First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  I must add here a parenthesis. Upholders of new methods of building are inclined, in their enthusiasm, to think that no further use can be made of the so-called traditional styles; that brick and stone, columns and swags are finished. As far as big office blocks and monumental secular architecture of any size are concerned, they are. St. George’s Hall and the Houses of Parliament are final examples of the brick and stone architecture—and there is a good deal of cast iron in them. But these buildings are satisfactory because they are built out of materials to which this decoration, whether structural or not, was suited, and because they were built by men of genius capable of moulding a style of their own.

  We all know the antiquarianism that besets the third group, domestic architecture. So well do we know it that it is hardly worth while trotting out the old jokes. Walk, some sunny afternoon as I have done, through any post-war suburb—and almost any place you visit in England is a post-war suburb. Look up, while the perambulator creaks beside you and the children skip over the squares of paving to the too-distant park, look up at the quiet houses that flank the interminable avenue. In poorer districts only a variation in the stained glass of a front door, the juxtaposition of gable beams, or greater or less repulsiveness in the texture of rough-cast differentiates one house from another. In twenty years’ time, when the building societies have got more than their money back, only the standard roses dwarfing the Cotswold sundial, the flower-beds lovingly filled with tested seeds, will improve the appearance of the road. Bay windows will be falling out, foundations crumbling, plumbing leaking, leaded lights letting in the rain, the larder will be sheltered by the hood of that long-disused pram—the Happy Homestead to which Hubby smilingly gave Wifie the key, that little corner of a loving heart that is for ever Metroland, will be rather unpleasant. The L.P.T.B. will not bother to display its best posters on the underground station; the buses will be less frequent, the walk longer, the houses draughtier than ever.

  In the richer districts Queen Anne vies with Tudor, as in St. John’s Wood where some of the most arrogant, staring, badly-planned travesties of Queen Anne architecture flare up in place of the decent Early Victorian stucco which once made that district a sun-reflecting half-village among laburnums and pollarded limes. I think of two couplets from Longfellow’s “Lady Wentworth,” describing the dream-mansion of American riches, they describe the dream-mansion of England today:

  “It was a pleasant mansion, an abode

  Near and yet hidden from the great high road,

  Sequestered among trees, a noble pile,

  Baronial and Colonial in its style.”

  If ever antiquarianism disguising itself as “tradition” has affected the English landscape, it has affected it in domestic building. Though willing to be crushed in an argument on the subject, I am ready to admit that in certain villages of limestone, chalk or brick, the old methods of building are the right ones. The pitched roof, a harmonious building material, even leaded lights (though not diamond panes) are permissible. But for our suburbs, that is to say for the bulk of our population, it can only be a form of bogus traditionalism backed by certain sinister influences in the building trade which has permitted the present system to continue. Building can only be carried on in fine weather. The houses once built, however badly, cannot be removed except at very great expense. When the focus of the population shifts, many London suburbs will be deserted and terrifying like the pit villages of the north, from which much of London’s new population has come. They will be useless as agricultural lands, and hardly a worthy memorial of our so-called civilisation to yet more archæologists in the future.

  Every day one sees in the papers advertisements of portable houses. Hideous indeed they often are. But that is the fault of architects. Architects have been too wrapped up in “style,” in bricks and foundations and whatnot, to devote their attention to the only solution of the housing problem—the production of decent and convenient mass-produced houses. These houses should be pre-fabricated, as was the Crystal Palace, they should be and could be as well planned, as sound and weather-proof as the best brick-built house. Pre-fabrication would make it possible to remove these houses from one place to another when they were wanted, and the land they had occupied could go back to agriculture. Experiments in houses of this sort have been made successfully in Germany and America. I see no hope for the majority until they are made here. Lord Nuffield had a wonderful opportunity to make them at his pressed-steel works at Oxford. He missed it, and many of his workers are housed in some of the worst speculative estates to be seen. Perhaps I am reading too much into antiquarianism to attach it to such inertia as this.

  Lastly comes planning, and with this I am too, perhaps, stretching a point by laying the stress on antiquarianism. But planning (though it comes last in this essay, it is the most important) is riddled with various schools of thought. Schools of thought? First comes the School of No Thought. The L.C.C. pulled down Waterloo Bridge for reasons which it would be libellous to go into. Were they planning a great road north and south, quite straight? If so, why? Does the L.C.C. realise that motor cars do not mind going out of their way to avoid traffic halts? That circular roads would be cheaper and more practical? That horse traffic, to which the shortest route was the quickest, is now almost defunct?

  Another example of the School of No Thought is that which puts up hefty blocks of flats, of the wrong height, in places where, for all we know, flats will not be wanted in ten years’ time—the School of No Thought, which builds before it plans, is found in every English local authority. Only someone with the myopic eyesight of an antiquarian would put up houses and clear others away before some concerted scheme of planning, traffic, railways, was made. As it is, the estates are built, and transport at great expense and to the confusion of everything else comes lumbering along afterwards.

  Perhaps it is antiquarianism, too, which dreams of England as a series of self-supporting garden suburbs surrounded by green belts. These antiquarians would have to go to Northumberland and Durham, the Welsh mountains or the distant “shires” before they could find a belt of any desirable width which could be called really green—any beyond that of leather which girdles up their own homespuns.

  Finally, my mind switches to the last fruit of the excessive antiquarianism to which we are subject—the educated reaction from it, which results in “jazz-modern.”

  “Jazz-modern” is the product of insensitive minds. It is the decoration of art-school students. You all know it. The “modernistic suites” to be seen in hire-purchase catalogues, the dashing milk-bars which have dispensed with the need for capital letters. The monogram and new buildings of the G.W.R. at Paddington. In the 1920’s jazz-modernism consisted of cubes, triangles and arrows in “poster colours”; everything from the frosted glass above the windows of a shop to the cushion in a punt was in this emancipated jazz manner. Perhaps even the arrogant modern designers who dared to think they could create mouldings and motifs, which it has taken centuries to evolve, perhaps even they grew afraid. Anyhow, the neo-Swedish style succeeded in favour. Little squashed flowers were engraved on glass (the new R.I.B.A. building is the cathedral of such decoration) or painted in ever-so-dainty shades of pastel pink and pastel green on to unstained birchwood. Later a style that was neither the one nor the other, but called “not too modern and not too traditional” was used, as it is now, for cinemas, churches and public buildings. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott is its most successful exponent. His library at Cambridge is only excelled by his new Bodleian as a “safe blending of tradition with modernism,” whatever that may mean. In London the supreme example of the restrained jazz is his work at Battersea Power Station. There the good, tall chimneys were not allowed to smoke for themselves, an architect was called in to design some fluting part of the way up them. Give me Lot’s Road. But Sir Giles has his great moments.

  The reaction from antiquarianism has been almost as harmful as antiquarianism itself.

  Before I finish, I would lik
e to enquire into the causes of this extraordinary state.

  There are the champions of antiquity. First the experts.

  We know the expert by sight and by conversation. “Yes, very interesting, no doubt, but I’m afraid it’s not in my period—you should see Popplethwaite. I believe he has done some work on the subject.” Experts are short-sighted, probably from studying details for so long, they live in museums, they are a little scurfy, a little dirty, very precise and very damning of every other expert. They have that wonderful gift of turning life to death, interest to ashes. The only vitality visible in them is the heartiness of their contempt for the enquiring layman. Then they flower, then they love to dazzle him with words and with references. And that enquiring layman, who might be you or I, is sent home abashed. Perhaps he came to know about aquatints, having admired the colour-prints of Rowlandson and Malton. Admiration for his subject is not what the expert wants. Admiration for his knowledge is what he expects. Perhaps long ago the expert really did like aquatints, but now he only likes knowing about first proofs, raw state, etc., etc. His word for “beautiful” has become “important.” He is as removed from the original purpose of his subject, be it aquatints for illustration, stained glass for telling a story, textile for decoration, as the mathematician from simple arithmetic.

  Experts can live in museums and can be divorced entirely from the setting. Museums and the experts who run them are one of the penalties of antiquarianism. Not all museums, for there can obviously be such a thing as an inspiring museum—the picture galleries and sculpture halls. But whenever I walk through long galleries of spears and arrow-heads, of urns and sarcophagi, I do not feel myself taken back to the ancient civilisations. Rather I find myself admiring dignified architecture and thinking what a long walk it is from one end of the Museum to another, and how singularly lifeless the loveliest things appear as soon as they are in a little glass case with a label underneath them. Museums of the uninspired sort, and that is to say most museums, from Forest Hill to Bethnal Green, are the direct children of antiquarianism. They are places where you cannot see the woad for the spears, more often you cannot even see the spears, so remote, so distinct, so classified and subclassified are the little prongs of objects displayed. There is only one London museum of an antiquarian sort which really moves me, and that is Sir John Soane’s, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And this is interesting not only because of its wonderful plan and exquisite furniture and pictures, but also because it was Sir John’s private house.

  And along with museums and experts comes the research worker and his institute. Research is the curse of our age. “Research” is the first step on the way to expertdom. There is so much research going on nowadays that teachers are becoming scarce. Already in the universities complaints are being made about there being too many research students and research fellowships. And what, you may ask, is all this research for? Goodness knows. There are at Oxford students researching into modern languages. What are they researching? Are they just being paid money to read minor authors in the original? It looks like it. Research into art is useful, but there can be and is too much of it. Every research student in art means one less work of art—for it means the glorification of antiques and the established, and less encouragement to the struggling artist. If the tremendous amount of money that has been lavished on founding the Courtauld Institute—an institute for breeding art critics and antique dealers of the more expensive sort—had instead been given as a fund for the encouragement and support of living artists, those among my readers who are creative workers would be able to have the more chance of earning a livelihood by what they like best. It is symptomatic of this age of antiquarianism that a thing like the Courtauld Institute exists.

  Next comes the authoritative attitude given to antiquarian research. Allow me to quote from a recent review of a publication of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments:

  Why does the survey stop at 1714? I have tried to find some significance for the date. Queen Anne died, the Peace of Utrecht had been signed the year before, the South Sea Bubble had not yet burst. Why not 1814? or 1914? Why any date at all? Should not all buildings of merit have been included and rather fewer fragmentary moats and fifteenth-century fonts? Or did none of the Commissioners feel himself capable of deciding what constituted architectural merit? The F.S.A.’s have it, as usual.

  It is hard to treat a survey as complete which thus describes Syon House, containing Robert Adam’s best interior work, “A large Tudor house, much altered in the eighteenth century, and incorporating an undercroft of the nunnery of Henry V.” On a plan of Syon, the Adam part is marked as “modern and uncertain.” Strawberry Hill interests the Commissioners because some original chamfered ceiling beams are exposed. The only part of Osterley recommended for preservation is the Elizabethan stables. Needless to add, four badly-preserved earthworks, eleven churches (but not Little Stanmore with its early eighteenth-century painted walls, Handel’s organ and the Chandos tomb, as these are a year or more later than 1714 and therefore “modern”), and several seventeenth-century houses are recommended as “specially worthy of preservation.”

  Town planning schemes, large Georgian and Regency houses in gardens, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century churches, the few surviving parks with their grottoes and temples, are considerations beneath the notice of the Royal Commissioners or, as they would term it, “outside their scope.”

  This survey is not only absurdly inadequate, it is also definitely harmful. It has all the authority of His Majesty’s Stationery Office, and the well-sounding names of the Royal Commissioners behind it; it is sold at so low a price that one can only conclude that the work has been subsidised: it is just the sort of book that will be used as a Bible. Arrogant and ignorant county councillors and avaricious builders will use it as an excuse for pulling down more and more worthy architecture: “Uxbridge Town Hall, Mr. Chairman, is not mentioned in the Historical Monuments Book. It has therefore no historical interest or architectural merits.” “Very well, Mr. Tudor Beam, we will make an order for demolition.”3

  After all this, imagine the position of the modern architect. Picture the young fellow to be put into a “profession” because trade is considered beneath him (another antiquarian prejudice). The young fellow hasn’t exactly got a legal mind, like father; he’s not much good at essays, so he can’t write; he faints at the sight of blood, so he can’t be a doctor. What is there for him to do? Architecture, of course. Architecture has registered itself as a profession. Unlike Art, Architecture is practical and respectable. Why, I know architects who, as they’re good at business, go far, just like ordinary men. Where shall we send the fellow? To an architectural school of course, where he’ll meet a lot of other healthy-minded youngsters and learn to turn out prize-medal drawings to be judged by Mr. Maufe, and learn to make letters in all the latest type-faces, and elevations in all the latest mannerisms, and to cast simply lovely shadows down his elevations.

  Are you surprised that with such people as this, frightened on the one side by the “dry-as-dust” antiquarian, tickled to death on the other by all the jolly tricks of a rebellious moderne, futuristic, Swedish, cubistic, yet tasteful nature—are you surprised that architecture in England is what it is? With an Ealing veneer of antiquity or moderne-ity.

  The time-honoured system of apprenticeship and practical experience, of being articled to an architect who either repulses you so much you react against him as Bodley did to the elder Gilbert Scott, or evolve from him out of admiration as Soane did from the younger Dance—that system is over. That system created individualists, great men of whom Comper, Voysey, Ashbee, Lutyens, Baillie Scott and a few others survive.4

  A man must be a great man, or a movement must be a disinterested one, to be able to ignore the noise of antiquarian prejudice shouting at its bastard, jazz-modernism. Down every street the bawling goes, from Selfridge’s to Lilley & Skinner’s, from Drage’s to Waring & Gillows, from Ouitoo to Grosvenor Court; the roads slide with
motor cars, the chasms are blue with petrol fumes, the sky roars with aeroplanes, deadly insects whose drone is like a dentist’s drill in the brain; the pavements belch with the noise of radio shops, the public passages are too narrow, the public faces too pinched, the public food too inedible, the public mind too frightened; a ticket for this, a form for that, a set opinion about this, a standard dream of the unattainable. No wonder we lose our heads, no wonder we escape into the past. No wonder the old men are antiquarians and the mediocre diddled. I hope I have shown how antiquarian prejudice has something, but not all, to do with it. Greed and Careerism have much more. What will give us time to think? What-will give us an opportunity to act? A Ministry of Fine Arts? A change of government? or a change of heart?

  1 Originally delivered as a lecture (1937) to the Group Theatre and published as No. 3 of Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets.

  2 I have now learned that Street was a severe but not merciless restorer and he was dead by 1881. One of the Fowlers of Louth is more likely to have “restored” a Lincolnshire church.

  3 This state of things is now altered. Salaried antiquarians on behalf of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning now schedule some Georgian work.

  4 Comper alone survives (1951).

  8

  THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTERTAINMENT

  IF there is one word which can safely be applied to the constructions for entertainment it is the adjective impermanent. Fire consumes and fashion changes, new and more hideous structures arise on the sites of older and less hideous, as we continue to slide into deeper depths of barbarism. One day, no doubt, something more blatant than the tower of the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square will challenge comparison with the steeple of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. For the present we must gaze at the pseudo-functional monument of the serious ’thirties, watching it grow more and more dated every week, while the steeple of St. Martin’s glows in its white Portland stone perfection, a dateless memorial of more settled days.