As George Eliot lamented in Adam Bede, the popular image of Methodism was no longer of a crowd of labouring men and women out of doors drinking in a faith that lifted their weary spirits and suffused their souls with the sense of a loving Presence. In her own day, ‘Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers and hypocritical jargon’. And did not Methodism, like all the other faiths jostling for converts in the religious marketplace, carry within it the seeds of its own downfall? Once allegiance to a Christian body became a matter of consumer choice, its authority became less certain. ‘As an agent of pluralism,’ Hempton remarks, ‘Methodism ultimately paid the price of pluralism.’ Harvey Cox, in The Secular City (1965), famously argued that secularization was an irreversible current which, by bringing tolerance in its wake, fatally undermined every Church’s claim to a monopoly on truth.
Yet Hempton points out that thirty years later, after venturing out from Harvard Square to visit some black and Hispanic Pentecostal congregations in Boston, the same Cox detected in all the laughing, dancing and speaking in tongues that he witnessed there ‘the harbinger of one of the great surprises of the twentieth century, the massive and unanticipated resurgence of religion in a century many had thought would witness its withering away’. The inevitability of secularization no longer looked so secure. This reversal of the current might of course represent no more than a series of eddies and backwaters. People who had been torn away from customary modes of life, and were only just clinging on in a world they found alien and alarming, might be seeking consolation in new forms of religion, just as those displaced by the Industrial Revolution had found anchorage in the direct and simple teaching of the early Methodists. But that need for consolation might be temporary. Once settled in suburbia, these new forms, too, might dwindle into tepid conformity.
But are modernity and Methodism so inherently ill-suited? There are, after all, still 9 million Methodists in the United States. The cheerful, work-oriented egalitarian ethos of Methodism seems pretty well adapted to the values required of Corporation Man. There is a stripped-down quality to Methodism, and a lack of hostility to the present. As Irving Kristol has pointed out, such an absence of lamentation for a lost past is also what differentiates neo-conservatives from traditional conservatives. Nor is this refusal to disown the contemporary world a recent deviation from the original spirit of Methodism. Hempton has an interesting passage on Wesley’s relation to the Enlightenment. Nobody who believed as passionately as Wesley did in God’s immediate supervising providence could be described as belonging to the mainstream of Enlightenment thought. On the other hand, Wesley was also very much a man of his own times, in philosophy a Lockean empiricist, a boyish enthusiast for scientific experiment, a keen believer in human progress and human rights, and an unwavering hater of slavery and persecution. David Hempton’s account in his Methodism: Empire of the Spirit is reminiscent of Ernest Gellner’s analysis of modern Islam in Plough, Sword and Book (1988). Far from Islam’s being an awkward medieval hangover in societies that are still ill at ease with modernity, Gellner argues that the ‘Protestant’ features of the Muslim faith make it surprisingly compatible with modern life. The stress on sobriety and orderly conduct, the equidistance of all believers from the deity, the lack of clerical hierarchy and the relative absence of superstitious encrustations all seem to Gellner ‘highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’.
Much of this would surely apply to Methodism as well. Methodism’s sharp decline in Britain may have had less to do with its intrinsic unsuitability for a consumer society than with the reluctance of Wesley and his English successors ever quite to renounce the Anglican pretensions in which they had been reared, so that Methodism came to seem less like a passionate alternative to the Church of England than a dingier version of it. The secular world prefers to focus on the fundamentalists in both religions, for the good reason that they are the ones threatening to blow us all up or trying to teach our children that Darwin was wrong. Their weird practices and outlandish superstitions are so clearly irrational that they need cause us no intellectual discomfort, though they may cost a fortune in security measures. It is a more unsettling thought that both Christianity and Islam might at the same time be also evolving mutations that actually fit the world as it is.
IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND
It’s a quick-change landscape. Every twenty or thirty miles, everything’s new: the buildings change from chalk and flint to red and blue-nosed brick, from creamy limestone to hot-hued ironstone. The woods change too, from box trees on blown downland to beechwoods in steep hangers, from alders and willows leaning aslant the river banks to the thick old oaks of the Weald and the Forest of Dean. And the voices mutate also, from buttery Devon through burry Hampshire to corncrake Norfolk, from Brummie whine with its melancholy fall up to that Geordie gurgle with its hint of hidden amusement. Despite the efforts of officialdom to parcel them out of existence into mere postcodes, the English counties (many of them older than the nation state itself) continue to resonate in our ears and still command our loyalties. In the early heyday of the BBC it was argued that the mass media would flatten out local accents. No such thing. A burr or a brogue is the passport to media success. Regional character is hammed up rather than eroded. It is the modern age which has invented Essex Man and intensified the competition for the Greatest Living Yorkshireman.
Writers are local spirits too. Sometimes you wonder whether the landscapes really existed before they invented them: Hardy’s Wessex, Crabbe’s Norfolk, Tennyson’s Lincolnshire, Belloc’s Sussex, Bunting’s Northumberland, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Coleridge’s Quantocks, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. This isn’t just a rural thing. Every London patch has its laureate: Keats’s Hampstead, Stevie Smith’s Palmers Green, Anita Brookner’s Marylebone, Anthony Powell’s Fitzrovia, the Bloomsbury of the Group, Patrick Hamilton’s Earls Court, the Bromley of H. G. Wells, the Shepperton of J. G. Ballard.
This inexhaustible diversity provokes in us an appetite for further and better particulars. To a certain sort of English person, topography is as irresistible as pornography, better really because fuller of surprises. The old Shell Guides masterminded by John Piper and John Betjeman, England’s Thousand Best Houses and Churches of Simon Jenkins, above all Nikolaus Pevsner’s gloriously unrolling series of the Buildings of England – these for us are anthologies of a poetry which is peculiarly our own.
Growing up on the undulations of Salisbury Plain, as gentle as they are bare, I have always been intensely aware of how worked and scored the English landscape is: the ancient burial tumps and barrows, the Iron Age camps and Roman forts on the hilltops, the grassy terraces that mark the deserted British villages of the Dark Ages, the chalk pits and limestone quarries, the windswept new fir plantations, the old coppiced copses of oak and hazel, the abandoned military camps of the Second World War, the fresh tank trails across the downs. Man has been everywhere here and left his mark, not to speak of his bones. For me, these bones live.
PEVSNER IN BERKSHIRE
In most people’s minds, poignancy and Nikolaus Pevsner do not go together. John Betjeman did his damnedest to make us think of his lifelong rival as dry-eyed and thin-lipped, the archetypal Prussian pedant. Yet it is hard to imagine a sadder start to any book than the foreword to the first edition of Pevsner’s Berkshire:
Berkshire is the first English county I had to travel and describe after my wife had died. She had driven me through nearly all the preceding counties, had done all the day-to-day planning, and more and more also visited the buildings. Four eyes see more than two, and her eyes were quicker than mine. I fear this volume will have suffered from that private circumstance. The journey could not have the zest, the fun, the cursing in common which all belonged to so well tried a partnership.
Some readers have endorsed this touching self-criticism and found the book as a whole a little spiritless and some of the entries too pe
remptory. I would prefer to point out the terrific pace at which Pevsner was proceeding with The Buildings of England. By the time Berkshire came out in 1966, he had dealt with thirty counties in fifteen years, with another sixteen to come over the following eight years, before the series was completed in 1974. He had assistants and informants, of course, apart from Karola Pevsner, but his was the judging eye and the driving force – well, in fact non-driving force. The magnificence of this one-man achievement must excuse the occasional over-laconic or dismissive entry with its dread interposed semi-colon: ‘Nave perp; dull’ and the hasty, unanswered question: ‘Can this be eighteenth-century?’
The new edition occupies more than twice the 355 smaller pages of its 1960s predecessor. It is gloriously comprehensive, both in its coverage and in its architectural explications, as the new Pevsners always are. The Yale University Press deserves all the plaudits it has already received for perpetuating the series and bringing it as close to perfection as is possible in an imperfect world. The photographs, by Angelo Hornak, match the sharpness and vivacity of the text. And while a great number of the entries have been rewritten as well as expanded, enough of the curiosity and acerbity of the Master survive, just as a robust Norman arcade may continue to underpin later embellishments.
Pevsner’s legacy to this particular volume was to provide his successors with a justification for keeping to the historical boundaries of Berkshire, before the graceless surgery of Ted Heath and Peter Walker tipped the top third of the county across the Thames into Oxfordshire. The old county had endured since King Alfred’s heyday, being first mentioned by name in a document of AD 860 in pretty much the shape it was to retain for the next 1100 years.
We need to explore the full Berks if we are to gather a proper sense of the amazing variety to be found in what is only a moderate-sized county (but can one think of any English county of which this is not true?). As the guide points out, you can drive across it today on the M4 in less than an hour without breaking the speed limit – more like forty-five minutes, I would say. Yet in this saggy-sock-shaped stretch of country there are half-a-dozen Berkshires, each with its own quiddities and materials. Here the splendid essay on ‘Geology and Building Stones’ by Philip Powell is pivotal and a considerable improvement on Terence Miller’s slighter effort in 1966.
In the north-west, a limestone ridge divides the Upper Thames from the Vale of the White Horse. As a result, some streets in Faringdon, now a quiet and bypassed little town, look as if they belonged in a Cotswold show village, although the Cotswolds would be hard put to outdo the unpretending beauty of Faringdon House, built for Henry Pye, generally regarded as our worst poet laureate, or match the high camp of its later owner, the composer Lord Berners (Nancy Mitford’s Lord Merlin), who painted the pigeons in his dovecote pink and blue, entertained Diaghilev and Stravinsky and built a Gothic tower 110 feet high on a nearby eminence, perhaps the last great folly built in England. His companion and later heir, Robert Heber-Percy, known as ‘the Mad Boy’, is commemorated, suitably, by a sculpture of Dionysus in the garden.
Only half-a-dozen miles south of Faringdon the chalk country begins under the lazy eye of the White Horse of Uffington, with its sinuous curve across the down, one of the most mysterious monuments in Europe, now ascribed to the Iron Age and at once intensely primitive and stunningly modern. On the other side of the hill sits Ashdown House, the first Earl of Craven’s hunting box, described by old Pevsner as ‘the perfect doll’s house’ and compared by new Pevsner to Mansart’s Château de Balleroy outside Bayeux. But there is something altogether more magical about Ashdown, the absurdly tall faerie pavilion of glistening white chalk plumped so high on the downs, something impermanent, a Tardis for hunting earls.
Coming down off the chalk, we come into the gravels of the Kennet Valley and mainstream Berkshire, a smaller-scale, more domestic landscape of flint and brick cottages and Nonconformist chapels and old cloth mills and biscuit factories, and new high-tech and IT business parks. Then in the south-east of the county, the gravels shade off into the Bagshot Beds, a sandy wasteland of pine and heather which remained almost uninhabited except for the gypsies, known locally as the Tadley Squires, until the coming of the railways transformed it into the heartland of Stockbroker Tudor and Prep School Queen Anne.
Finally, if we trace our way along the south bank of the Thames, which forms the county’s old northern boundary all the way back to Buscot, we find outbreaks of the Edwardian Regatta style: white wooden balconies, tile-hung façades and fanciful belvederes, crouching under steep hills with beech hangers clinging to them.
The small towns of Berkshire stayed small until the later twentieth century. Reading and its suburbs have grown from a population of 120,000 in the 1960s to more than 200,000, Bracknell from next to nothing to more than 50,000, while Newbury has become one of those edge cities which promise high-paid jobs without the hassle of commuting. It is noticeable, I am afraid, that the prettier and thus richer small towns like Abingdon and Windsor have taken more trouble in supervising the scale and architectural tact of the new developments than the mushroom townships in the east of the county.
Berkshire has no ancient cathedral and few great houses. Englefield, the nearest thing to a prodigy house, fails to scrape into Mark Girouard’s Elizabethan Architecture, perhaps because so much of it was Jacobeanized by the Victorians. In the eighteenth century, City merchants and magnates built some delightful Palladian villas along the southern slopes of the Kennet Valley, but only Basildon Park, in the woods to the west of Reading, makes it into the top division, and that was built for a Yorkshire-born Bengal nabob, Sir Francis Sykes, by another Yorkshireman, John Carr.
What stick in the memory rather are the modest town houses with their creamy pediments and pillared doorways, and above all the brick they are built in, of every colour – orange, and salmon, and rose, and scarlet and blue and grey and purple – and patterned in every imaginable way, in string courses and diapers and zigzags and crosses and saltires and oblongs and rondels. In their Murray’s Berkshire Architectural Guide (1949), John Betjeman and John Piper assert that bricks have been better and longer used in Berkshire than in any other county except Kent, and East Anglia: ‘the bricks and tiles of Berkshire are seen at their best in crisp winter sunlight, when they seem to glow like fires and, as the sun goes down, to hold the light more warmly than the sunset.’
The guides that Betjeman and Piper did for John Murray are as full of atmosphere and enthusiasm as the Shell Guides over which they also presided. In Berkshire especially they were on home terrain. Piper lived just the other side of the Thames, near Henley, and Betjeman lived at various times in four different houses within striking distance of Wantage. He was a churchwarden of the matchless Early English church at Uffington, and he is commemorated in the tiny downland church of Farnborough by an exuberant Piper window of butterflies, fruit and fishes. So their blood was up when they wrote in their introduction: ‘We still believe in the virtue of making clear our reactions to buildings and to towns and villages. We believe that houses and churches do, and should, inspire love and hate, and that it is worth while recording the reactions of two observers, instead of making a cold catalogue.’
Although Pevsner’s first county volume was not published until two years later, it is clear enough at whom all this is aimed. The feud had got under way in the 1930s, when Pevsner described the attention being paid to Victorian buildings and design as ‘still, with a very few exceptions, of the whimsical variety’. In his second London volume, published in 1952, he denounced ‘the excesses of praise lavished on Comper’s church furnishings by those who confound aesthetic with religious emotion’ – Ninian Comper being Betjeman’s favourite living architect. Pevsner’s disdain matched Betjeman’s prickly paranoia. It is not surprising that there should have been not a single mention of the Murray’s guide in Pevsner’s.
More than half a century later, a posthumous peace seems to have broken out. The new Pevsner quotes Betje
man and Piper copiously, for example, their verdict on Bracknell as ‘the dullest-looking town in Berkshire’; or of Crowthorne, ‘its straight tarmac roads between wellingtonias, deodars and rhododendrons’; or of St Luke’s Garford, as ‘a brown study in village Perpendicular’. Indeed, comparing all three guidebooks, you begin to wonder what the row was all about; so many of the entries run along the same lines, reach the same conclusions and let rip the same likings and loathings.
Nor can Pevsner be stereotyped as an unreasoning teutonic Modernist. Christopher Hussey in a three-parter in Country Life lavishly admired Charters, Sunningdale, the giant white pile built for the electrical millionaire Frank Parkinson by George Adie, better known as the architect of the Stockwell bus depot, but Pevsner dismisses it as ‘a typical case of the C20 style adopted willy-nilly, just in order to be up to date. White and cubic it is, but the great hall in the centre has a front to the S with the giant pillars of the Fascist brand and the French windows to its l. and r. are of Georgian proportions’. New Pevsner is rather more charitable to Adie’s efforts to bring the machine à vivre approach to Sunningdale.
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