Ghastly Good Taste

by John Betjeman

How well the ancient woodwork

  Looks round the Rect’ry hall‚

  Memorial of the good work

  Of him who plann’d it all.

  He who took down the pew ends

  And sold them anywhere‚

  But kindly spared a few ends

  Worked up into a chair;

  Oh worthy persecution

  Of dust; oh hue divine!

  Oh cheerful substitution

  Thou varnishéd pitch-pine!

  Church furnishing! Church furnishing!

  Come Mowbray swell the praise.*

  He gave the brass for burnishing,

  He gave the thick red baize;

  He gave the new addition

  Pull’d down the dull old aisle,

  To pave the sweet transition,

  He gave th’ encaustic tile!

  Of marble brown and veinéd

  He did the pulpit make,

  He order’d windows stainéd

  Light red and crimson lake.

  Sing on with hymns uproarious

  Ye humble and aloof!

  Look up—and oh! how glorious!

  He has restored the roof!

  But it is tiresome to laugh at Victorian solecisms. It has been done too often. For those who wish to read a far from laughable study of the earlier part of the Gothic revival, I can recommend Mr Kenneth Clark’s book on that subject.

  The true English tradition of national craftsmanship never died in the Victorian era. That is a superficial criticism, often aimed at an age of mass production and but partially organised industrialism.

  Perhaps it were well to take the good craftsmanship in Victorian domestic architecture first. I admit willingly that it did not reside with architects, and but rarely with builders. Speculation in houses saw to that. In the house, however, woman, aware of her place, that of doing crochetwork, embroidery, shell work, painting, dressmaking while waiting for baby, produced exquisitely-made articles that are the pride of families whose ancestors go back to Victorian times.

  But by far the finest tradition of architecture set by the Victorian age was in her commercial enterprises. We do not realise today the courage required to build a railway to the North of England, a house of glass like the Crystal Palace, a development scheme like that extending from the Albert Memorial to the Museum district of South Kensington. It is in these schemes that the great English architectural tradition was ahead of Europe. Whoever considers King’s Cross Station today? Yet it is one of the finest buildings in the world. Two enormous brick arches filled with glass, divided by a plain tower with no superfluous decoration. The offices, blocks, and the crescent-shaped hotel form part of the same scheme, simple buildings with an appropriate veneer of classical decoration. And inside the station are those two great receding tunnels of glass, with their rhythmical pattern of iron girders and supports.

  Next door is St Pancras Station, with its fantastic Gothic hotel, before which Sir Gilbert Scott, the architect, is said to have exclaimed, ‘It is too beautiful!’ Behind it is one of the largest roofs of a single span in the world. More beautiful though no less daring than the hotel. The hotel reminds me of a pompous alderman with an enormous watch-chain, flaring tie and pearl tiepin masking a bosom in which beats a worthy heart.

  Nor are railways, with their handsome locomotives, the only examples of England’s innate architectural sense. In the countless factories, unadorned workplaces of the North, in machines, in engine sheds, in cast-iron bridges, in the work of railway and bridge engineers, even in gasometers, the English tradition was carried on, albeit unconsciously.

  Only when ‘architecture’ was considered something to stick on to a building afterwards to make it ‘showy’ or upper class, were the mistakes made. Heaven knows there were hundreds of such mistakes. But they were good, vulgar mistakes, like a dropped ‘h’. I would any day prefer an ornate sham-marble Victorian mantel to a ‘refeened’ pseudo-Queen Anne effort designed by some pupil of an architectural school today.

  Victorian architecture exactly reflected the middle class, the backbone of England, which industrialism had created. In its utilitarian buildings it was honest and often imaginative, in its domestic buildings naïvely snobbish, as unpleasant but as well intended, as grocer’s port. The ‘refeenment’ and ‘good taste’ which killed English architecture, at any rate, as a national style, must wait until the next chapter.

  * Mowbrays at the time objected to their name being used, because they thought it detrimental to their church-furnishing business. I was sent for to see them in their Margaret Street shop. The edition was withdrawn, the page was cancelled, and a feebler line with no names in it substituted.

  Chapter VIII · Revolt in the Middle Classes

  Refinement and Refeenment Good Taste

  The isles saw it and feared.—Isaiah xliv

  In 1874 the new Law Courts were begun. Little more than a decade before, the flagstaff had been erected on the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament after the last stone had been laid. Street built the Law Courts, and Barry built the Houses of Parliament. And in those two buildings lies the whole history of great Victorian architecture. The era which had started so well with Barry’s stupendous achievement, the Houses of Parliament, ended in that colossal failure, the new Law Courts, which guards Fleet Street still, like some fossilised, but none the less impressive, brontosaurus. And perhaps it is by contrasting the careers of Sir Charles Barry and George Edmund Street that we may see how architecture has become so diverse today. For Barry was in the old architectural tradition—self-educated, a demon for work, an artist and a visionary. Street was in the new tradition, a gentleman, well educated, a scholar, an artist and a visionary. Barry was unself-conscious, Street the reverse. Barry allowed his scholarship to be no more than his slave. He tamed Italian palaces into London clubs, and Henry VII’s Chapel into the Houses of Parliament; only here and there did he make a mistake. Street always considered his scholarship first, and let his own ideas work themselves out within the limits allowed by a somewhat pedantic conscience. He never tamed anything. He died beaten by his own master, the Gothic Revival, when fierce contentions rated over his beloved Law Courts. And there they stand today, dated and dead, while Barry’s masterpiece is as alive as ever.

  The Law Courts were the death knell of the old-fashioned scholarly Gothic. Obviously something was wrong with them. They were like a cathedral, certainly, but somehow they needed monks and priests and bishops.

  And as much as the Gothic Revival had become a self-conscious and a moral affair, the classical architecture which had glorified the Regency period lost its vigour in these fierce commercial times. I have shown in another chapter how the districts of Pimlico and South Kensington are unwieldy memorials of its downfall. Classical architecture became Italianate and attenuated, in its effort to keep pace with the Gothic Revival, and in Edward Middleton Barry’s Cannon Street Hotel we see a similar effort to St Pancras carried out in the classical manner.

  All such monumental architecture of public buildings and the larger merchants’ mansions had become the work of architects who were ruined by self-consciousness, who were horrified lest they should betray some false scholarship by building any large edifice in a straightforward way.

  Domestic architecture had come to a pretty pass. The rapidly increasing population requiring small houses were swindled by speculators almost as much as they are swindled by them today. Houses were built by visionaries, or else by speculative speculators in land, in stained glass for front doors, in cast iron railings, in terra-cotta ridge tiles, in mosaic pavements for front gardens, in bamboo furniture, in mahogany sideboards, in Japanese fans, in horsehair coverings, in moulded classical cornices, in marble and imitation marble mantels, in vases, in bowls, in coloured tiles, in coloured door knobs, in wallpaper, flowered and classical, in capitals, Gothic and Romanesque; in window-boxes, sashes, frosted or stained glass, glazing bars; in brass knobs for bedsteads, in brass bedsteads for knobs, in the thousan
ds of superfluities which make a home a home and a house different from its neighbour alongside it, and to all but its owner a just estimate of an income of its inmate. The suburbs of every manufacturing town, the pretentious villa in a village trying to look like a bit of East Ham in Melbury Bubb; every front door imitating the window of a parish church, every name in glass above it lit by a flaming gas jet behind, picked out in flamboyant lettering and recalling the name of one of the stately homes of England, although the number is 37 and more convenient for the post office; these are the products of speculating building.

  It is, therefore, hardly surprising that those middle-class Victorians, whose eyes were not blinded by the dust from the progressive march of industrialism, should have attempted to have a little aesthetic revolution on their own. It was a revolution which had disastrous effects, as we shall see later; it was the revolution of ‘back to mediaevalism’ in the face of Sir Gilbert Scott and G. E. Street. Gothic practised by the pundits was not mediaeval enough. William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood escaped from the din and the roar of commerce. They escaped to those flat meadows of Lechlade, where Kelmscot Manor still stands among the elms, and where Miss May Morris still waves from her father’s bold designs. But as she and hundreds of others influenced by the Morris movement weave and weave with lily hands the trailing beautiful patterns of their inspirer, patterns equally good in a different way are stamped, edged and spun by machines, are made faster and faster, until the fingers of the gentlefolk weavers tire and fall into their home-spun laps. It is easy enough to laugh at the Morris movement. It was as scholarly as architecture practised by architects had become, but it was a domestic movement. Besides Philip Webb, there was no great early interpreter of Morris in brick and stone; they were to come later.

  Morris came like a healthy breeze, pleading his doctrine of escape in an impossible guild socialism capable of succeeding only in remote agricultural villages.

  From township to townships‚ o’er down and by tillage

  Far, far have we wander’d and long was the day,

  But now cometh eve at the end of the village

  Where over the grey wall the church riseth grey.

  There is wind in the twilight; in the white road before us

  The straw from the ox yard is blowing about,

  The moon’s rim is rising, a dove glitters o’er us

  And the vane on the spire top is swinging in doubt.

  Down there dips the highway‚ toward the bridge crossing over

  The brook that runs on to the Thames and the sea,

  [Draw closer my sweet‚ we are lover and lover,

  This eve thou art given to gladness and me.]

  What a blessed relief from New Cross and Hornsey, from Pimlico and Manchester, but how impossible and how cowardly an escape!

  We have made the machines and there they are. We have let them get the better of us. The pure doctrines of Morris certainly purified English architecture, though they only purified domestic architecture. The work of Charles Francis Annesley Voysey, a master of all crafts, which carried on and made known to the Continent that architecture was still alive in England, was perhaps the finest flowering of actual self-conscious architecture in Victorian England. We all know the sort of houses he built and those his imitators built. They are situated generally in Buckinghamshire. Steep and broad-slated roofs with tapering chimneys are supported by thin walls heavily buttressed. The windows, high under the roof and again near the ground, are long and low. Inside, the furniture is simple and hand-made of unstained oak, probably pierced with hearts. The walls are whitewashed, and the chintzes are designed in bright primary colours. There is an atmosphere of health, of the windows flung open, of bright nurseries and clean bathrooms, of the smell of soap, of wholemeal bread, of vegetarianism, Quakerism and sober gaiety that marks the beginning of emancipation in the early twentieth century. Sir Edwin Lutyens started as a follower of Voysey when he built his beautiful smaller houses; Guy Dawber and Baillie Scott followed close behind. A prophet is not without honour … Voysey lives today. Of such stuff as these houses were made garden cities, our most important contribution to the all-important subject of town planning.

  Influenced by Voysey, and reacting from the sham classicalism of Norman Shaw,* came the Art Nouveau movement of 1900. It was the longest stride in the right direction. It looked to find new forms, and discarded the old shibboleths of crockets or classical orders. It died a quick death. Its greatest exponent was characteristically a Scotsman, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who died almost forgotten in 1924. He may be said to have founded ‘modern’ architecture as it is to be seen in Germany. He had no fear of blank surfaces, and made windows only where he needed them. His finest work is the Glasgow Art School. We would have none of his work in England, but until the war simple contemporary architecture, such as that practised by that master genius, Peter Behrens, was known in Germany as Mackintoshismus.

  The lily roots and twisted horrors of Art Nouveau had been straightened out, and the simple architecture goes on today with the work, among others, of practical men like Frederick Etchells, Wells Coates, Joseph Emberton and a few others.

  There were, indeed, disastrous results of this domestic Morris movement of architecture, but not so disastrous as those of a classical revival specially suited to ‘educated’ architects, who liked to show off their knowledge of Renaissance detail—a novel knowledge in 1880—and whose leader was Norman Shaw. Of this gentleman’s work the less said the better. He was a facile, expensive and pretentious architect, who, like many of his followers, had a facility for catching rich clients.

  Except for the fine streak in domestic architecture which I have mentioned, building ceased to be of anything but commercial importance in England after 1860. For those who have a taste for the morbid I have appended a genealogical tree—perforce, rather too sweeping—showing the results and reactions of self-conscious stylism.

  * Who, I now realise, was our greatest architect since Wren, if not greater.

  THE GROWTH OF ‘GOOD TASTE’

  Conclusion

  And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.—Isaiah xxxv. 7

  And now what of the future? I have taken a clean sheet of paper because I do not wish to hamper my mind with the thoughts that surge up in me at the sight of Mr Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s devilish drawings, or of the art in Shaftesbury Avenue or the new Regent Street.

  Architects today ought to be the most important men in the country.

  Nearly all the suburbs and centres of towns are badly planned. An architect must be a town planner.

  Steel, concrete, glass and plywood have made a new era in building. New proportions and new masses and new systems of heating, lighting and ventilation have been called into being. Only 100 years ago a water-closet was unheard of. An architect must be every sort of engineer.

  There are more swindlers about than ever there were in the eighteenth century. An architect must be a business man.

  Where has English architectural talent disappeared? Native ability to design is alive. No other country than our own can make such beautiful motor cars, railway locomotives, buses or trams. English craftsmen can be competent and thorough as many British workmen. The housewives’ dream, the labour-saving kitchen, that throbbing heart of efficiency in the midst of the dead ‘period’ decoration of every villa in lovely Mill Hill, Hendon Heights, healthy Edgware, bracing Bootle, beechy Bucks, charming Surrey or moderate Morden contains all the architectural ingenuity required to plan a town.

  Architecture is not dead, it needs co-ordination.

  Who is to co-ordinate so many talents? The genius is there, though I doubt whether all the knowledge required for an architect today could be co-ordinated in one man. We have created a specialised civilisation, so that its architecture will require specialised departments. In a system of commercial competition th
is is impossible. So far we have had to be content with the pseudo-Renaissance efforts of a be-knighted architecture—architecture as affected and ‘naice’ as a refeened accent and hardly preferable to the dropped ‘h’s’ of a speculative builder.

  And this is where I clinch the argument by which I have attempted to hold together this book. Since architecture is too big a job for one man, several men must do it. This will never be done under a system which allows the ‘gentlemen’ to show off their knowledge of period, while the all-important engineers have their good work hidden by these self-conscious marks.

  Several men, each working in his own department, can be made harmonious by a unity of ideals, as men worked in Regency or mediaeval days. This is obvious enough. We have seen in this book how English architecture emerged from the religious unity of Christendom to the reasoned unity of an educated monarchic system, and then to the stranger order of an industralised community. As soon as it became unsettled, towards the end of the nineteenth century, ‘architecture’ qua architecture became self-conscious. Only in trades which were alive and prosperous did good design continue. Now those trades are declining and architecture is no less self-conscious.

  Architecture can only be made alive again by a new order and another Christendom. I repeat that I do not know what form that Christendom will take, for I am not an economist. It is unlikely that it will be capitalism. Whatever it is, this generation will not see it.

  Castlepollard—Capri—Heston-Hounslow—Wiesbaden.

  About the Author

  Poet and architectural critic, Sir John Betjeman was born in North London in 1906. He was taught by T. S. Eliot at Highgate Junior School and was rusticated from Magdalen College Oxford for failing Divinity. He published several poetry collections, including New Bats in Old Belfries and A Few Late Chrysanthemums, and several works on architecture. His Collected Poems was published in 1958 and the first edition sold over 100,000 copies. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in 1972. He died in Cornwall in 1984.