the most ridiculous transformations.

  But it is not my intention to go through all the abuses of modern Architecture; those already mentioned are sufficient, for the present purpose, to show that the antique style has never been revived or understood, and that modern Architecture is by no means the imitator of the former. These abuses belong not to accessories, but to essentials; they affect not the details, but the whole system and theory of the art: but they are the practices of the greatest names in modern art, abuses which form their style, and upon which their reputation is built.

  The age of invention is gone by, and that of criticism has succeeded: it remains for us, if we cannot rival the beauties of our predecessors, to avoid their defects; to apply with judgment, if we cannot invent with genius; and to follow the guidance of just system, if we cannot track the flights of imagination. Every style of Architecture lies open to our choice, and there is no prima facie reason why one should be preferred to another. Any mode may be adopted with reason, but none without…. No one can apply justly, who does not penetrate the system and theory upon which any style of Architecture is founded; but possessing this, he will not copy but imitate; he will be able to modify the style adopted to suit the required purpose, and, while altering details or proportions, to preserve character and system.

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  The attempt to produce a deception in building is absurd, and productive of disappointment. An English villa can be neither a castle, nor an abbey, nor a temple; and even though at a distance, and at first sight, the resemblance may deceive, that nearer inspection which detects the imposture is sure to punish it with contempt and ridicule. Those very feelings, which most powerfully operate to excite pleasure in beholding a genuine remain of antiquity, will have a contrary effect towards a recent imitation. What observer, after catching a view of a turret embowered in wood, and approaching, in expectation of beholding an ancient castle, would not feel a sensible mortification on finding a modern villa? But the builder of modern Gothic is naturally led to attempt deception; for, in considering Gothic Architecture, we never generalize the style and reduce it to elements capable of application to all kinds of edifices, like the Grecian, but we think of particular buildings, of castle, abbeys, or cathedrals, and thus any person attempting to build in the Gothic style, will be in a manner compelled to imitate one of these species of buildings.

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  The advice given to translators will apply to the Architect: he must endeavour to think like an Ancient placed in modern times, avoiding equally the servility of frigid copying, and the license of incongruous alteration.

  The builder of a modern villa has nothing to do with systyle or eustyle intercolumniations; let these particulars be guided by the requisites of internal convenience: neither is it necessary to adhere to any particular canon of proportions, in shaft, capital, or entablature; these only may be properly and gracefully varied with circumstances; but this rule I would observe with inviolable strictness; to give the column its natural and appropriate employment, to make it a bonâ fide support, and never to degrade it to the rank of an idle ornament. Every member belonging to construction I would retain with the same fidelity, but reserve the liberty of altering any merely ornamental part as taste might dictate.

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  The principle of contrast will lead to oppose ornament to plainness, by which alone decoration acquires its full value and effect.
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  Variety and contrast sometimes give a charm to buildings which, considered in detail, are really mean and ugly.

  In carrying these principles into execution in the designs of modern villas, it will be necessary to avoid the contact of equal parts; to reject the square and the cube, and, thus escaping monotony, the composition will acquire character and expression. The elevation should be either broad and low, or high and narrow, or a combination of both; and, to descend from the general forms to particulars, a long low front may be pierced with high narrow openings, and a lofty tower with broad windows. The general form may be varied by differences in projection or elevation, or a straight front may be broken by the shapes and dispositions of the windows. Paucity and smallness of the openings will give an expression of strength and solidity, and large and frequent windows an air of gaiety and cheerfulness. The medium of these qualities would give no expression at all, and cause that insipidity which is most carefully to be avoided. They may, however, be introduced in different parts of the same building, and, being kept quite distinct, they will operate, not as interdestructive quantities, but as contrasts to heighten the effect of each other. Of course, the pursuit of variety must be under the guidance of judgment, and kept subordinate to utility, that it may not degenerate into extravagance.

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  I have, in almost all the Designs, wholy omitted everything which may be called ornament, wishing their beauty, if they possess any, to depend upon their general forms and proportions, and thus endeavouring to attain an economical style of beauty, to which ornament is neither necessary nor inapplicable.

  And examples of work by Aikin and his contemporaries exist all over England today. They are decent stone villas arranged in squares, crescents or terraces; they are so unpretentious that one does not notice their ample painted surfaces, or so magnificent that one takes them for granted, like Park Crescent, Cumberland Terrace, Waterloo Place and Carlton House Terrace in London. I associate them with Sunday afternoon walks in provincial towns. It is then, generally, that one finds a terrace or a crescent, slightly on the outskirts, wedged in between the mediaeval part of the old town, with its winding streets interspersed with towering brick houses of 200 years ago, and the Gothic revival suburbs beyond. Generally the houses are two, or at the most three, storeys high; the stucco is peeling from their once elegant façades; the grass laid out before them is long and rank with weeds; the corner house bears a name in incised letters which have been allowed to become illegible with the decay of the stucco—‘Adelaide Terrace’, ‘Royal Circus’, ‘York Cottages’, ‘Hanover Square’, ‘Brunswick Villas’—names that are memorials to the martyred Hanoverian monarchs, butchered by Thackeray to make a middle-class holiday twenty years later. The houses are inhabited by genteel old invalids, who hobble out of them, black against their stucco Corinthian background, to Baptist, Congregational, Countess of Huntingdon, Reformed Church of England, Brethren, Catholic Apostolic, or Quaker place of worship. The grained oak door shuts with a bang, and a piece of plaster falls from the architrave. But within the empty Sunday house, there is light and plenty. The hall is spacious. To the right, the dining-room looks out on to the terrace, behind it a morning room looks out on to the garden; below, the kitchen clock echoes over the stone floors of the basement. Up the stairs, whose unadorned balusters and slender mahogany rail accentuate the noble sweep of the staircase, the first floor room looks out over the trees to the quiet weed-grown plot of ground in front of the houses, while the folding doors are flung wide. And then from among the gilded furniture, silken hangings, faded samplers and rosewood piano can be seen the full length of the garden, neatly planted with sycamore and ilex, running down between its pale brick walls.

  There can be no one without a memory of such a square, or such a row of houses; and, although they are fast being removed as old-fashioned and insanitary, and villas covered with fake half-timbering take their place, there is still hardly a town without its Regency buildings.

  Some towns consist almost entirely of Regency and Victorian buildings: Cheltenham, with its noble streets, wide and planted with trees, radiating round its pump room and Pittville Spa; Leamington, with its Jepson Gardens, Clifton, Edinburgh New Town, St John’s Wood and Upper Belgravia and parts of Kensington in London, Abercrombie Square in Liverpool—these three last are little towns within a greater—Harrogate, and parts of every cathedral city and town of any antiquity in England.

  Next to the simplicity of its architecture and its practicability, the Regency period will always be known for its civic sense. The eighteenth century lavished its abundant genius on a ballroom, a front door, a mansion, a park, or even a single street, but the Regency lavished its genius on whole towns. Bath and Dublin and Buxton are the only eighteenth-century town planning schemes in Great Britain, and mighty triumphs too. But London needed planning. The Duke of Bedford’s Estate and the Grosvenor Estate had made various abortive attempts, of which Bedford and Grosvenor Squares and the somewhat gloomy confines of Gower Street were the result. This was in the true eighteenth-century tradition, which lavished adornment on the interior and did not worry as much about street architecture.

  But what period of English history except the Regency could have inspired such a scheme as Nash’s Regent Street? Even today when we have ruined the proportions of the Quadrant by building in a pseudo-modern Queen Anne style, when we have replaced those washable stucco façades with Portland stone that will grow grey and dull, the former glory remains. Not even those blind blocks of masonry balanced upon plate glass plinths pierced with arches, not even the new County Fire Office, with its flat dome and two chimney stacks like great ass’s ears each side, that shock the eyes of the man approaching up Lower Regent Street from Waterloo Place, not even the middle of Piccadilly Circus and the commercial ostentation of Oxford Circus can take away from the glory of the scheme. Though now only the curve of Nash’s Quadrant remains, this alone manages to give dignity to the new Regent Street, though its proportions have been ruined for the sake of higher buildings and higher rents. But just imagine it when it was originally started. To the right and left of the steps up to the Duke of York’s Column rises Carlton House Terrace, a long plaster cliff imposing and solid, set back upon its Doric stables, given strength and shadow by immense Corinthian columns. There, Waterloo Place with Decimus Burton’s Athenaeum Club and Barry’s two masterpieces beyond it, the Travellers’ and the Reform, harmonising with the street, yet boldly differing in detail and fenestration: on the right the United Service Club (now spoiled by a vulgar roof). Then the whole sloping length of Lower Regent Street with Repton’s Church, and the County Fire Office at the top. Then the Quadrant in those days adorned with a colonnade. Then block after block of shops by Soane, Smirke, Nash and all the best architects of the time. The windows uniform, each displaying a museum of taste behind well-proportioned oblong panes. The lettering above the shops is uniform, and so the royal march continues past Cockerell’s Church to Nash’s curious building, All Soul’s Church, at the top of Langham Place—a building which perhaps justifies Mr Arthur T. Bolton’s sweeping remark, ‘the easy theatricalities of Nash’. Then a turn to the left and the broad avenue of Portland Place which ends in Regent’s Park. And Regent’s Park alone today remains unharmed. At Portland Place the two quadrants of York Crescent burst out to left and right with their mellow colonnades and unadorned upper storeys: over the Marylebone Road, and there are more simple terraces, and finally, the glorious blocks of buildings—Chester Gate, Cumberland Terrace, Sussex Place, York Terrace—memorials to the greatest English town planning scheme yet put into practice. While behind Cumberland Terrace are, or rather were, smaller Regency streets—Cumberland Market, with the two-storey streets near it, ‘workmen’s dwellings’ invented 100 years before their time.

  And, where London led, the provinces followed.

  The skill of Regency architects is best argued in their buildings. Before this book is remaindered there may
still be a chance, the best chance I know, for Londoners of seeing how excellent the ‘easy theatricalities of Nash’ could be. Let the observer stand on the pavement outside Charing Cross Station. On his left there will be the last remaining stucco buildings in West Strand with a bank on their corner. Let him look at the treatment of that irregular corner, two circular towers engaged to the building and neatly masking the awkward turn into the street that runs alongside the east walls of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Next let him look at the corner of the new South Africa House by Sir Herbert Baker. Lyons, commercial to the last, retain their ungainly shop front below; above, rises the blunt nose of masonry, awkward, narrow, two-dimensional in appearance, skimped in detail, ineffective in its half-hearted effort at simplicity. The new South Africa House seems to be the work of a timid man afraid of the importance of his site. The corner opposite, though half the height of South Africa House and as difficult a problem, is confident work. The buildings of the Regency need no praise; if only people will study them, they speak for themselves. They are removed in this muddled age because they do not speak loud enough. Here are the masterpieces of the Regency and late Georgian architecture in Great Britain. Look at them: Waterloo Bridge, all buildings by Sir John Soane, Carlton House Terrace, Kensal Green, the Screen at Hyde Park Corner, St Pancras Church, Regent’s Park, the National Gallery, Kennington, Stockwell, the Custom House, the British Museum, St Matthew’s, Brixton, the Soane Museum, the Dulwich Art Gallery, in London; St George’s Hall, Liverpool; the National Gallery, the High School, most of the New Town in Edinburgh; the older parts of the Necropolis, Glasgow; the late Nelson Pillar, Dublin; the list is endless.