Not motoring
He wasn't seduced
Gavin Stamp
t remains to use the motor-car as a challenge to our houses and our great buildings,' wrote that sinister beguiler, Le Corbusier, in Towards a New Architecture. And, by juxtaposing a Delage 'Grand- Sport' of 1921 with the Parthenon on the same page, the meaning was clear, and it Was a message reinforced by the seductive buildings: published photographs of Corbusier's ouildings: a smart new car outside the villa at Garches and outside the Salvation Army hostel in Paris. `The motor-car marks the style of our epoch!' So architects redesigned our cities for cars and more conservative designers joined in the car worship as well — the great Sir Giles Scott would sometimes drive to Liverpool Cathe- dral in his Buick.
But there was one extraordinary patron of modern architecture in Britain who dis- agreed, and whose career challenges this all-pervasive association between cars and progress: the industrialist Wenman Bassett- Lowke. To quote one of his colleagues in The Bassett-Lowke Story, 'He had a great dislike of the motor-car and travelled in them only when it was essential. He never possessed one. He loved travel by train and ship and became almost an authority on their facilities and features. It was a proud boast that despite working to very close schedules he had never missed a train .
Yet Bassett-Lowke was nothing if not avant-garde. First, during the first world war, he commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh — then in pathetic self- imposed exile from Glasgow — to redesign the interior of his terraced Georgian house in Northampton. The result was the archi- tect's last significant creation and it is good to know that Northampton Council has now acquired No. 78 Derogate and will restore and open it to the public. One task must be to recreate the guest bedroom with its decoration of parallel black lines. George Bernard Shaw stayed in it in 1923 and, when his host expressed the hope he would not find the decor disturbing, replied, 'No, I always sleep with my eyes closed.'
The following year Bassett-Lowke decid- ed to build a new house in the suburbs and this time, as 'I could not find any other architect with modem ideas in England', he commissioned a German. Six years after the Armistice, this was a typically unusual and courageous thing to do. The architect he chose was the great Peter Behrens of Berlin, designer of famous factories for AEG, who produced the first proper Mod- em Movement house in Britain. It was probably of this — 'New Ways' — that Evelyn Waugh was thinking when he invented Margot Beste-Chetwynde's `King's Thursday': 'something clean and square' designed by Professor Otto Silenus.
Unusually for such a house — and unlike Le Corbusier's contemporary villas — 'New Ways' has no garage. But why should Bas- sett-Lowke have promoted the car when his reputation was based on the precision man- ufacture of model trains? Inspired by the quality of German engineering which he always admired — Bassett-Lowke began to manufacture miniature steam engines and trains in 1902. Soon they were celebrated for their accuracy and precision: Bassett- Lowke products were not toys but models.
But Bassett-Lowke did more than make trains for schoolboys. In 1904 he helped found Miniature Railways of Great Britain Ltd. Such things already existed, often in the grounds of country houses like Eaton Hall: those tiny railways with steam-trains pulling small carriages on which giant humans sit, looking foolish. Bassett- Lowke's improvement was to make these miniature 15-inch gauge trains properly to scale. His first was at Blackpool, in 1905, and others soon followed, at Rhyl, South- port and even Geneva, as well as at international exhibitions like White City in 1909 and Brussels the following year. In Betjeman's television film about `Metroland', there is footage of King George V and Queen Mary at the Wemb- ley Exhibition sitting on a miniature train and looking rather unregal. Needless to say, the locomotive pulling Their Majesties was made by Bassett-Lowke.
Of course, such railways were merely for fun and the route usually circular. But the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway in West- moreland demonstrated that miniature railways could also provide a useful trans- port service. Bassett-Lowke and his collab- orator, Henry Greenly, laid a 15-inch gauge track on an older mining railway with the intention of having it running all the year round — for local people and industry as well as for tourists. The Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway still exists and still runs, although I have never been on it. The one I know is the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway down in Kent, whose 15-inch gauge trains are hauled by model locomo- tives — steam and diesel — and which con- tinues to provide a service for school- children as well as for holiday-makers.
Bassett-Lowke had nothing to do with the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch, which now runs on behind seaside chalets to a terminal loop at Dungeness. Here, on desolate shin- gle, tiny steam trains can be seen in juxta- position with lighthouses both old and new with, beyond, the sinister bulk of the nucle- ar power station. But is that any more incongruous than an antique car next to the Parthenon? Charles-Eduoard Jeanneret and W.J. Bassett-Lowke were both remark- able if rather difficult and unpleasant men, but I can't help thinking the Englishman had the better attitude to transport as well as a more benign effect on humanity.
Are you sure you've dragged a lake before, Constable?'
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