Local Stone
The Pattern of English Building. By Alec Clifton- Taylor. (Balsford, £5 5s.) Tim varied and distinct techniques of building in England, as governed organically by local geological conditions, are the subject of Mr. Clifton-Taylor's book: he writes about them warmly without sentimentality, knowledgeably without pedantry, and interestingly without stylistic pretentiousness. The Pattern of English Building is a work of dedication, and one of those books to which you know you will return again and again in the future, both for pleasure and to consult for information before a visit to any particular region.
Stone, of all English building materials, shows great variety, and quite properly nearly half of the book is devoted to it. Most important is the oolitic limestone which stretches in a great roughly sickle-shaped swathe from Port- land Bill, through the Cotswolds, across to the Wash and up to the Humber: on this belt are the quarries of Clipsham and Ancaster, Barnack, Painswick and Taynton, Doulting and Bath, and, above all, Portland.
Mr. Clifton-Taylor examines the qualities of the stone from these and many other quarries, both disused and still worked, throughout the whole of England, and discusses the ways in which they have been employed in numerous architectural examples. He finds that local materials inevitably blend best with the land- scape and produce the most aesthetically pleasing results; and that perhaps the only tech- nique for which this cannot be said is flint masonry, whether as pebbles or knapped.
He is less than just to Welsh slate, however, in condemning its widespread use in England on the ground that its regular size and colour are monotonous. However true this may be when a roof is first laid, within a few years damaged slates are replaced by others which are often a slightly different hue and are cer- tainly less weathered: this produces textural relief which is as pleasing in its way as that of any of the limestone roofs Mr. Clifton-Taylor so admires. And who would have a Georgian mansard roofed with anything but slate?
Brick, the predominant material of so much English building, is given less space than it de- serves, although the chapter is very good on surviving early work and Tudor ornamental stacks. It is something of a surprise to find that even bricks, with their size being governed by the width of a man's hand and therefore easier to move than stone, were rarely transported from region to region before 1800.
It was the difficulty of transportation, of course, which made the pattern of English building an essentially local one. The only practical method was by ship: Portland stone owes its widespread use as much to the fact that the quarries were near the sea as to its con- sistent texture and chiaroscuro weathering properties, and even today it is still cheaper in Dublin than it is in Birmingham. The pattern was broken by the Industrial Revolution, and, though he does not admit it specifically, in this book Mr. Clifton-Taylor is not very interested in building since 1800. He seems to be concerned to apologise for writing a 'backward-looking' book, but since this is a history it could not have been anything else, and the apology is unnecessary.
Where he does grate, however, is in his asides; as when, speaking of certain Purbeck stones, he says, 'That the present demand for them is principally for rockeries and for crazy paving is a doleful comment on the times'; or, another instance, The supplies of Cotswold stone suit- able for slates are still almost inexhaustible; it is the conditions of our time which prevent their exploitation.' Remarks such as these (which, to be fair, are few) embody attitudes which look back selectively and romantically to the past and are therefore distorted: they should rather be supported, if they are supportable, by reasons for the effective and relevant use of these materials in modern architecture.
But with the relevance of his main thesis there can be no quibble: in all building the genius loci must be carefully consulted, and, where it is deliberately ignored, contrast must not become incongruity. It is for its cogent re- iteration of this principle, as much as for its historical record of what has actually worked xsthetically, that The Pattern of English Building should be required reading for everyone re- sponsible in any way for future architectural development.
B. S. JOHNSON
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