Forwards and Backwards: Architecture in inter-war England - Dr Simon Thurley

well good evening ladies and gentlemen and I apologize that for those of you who came last time you only saw a disembodied figure disembodied voice me on the screen and also I apologize to those of you who say like the film of me last time that you're disappointed you've got me in the flesh but there we are I am here and I'm pretty pleased to be here and I'm really pleased to be continuing this extraordinary and Odyssey that Gresham er have allowed me to go on over the last few years following the extraordinary history of English architecture it seems like a long time ago that I've started with the anglo-saxons and we've now reached the interwar years and my disembodied lecture really was focused on the first world war and I want to start again with the first world war this evening just to position ourselves and get ourselves into the mood for what followed so the first world war of course killed eight million people it shattered the Victorian age and you know it was a very it was a particularly traumatic issue because England had not been in a major war since the defeat of Napoleon and those who had sort of imagined riding to victory in shining breastplates were appalled to end up in a muddy network of trenches that if stretched out in a long line would have wound their way once around the globe 7,000 young men were killed every day in the trenches while only 70 miles away across the channel people still went to the theater and smoked cigars the young archaeologist Mortimer wheeler who was a director of this museum which also I was and some years ago he recalled in his autobiography this he said those familiar only with the mild casualties of the second German war can have little appreciation of the carnage which marked his predecessor it is a typical instance that of five university students who work together in the rock excavations of 1913 only one survived the war it so happened that that survivor was myself the survivors like sir Mortimer wheeler and their families wanted something different from post-war Britain but the new direction that Britain took was rather a different one than that taken by the French and Germans it was a gentler it was a more conservative way because between the wars Britain neither broke with his past nor I would suggest was in its thrall it accommodated it and it modernized it it redesigned it to make it part of everyday life modernism and the avant-garde all right it's not right for me I can tell you modernism and the avant-garde is less if I say avant-garde it makes a horrible noise such an important cultural feature of France Germany or Russia played I'm going to suggest a very little part in interwar Britain the Arts and Crafts movement which I touched on in my last lecture was alive but was now democratized millions shared in the country cottage the countryside the homely comfort of old england modernity in Britain was conservative it was comfortable it was cautious it wasn't angular jarring and reactionary and this is the key to the title of my lecture this evening forwards or backwards which way was Britain to go after the first world war would it as I've already hinted somehow find a way in between so forwards or backwards was in fact the key dilemma in the interwar war world of art and architecture let me put it in the words of the time for them the dilemma was traditionalism versus modernism or again as some put it contemporary some put internationalism versus vernacular ism and all this was very neatly expressed by the then father of English painting Paul now a confirmed modernist who worked in a native tradition he was to ask in 1922 and I quote whether it is possible to go modern and still be British the battle lines have been drawn up internationalism versus indigenous culture renovation versus conservatism the industrial versus the pastoral the functional versus the futile so what were in fact these two choices well modernism of course was seen to embrace new materials and innovative technology it was seen as searching for a radical new visual language based on abstract non representational non representational forms and minimal decoration as well as I think a sort of engagement with what were thought to be universal design qualities rather than very specific ones and the approach is perhaps best expressed in a very well-known modernist building the lawn Road flats in Hampstead sometimes known as the ISO Khan building it's a block of 32 ultra-efficient flats now many of you will have walked past this building it still survives recently been renovated many of you will not have been inside the rooms inside were extremely small and deliberate and so they were just large enough for a couple but they were better off really for a single person and this was a daring concept in itself especially if that single person was god forbid a woman so this was not a place for traditional families and the interiors were deliberately very hard to personalize the furniture and the fittings were all supplied as part of the package this was designed for living without possess there wasn't even really any way to put the possession but your possessions there was no mantelpiece or anything that's a traditional thing that you'd have expected the building was designed by Wells Coates a man without any formal architectural training he was an engineer so this is the first choice for artists and architects the choice to turn modern the alternative was to continue in what should be called the historicist vein in other words architecture that took its lead from past historical styles as I explained in my last lecture before the First World War this was a style called Arts and Crafts or sometimes called Queen Anne it was a funny sort of amalgam of things partially Tudor and partially a revival at the time of Sir Christopher Wren but in its essence it was a revolt against the standardization and the mechanization of industrialization and this is where I'm going to start this evening as this was the established look that people were interested in and against which the proponents of modern styles reacted a historian an architect called J alfred gough was the first person to write a learning account of Tudor architecture in England it was a book published in 1901 it was called early English Renaissance architecture and this expanded on an earlier book that he'd done of photographs and drawings that covered Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings got his contemporary was a man called Thomas Garner who is exactly the same time was compiling an even larger and even more ambitious project on the Tudor houses of England and he died and an architect and lecturer at King's College called Arthur Stratton took up his research and notes and what he did based on Garner's work was published this absolutely huge book I've got a copy of this at home as two volumes it's this big and it's that fat each volume I mean it's solutely a gargantuan book and this is published in 1911 and it could only published by a by a list of subscribers people subscribe to these volumes and almost every single major architect of the day can be found in that list of subscribers at the front including Edwin Lutyens CR Ashby W D Cairo and many many others and the book starts off in its introduction of with the following and I'm just going to read you to read read you what it says one of the chief reasons that make this particular period of such supreme importance is that the house building is indigenous to this soil it is as national as the name with which it is stamped it breeds the restful yet vigorous spirit of the time that gave its birth and with all is characterized by semi contained homeliness redolent of the life and customs of the Englishman of the day and impossible to be either originated or imitated by its continental contemporaries this was an incredibly nationalistic view of English architecture one that was incredibly powerful particularly after the first world war when England wanted to express its difference from the countries elsewhere in Europe and this view that this that Tudor architecture somehow knew how to the soil of England expressed the soul of England was also the view of a large number of architects and private house owners particularly the very rich who about the time of the First World War turned to the Tudor style in force this Tudor mania led to the restoration of many old houses many which were originally ruins so item moat almost completely ruined ruined was taken over and restored to be a Tudor house sissing her also a ruined taken over of course by Vita sackville-west in Kent och Wells in Berkshire Ethel Hampton in Dorset Avebury in Wiltshire these just a small number of a large number of Tudor projects that took pair took place in the period after the First World War up to 1939 there were also some new about houses houses like bailiffs Court in Sussex which was built for Walter Guinness and in this example as in many of the previous ones I've just shown you genuine tutor buildings were dismantled and reincorporated into the new and structures well just as cuter architecture had become admired so at exactly the same time was a revival in the interest of the architecture of sacristy fir Wren now Wren of course today is sort of universally acknowledged as one of the great sort of English geniuses and so it's really hard for us to imagine that he went through a period of being really not admired at all but around an 1800 the tide of taste had really seriously turned against Christopher Wren and by the 1840s people thought he was really really unfashionable his palace of Hampton Court it was characterized and I'm quoting here is a national misfortune and impertinent construction his ionic colonnade in the occur in the clock Court was a symbol of desecration and Wren was described as one of the many men ruined by the madness for classical the in a quadrangle or fountain court at Hampton Court was described in 18-49 as somber and melancholic the ordinary result of narrow spaces enclosed with lofty buildings on every side dribbling fountains and little fish and fishes who were the prisoner of the state but the growing appreciation of Ren's genius had begun relatively soon after with the publication of his first biography in 1823 by James Elms the life and work of Christopher Wren and ten years later see our cockerel the first professional president of the Institute of British Architects was the first major architect of the 19th century to admire wrens life and architecture and in 1838 he painted this astonishing painting a tribute to the memory of Christopher Wren is huge watercolour it's about this big with showing all wrens major works all in one view of course you've never seen that view thank goodness but it was all they were all that laid out there together a man called John Clayton was inspired by this extraordinary watercolor and he produced the first major study of wrens city churches in 1848 I wish in fact dedicated to cockerel by the 1860s there was anyway a fading of the evangelical fervor that had characterized the Gothic Revival and it was giving away giving way to something much more English something much more compromising and something much more secular in this map this admiration for Queen for the 4/4 and Christopher Wren which at the time was described as Queen Anne it was all about soft red brick enlivened with beautifully cut white Portland stone dressings and one of the first houses built in this style is not a house that has seen much it's a place called kin mail park and Denbighshire and is a house that was directly inspired actually by Sir Christopher Wren's Hampton Court it was built for a man called H R Hughes who'd made an extraordinary sum of money and copper mining his architect was William Eden Nesfield with whom he had a deep Ling friendship and together they went to Hampton Court to look at the building to get some inspiration and if you ignore these huge frenched roofline here which was deliberately put on to compensate for what was often felt as wrens rather boring roofline attempt in court but everything below that looks very very much like wrens are buildings on the East Front at Hampton Court but this is a building built in the middle of Wales and if it had been in Surrey it probably would been very influential and but in the end the big champion of the English barak revival was Ness fields assistant John McCain Brighton who in a series of brilliant lectures and articles argued for a revival of classical architecture as epitomized by Sir Christopher Wren and so from the late 19th century a small group of buildings pioneers that style bryden's own building of Chelsea town hall in the late 1880s John shores Wellington College and you can really see Hampton Court in that Connie French roofs again to try and get away from the problem that Wren had with his is very flat parapets the municipal buildings in Leicester also built in the late 19th century and so and certainly by the turn of the century Reginald Blomfield was publishing his book a history of Renaissance architecture in England the crescendo of which was the work of Sir Christopher Wren who he characterized as the most English of English architects and so you have this extraordinary and coming together and exactly the same period around the first world war of a conviction that Tudor architecture was uniquely English and that the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren was uniquely English and so in the early years of the 20th century this architecture of Wren gives birth to a whole spectrum of public and private buildings led by a group of Edward Edwardian architects who sometimes known as the men who are working in the Renaissance as in WR en Renaissance style and it's probably worth just listing a few and just showing you a few pictures of these buildings so you can get a feel of what these were like so Bloomfield himself who had written the great book extolling the virtues of Wren builds mounds mere house um in Hampshire and immediately before the First World War for Wilfred Buckley pretty extravagant but very elegant tightly controlled building his cousin AC Bloomfield rebuilt Stansted Park in Sussex still pretty pretty big pretty handsome house in the field of public architecture some of the big buildings of Whitehall some of the new government offices in Whitehall in Scotland Yard commercial buildings were also used Bentall stall to know Bentall store in Kingston looks very much like Hampton Court actually spookily which is right next door designed by Sir Aston Webb 1931 to five and he wasn't only polite architecture it wasn't only a big public buildings commercial buildings country houses and it was also used in quite humble housings this is a peabody estate philanthropic housing development and that cleverly in Hammersmith 1928 by victor wilkins you see how this motif here which comes from hampton court is incredibly popular you just see look there it is again it was used again and again in these buildings and these round windows here very very popular again all seem very much as part of them Christopher Wren's and contribution and just as contemporary architects rediscovered wrens architecture so they also discovered his interiors and interior decoration developed a fascination for this period this early 18th century period for instance the 6th Duke of Devonshire a Chatsworth House in 1811 had regarded these State Apartments which we now find so magnificence is deeply unfashionable he called the ponderous and dismal and he said that they'd rather uncomfortably reminded him of that terrible place Hampton Court and so he and his architect Sir Geoffrey Wyatt Phil Craig Gotha sizing architect and originally planned a complete modernization of them but all this had changed by the 1920s when the wife of the ninth Duke and set out with the help of her architect to disguise the effect of Wyatt films works and reintroduce the Tudor interiors and so when you look in this room here and the china-closet the original corner fireplace very characteristic of rent wrens work had been taken out by the Victorians and was put back in again in the 20s in a homage to sequester for Wren but this interest in 17th century architecture and 18th at 16th and 17th century architecture was not just an upper-class obsession it was a middle-class obsession too but one very mixed up with a newly found passion for the countryside by the first world war the incredibly intense urbanization of the previous century had ground to a halt and people were falling over each other to get out of the towns and get into the countryside cities began to bleed out into the surrounding countryside as landowners sold farmland for new suburbs laid out in a open and generous way suburbs tried hard to be villages in layout in road names in architecture in gardens open space and planting villages meanwhile tried even harder to be villages the first village name signs were erected on the Sandringham Estate by Edward the seventh starting a rural tradition that quickly seemed as if it had always been there he probably never thought about that when village signs first started but Edward the seventh invented it to promote rural tourism in his rooms you may be interested to know that the village sign of desing him though is a new one which I unveiled about three weeks ago so in my mind at the moment and pubs pubs which in the late 19th century had been characterized by incredibly garish brightly colored enamel metal signs lost all those and acquired traditional hanging pub signs and names tea shops cafes even petrol stations as I will go on to describe were camouflaged to look like old world fixtures in villages to which they came the countryside after the first world war was deluged by visitors in trains and buses and cars and bikes and on foot and increasingly workers were given long holidays and this that meant that by 1937 15 million English people about a third of the population were taking an annual holiday this was new after the first world war it wasn't available to workers in the Victorian period cars were at first not a means of business conveyance they were unleash a accessory just think how nice that would be early motor magazines didn't focus on the mechanics of cars how fast they could go your v8 engines they focused on where to take your cars where to go in them where to drive them how to enjoy them and as a result the market was flooded with guidebooks aimed for the motor tourists in 1907 James Edmund Vincent a distinguished times journalist and former editor of country life wrote a book called through East Anglia in a motor car one of the very first books written especially for motor Turing he announced in his introduction and I quote a new method of travel in fact brings in its train than the need for a new species of guidebook and he recognized that for the first time the principal enjoyment of a day out was not reaching the destination it was getting there and the Terr was the thing that's what people wanted people wanted to go on a tour and his guidebook gave advice on routes and roads even the best place while you are driving around night Norfolk to bet buy a pair of driving gloves Ordnance Survey maps were stuffed into the glove pockets of hundreds of thousands of touring cars and in 1924 the Ordnance Survey Archaeological officer ogs Crawford under his own steam published the map of Roman Britain the Daily Mail described it as one of the most wonderful Maps ever made and it claimed that it would open up a complete new era in motoring it sold out and very quickly the Ordnance Survey produced more period maps opening up archaeological remains to tourists everywhere more specialized books helped visitors get to remote Neolithic Long Barrow sandstone circles there was a extraordinary organization called the homeland Association no one's heard of it today very very popular in the years after 1914 the homeland Association was encouraged and found to encourage knowledge and love of Britain and it published a range of guidebooks in 1930 came a guide to prehistoric Sussex this was completely impossible before the First World War he could never got the prehistoric monuments some visitors wandering around prehistoric Sussex may have had in their pocket our homelands prehistoric antiquities and how to study them published in 1922 so there was a great there was a great influx of people into the countryside perhaps the most successful of all the merchant guides were the shell guides published by shell and written by very prominent people including as you see here John Betjeman who was the series and editor so in short the countryside after the First World War was full of people wanting to go places and see things during the First World War there were 331 staged bus operators by 1930 there were 3000 962 and by 1932 buses carried more passengers than the entire rail network at the same time there was an explosion in car ownership in 1918 had been no more than a hundred thousand private motorcars but by 1939 there were two million the internal combustion engine took people to places that railways and even motor buses couldn't the countryside towns villages its monuments were now for the first time permeable to almost everybody now the effects of this were very considerable and for a few moments I need to turn to an entirely new category of architecture which emerge very strongly after 1914 which were buildings for the motor car now for those people wanting to buy one of these new fangled devices the first car showrooms were set up in carriage repositories and occasionally in normal town centre shops but in the years around the first world war interest was growing in the design of purpose-built car showrooms indeed in the streets around Great Portland Street in London by 1914 there were already 29 showrooms selling cars here's one of them and if you actually wander around a Great Portland Street quite a number of shops and particularly restaurants are actually built in former that car showrooms and after the first world war the London car dealers moved for Great Portland Street into Cumberland instant James's because they thought that that is where people who would want to buy cars were some of you who are rich and fashionable enough may have been to the woolsley restaurant the headquarters is Wolsey mote Motor Company here it is one of the grandest and earliest and most important car showrooms in England it is designed by Curtis green a very very good firm who I mentioned in my last lecture in 1922 these giant corinthian columns here and down below very elaborate wrought iron work which led into the showroom originally those of you who've been in there and has been a restaurant know what the interior looks like originally these columns these Doric columns this vaulted space were red lacquer so they were very very very striking structures it's very interesting that the the earliest car showrooms were deliberately traditional in style they were trying to be reassuring here was new technology it was not tried it was not tested and in order to sell this stuff they wanted to create an environment that would have been reassuring and through to the gentleman who left this and James's club after several glasses of claret and port at lunchtime and a viewing and Wolsey motorcars and thinking of buying them at this time also I think cars were being advertised and sold not on technical specifications rather like oh saying with the magazines but on their elegance and sophistication as leisure machines and as we leave the 1920s and move into the 1930s these very traditional type of showrooms give way to buildings in a much more modern style the this is in Liverpool there's a street called bold Street in Liverpool it's now it was still a shopping street it's a bit rundown now but in the 1930s this was the exclusive end of Liverpool and here you see a car showroom designed in the 1930s again in the modern style selling cars or off the back of their of their design rather than their traditional people who bought cars at first tended to store them in existing stables or carriage houses because the first people who owned cars generally were quite well-off gradually a market developed in timber motor houses as they were called and you could buy them off the peg you can see this is an adverse and I think from country life but it was only eventually in the 1920s when new built houses in the suburbs were given garages I apologized for this photograph which is really bad but what it shows is one of these half-timbered houses the slope comes down here and there is an integral garage at that point they're from say from the 1920s garages actually are built into and houses themselves and for those living in towns car parks were very often underground and here is the colossal block of flats Dolphin Square in Westminster built in 1935 to seven a development of 1236 flats and it had a colossal carpark underneath the whole of this area under here is excavated out and is a car park for the residents of these buildings it was simply assumed that if you lived in a stylish and fashionable fact like this you would own a car but these garages actually made only a very minor impact on the appearance of English towns and villages before 1939 what did actually make I think quite a substantial difference was the need to park cars away from home Londoners alone already owned more than forty thousand cars in 1910 and of course they wanted to use them to drive round a town large car parks were consequently built before the second world war in seaside towns the city centres railway stations and at entertainment venues the model was stable thousands of which were crammed into city centres to accommodate hundreds of thousands of horses like stables early city centre carriages were multi-story now I'm not sure that I've covered this in previous lectures that it can't cover everything but um because of the incredible pressure to have horses in the centre of London most big stables were on - or perhaps even three levels just to give you example if you go to Paddington Station and you're standing fronting the station looking at it on your right the some red brick buildings that that build those buildings were built as multi-story stables for the general post office so they could redistribute it redistribute letters and there is least one multi-story stable still in use if you go and walk along Whitehall and just round the back of Scotland Yard the police have got a very nice nineteenth-century double-decker stable in which the horses are kept and so when cars needed to be accommodated in central London to begin with they were looking at these multi-story and stables the first ones though incorporated lifts and turntables so if you look at the Bluebird garage on the Kings Road very important building actually is now a restaurant also again visit they dine in there one of the earliest multi-storey car parks in England there were lifts and turntables but it was realized that actually ramps would be cheaper they'd be faster to operate and they'd be more reliable and the first ramps we'll put in Bluebird garage had ramps and the place where you can see the really early ones here in Soho this is the Brewers Street at car park in in in Soho and is a complete aside I remember in 2005 being responsible for listing this building and most listings are just ticked through by ministers without realizing what they're doing most of the time this one came to the notice of Tessa Jowell who was then Secretary of State and I remember being hauled up before her and her blowing me up saying what the hell's are doing listing a multi-story car park in brewery well the answer is is it is the first major surviving car park which still contains its early ramps and there's a little bit of trivia for you for the future so by the state and we're talking about that this one is built in 1930 by this date repair and maintenance garages were also beginning to become a common sight in rural areas and in in towns initially these garages were just built in converted or pretty rudely built roadside structures but the city center ones started to become quite big this is a rare surviving one again and through my photographs not great this is Hamilton Motors it's now called exotic cars it's on the edgeware Road and it's a very early example of a repair and maintenance garage which also had a showroom and would have had turntables and lifts to get cars upstairs and during the 1930s these garages became much bigger and much more sophisticated because what started to happen was the dozens of different car manufacturers tended to amalgamate tended to combine and the were a much smaller range of cars on the road and what this meant was that the garages were able to adopt a much more sort of streamlined production line approach to car maintenance at the same time cars started looking less like carriages and began to look much sleeker and so the design of these garages became sleeker too here is the tower garage now Maranello Ferrari on the Egham bypass next time you're driving what their past slow down it's a very early one built in 1935 this is when garages started to look like the cars that they were selling they were selling people a dream of modernity a dream of the stylish lines that were in the cars and that the buildings were were designed and to match and it's very very typical of these buildings and I'll show you some more examples later with the combination and I think I mention this in my last lecture when I was talking about underground stations of the horizontal cut by the vertical it's very very characteristic of these early modernist and buildings petrol stations likewise tended until the late 1930s to be very sort of vernacular and here is a very early station still amazingly in operation in Worcestershire very dark deep countryside there generally speaking they tried to blend in with the style of the buildings roundabouts and they were able to do this because before 1939 all petrol stations were owner-occupied the big oil companies hadn't bought the petrol station sites and owned them them introduced standardised signs which is what happens after the Second World War and so every petrol station you went to you look different because it owned was owned by a different person and very often they tried to look like some half-timbered stables or they were set in gardens and the lots of flowers around them it was this still this wonderful and elegant period of motoring where and it was all about leisure rather than being busy and trying to get somewhere quickly now I'm not going to apologize for having spent quite a lot of time looking at the architecture of early motoring because I think it really helps makes make my and central point this evening the car was a fundamentally modern forward-looking piece of technology but it was used at first to look backwards to gain access to the countryside to gain access to ancient monuments on hilltops and almost exclusively until the late 1950s that is the architecture that was used in connection with the car was also deeply traditional you see the countryside was being invaded by a new type of person these weren't landowners or tenants they were a town and city dwellers King for something that they saw as being part of their national identity people wanted the security the familiarity of the images that were encapsulated by half-timbered houses half-timbered petrol stations with leaded window panes the interwar years were marked by fundamental rapid changes deep economic insecurity and national self-questioning and the countryside and its buildings provided an extraordinary sense of reassurance and a major effect of this was the Garden City now the Garden City was a concept invented by a single man at Bernie's a Howard but it was one that found instant approval because of the ideas that I've just been talking about Howard wanted to design a new type of place to live in based I think broadly on the model industrial villages of the late nineteenth century such as salt air built by the industrialist Sir Titus salt for his workers in his mills in Yorkshire but particularly I think Port Sunlight on the wheel west bank of the Mersey built by the lever family and named after their most successful product sunlight so these settlements were developments that got our workers away from the brutal terraces that had characterized most of the new industrial towns such as Middlesbrough which you see here what it did was allowed workers to live in traditional buildings in rural settlements I mean the sort of no comparison between the two is there really what was different though about the garden suburbs is that they were funded by their inhabitants and not by their employees first to be built was left with Garden Suburb followed by Hampstead Garden suburb which you see a photograph here from the air these housing developments about which I could give an entire lecture were important because they presented a view of England and of English architecture that was essentially rural vernacular and native the types of houses were Tudor or Queen Anne fewer near Georgian like the ones I'm showing you here and they were laid out a mix trees and Parks this was the counter urban this was quasi rural and the architectural styles that have been used other styles they talked about at the start Tudor and this Christopher Wren style styles that were believed to be uniquely English this was a recreation of the English countryside in the town but these rural values expressed in the garden cities were a political mantra to staning Baldwin the dominating political figure of the interwar years who you see here in a very early radio broadcast clearly saw the importance of England's rural heritage the First World War had had a transforming effect on his outlook and opinions and indeed on his political career he was too old to fight in but in 1916 with a healthy inheritance he turns to politics with a determination to serve his country in a different capacity in an important speech in 1931 he laid out his motivations for entering politics he said that after four years of slaughter and destruction many times four years would be needed to repair even part of what had been lost and after such a storm should there not be calm and would not the Sun come out and would not the world be more beautiful than before Baldwin had an extraordinary career he's very little-known he's incredibly important on the subject I'm talking about this evening was prime minister in 1924 1929 and in 1935 to 1937 and between those dates he was effectively Deputy Prime Minister like Margaret Thatcher another conservative Prime Minister Baldwin successfully conveyed a personal vision with huge influence he saw the post-war world as a fragile place inherently unstable in need of careful handling he strove and succeeded to be a figure that rose above politics trying to evoke images that he believed would unify the nation and these images were traditional Christian images charity patience respect generosity of spirit but they were all underpinned by the idea of rural heritage the image of Britain that Baldwin encapsulated was one of him being the countrymen and Baldwin the countryman was a central part of his appeal particularly in the early years of his Premiership this is hares field beacon that was handed over to the National Trust in January 1931 and Baldwin was asked to come and mark the acquisition of it and in his speech which was published he said I think it answers to a very deep and profound instinct of the British people the country represents the internal values and the eternal traditions from which we must never allow ourselves to be separated June 1931 he and unveiled another a memorial stone very keen on unveiling stones this time at Old Sarum the beautiful former site of Salisbury and here he asked what was the value of Old Sarum the site value arrived at by any value can be but very small but the value to us and to England is infinite the spiritual value is beyond all computation so here we have the leading politician of it of his age defining himself through a rural the countryside and it was Baldwin's government that set up a body called the Empire marketing board to promote imperial products worldwide its secretary was Steven talents who invented the concept of national projection the conveyance of images about Britain that were to marry dynamic forward-looking characteristics such as industry and tourism universities scientific research with a more established group of icons the monarchy London buses the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the countryside and in 1937 under his influence Britain sported a pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition and this was intended to convey precisely this image the building was partly modern and partly traditional a white box as you see with a vicious lines but with Georgian shaped a windows which you can't see in this you have to see them see them on the back and inside there's quite a modern vision I think you'll agree on the outside inside it contained an entirely traditional village a vision of England with tennis weekend cottages shepherds in white smocks in 1937 and wait for it a cardboard cutout of Neville Chamberlain fishing it was designed by the architect and Oliver Hills you can see here at the bottom of this magazine and picture here but with significant input from Frank pick who I mentioned in my last and lecture the brains behind London Underground so here you have it absolutely encapsulated forwards and backwards the empire pavilion expressed inside the reality of interwar England the countryside cottages fresh air outside it attempted to make a concession to the modern style that many other countries were entering into in a much more cold-hearted way but that modernity was a minority interest in England the mainstream was somewhere else entirely because as we have seen the post-war personal fashion was for miles and miles sprawling developments of half-timbered houses in the suburbs those were slightly more cultivated taste I think turned away from this oldie World II vision of England - and the Georgian period which was seen as being much more ordered much simpler a Metropolitan aesthetic restrained and well-mannered that created a stylish modernism with some sort of ancestry it's very interesting the great admiration for the Georgians because I think there was a quite strong association that was made at the time between the post-war years and the years in which Georgian architecture flourished and classical architecture in England as I've made the point several times in the series of lectures and appealed to different generations for different reasons the Georgians themselves had admired Georgian architecture because it brought them the feeling that they were imitating the architecture of Roman senators and generals and they associated with these people very very strongly the Victorians associated with classical architecture and had made this point in this series of lectures because they saw in these classical buildings the Medicis and the Gonzaga the great merchant princes and they saw themselves as merchant princes and I think that the Edwardian admired the Georgians and this is of course Admiralty Arch which is built by the Edwardians because I think they associated with a world in which the terraces of Georgian England were constructed a world which existed in the immediate aftermath of a long cruel European war than a Poli onok Wars it was a world of political and social turmoil turmoil that managed despite all its complexities to produce the ordered and elegant architectural expression of George in England so I think Edwardian is associated very strongly with Georgian architecture and this architecture was promoted very strongly by the magazine country life whose editor Christopher Hussey who lived and Scotney castle here another sort of romantic amazing romantic vision set out really to popularize Georgian Georgian buildings and of course this was at a time when Georgian architecture was very unpopular Georgian squares not this one which is Fitzroy which is not for traders Bedford Square but this one wasn't being knocked down but many others were being knocked down this was the period when the georgian group was was was founded and country life itself set out to to live what it was preaching these are the new offices in Tavistock square designed for country life in immediate years just before the first world war in a Georgian style but after the war and this is what you get this is Grosvenor square miles and miles and miles of neo Georgian building really the dominant architectural expression in our towns and cities these are a mixture of flats and offices wherever you go these big new Georgian red brick blocks are everywhere such blocks of flats were despised by modernist architects who built the Isaac on building which we looked at earlier they thought these buildings were backward looking and historicist but funnily enough I think that at the time modernist buildings were also regarded as a sort of historical curiosity now this is a very funny thing to say but I'm gonna try and explain what I mean and to explain what I mean I just want to take you in my last five minutes to the seaside ever since the Prince Regent had built his marine Pavilion in Brighton the seaside sported buildings that were fun and fantasy that's what it was all about it enabled seaside visitors to escape from their mundane everyday lives and enter a magical world of the annual holiday and after 1918 Victorian seaside towns built incredible sights we've got the Blackpool Tower here the winter gardens and there's a bad picture of afraid but exotic mem interiors these are of course our late Victorian buildings what happens though and after at 1918 is a new exotic style appears they turn away from exotic styles from India from Spain from Mexico goodness knows where else or the seaside architecture is really quite mad they turn towards the fashionable French continental Riviera and they turn to see going oh Sh unless were qunk last Britain's now had no need to afford to go to the dangerous and morally suspect south of France where people and X garlic and pet frogs legs they had no need to go and cripplingly expensive upper-class cruises because they could experience the sophistication from all this at home Morecambe Bay a working-class holiday resort from people who lived in Liverpool acquired the Midland Hotel bringing a glamorous foreign style to a Victorian town perhaps you might take a call a flat at Marine Court in Hastings this is an advertisement for is still there built in 1937 which was described at the time as a liner on land or you might go to the movies in the cinema on the front at Margate now the entrance to Dreamland but when it was built in 1935 one of the first entertainment buildings in Britain to have one of these tall towers with a fin on it this again is what I was talking about earlier the horizontal and the vertical and lots and lots and lots of cinemas and adopt this this style after and dream land and takes it on and on your holiday you would certainly want to bathe in one of the vast leaders constructed on the beaches of the most resorts here is salt Dean Lido built in 1938 so many of them we demolished this one survives one of the most sophisticated of all the seaside Lido's consciously influenced consciously influenced by aircraft and an airport design that you probably can see it in that contemporary picture the fascinating thing about this extensive use of modernist architecture at the seaside was that this was not seen as a serious style the serious style were the houses in Grosvenor Square they were Georgian this is where the serious architecture was this is where the money was but in the coast a new fantasy style was to join the other fantasy styles a new sense of escapism this wasn't real England this was fun real England was rooted in the past but the worst perhaps just a tiny weeny hint of threat in these seaside structures it was though let it was through leisure pursuits that many British people saw a huge threat of Americanization because by the 1920s the successful films the ones that people wanted to watch were almost all American so was the music hot jazz ragtime foxtrot eventually the Charleston to which young people danced and it was very consciously that the newly formed BBC acted as a bastion against creeping Americanization championing British traditions in music and comedy and in crystallizing a sort of calendar of national events from the sound of the first Nightingale to the choristers of King's College Chapel singing on Christmas Eve in 1932 ten years after its foundation the BBC commissioned its first purpose-built home broadcasting house designed by George Bal Maya a commercial architect who built another of a number of as office blocks in the city in the context of his neighbors this was an uncompromising ly modern design overwhelming All Souls Langham Place next door in its height and in its Art Deco style there is a hint of the American office block but as its root it has a Georgian rhythm to it it has Georgian windows and these convert Leiby Georgian sash windows the disposition of windows are there so here we have the BBC the bastion against Americanization it too is backwards and it is Fords this is the position in which English architecture found itself between the wars it wasn't sitting on the fence it wasn't uncomfortable but it was distinctive and it was representative of this society transformed by the terrible events of 1914 to 18 while the First World War did not mark a decisive break in English architecture the Second World War was cataclysmic so I would like to invite you to join me on the 6th of March here coming to terms with modern times which will be about how architecture after 1945 went in a very different direction thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 17,693

Keywords: Architecture, Building, London, Petrol stations, Lido, Modernism, Christopher Wren, Peabody, Motoring

Id: 8wiP8yrM0fE

Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2013