ARCHITECTURAL NOTES
THE " WEEK-END COTTAGE "
IN the course of the last twenty years the habit has grown up among many well-to-do Londoners of spending Saturday and Sunday of every week in small residences .in the rather urbanised country which lies within a radius of 30 to 40 miles from Charing Cross. The habit' is by no means a new one in England. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Richmond, Clapham, Blackheath and Hampstead were among the favourite suburbs where prosperous city merchants entertained their friends on Sundays in charming houses, many of which are now unfortunately either derelict or demolished. With the immense growth of London in the nineteenth century the districts easily accessible by horse traffic lost their rural character and the habit of- going; away for Sunday decreased in the Victorian era, owing partly to the sabbatarianism then in fashion and partly to-the greater complication of a short journey by train with its drive to the station in London and its similar drive from the station at the other end. A different attitude towards Sunday observance and above all the invention and popularisation of the motor-car have produced- a great change in the last 20 years, and it is now almost the exception for anyone to stay in London for Sunday who can afford to go away. On the whole the health and- happiness. of a section of the com- munity probably gains by the custom. The masters like the country air and their servants left behind like-the rest. The only people who lose by it are the clergy, for the urbar-s do not usually care to spend a large part of their morning in the country in church nor do they habitually take the slightest interest in the rural' life going on round them.
Now let us see what result the growth of this habit- has had on the development of modem. English architecture. It might have been expected that the demand would have led to the supply of a simple and convenient type of" Week-end Cottage " as the owners of such houses usually call them. Oddly enough this expectation is not. fulfilled, and we are confronted with the curious and interesting fact that numbers of prosperous and educated people house- themselves every Sunday in dwellings which their forbears in the eighteenth century would have considered hardly better than pig-sties. I have been told, though I have never verified the fact, that Dr. 'Johnson defined the word " cottage " in. his Dictionary as a " low mean house in the country." Within.a few years of Johnson's death the word had ceased to have any depreca- tory sense and,the writings of Rousseau had brought' cottages into fashion. But the cottage " of. 1705, as described by the foppish Robert Ferrara in " Sense and Sensibffity," was a large and' wellzbuilt 'house, as is doubtless York Cottage, the autumn residence- of the greatest of worldly monarchs (Shades of Dr. Johnson I), and it was reserved for the English of the Edwardian epoch to carry the teachings of Rousseau,
to their logical conclusion and literally to live in cottages. Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire have been ransacked to find relics of the dwellings where the simple tillers of the soil lived in Tudor and Stuart Times. The original and rightful inhabitants have been squeezed out of their homes, though it is only fair to say that when alternative accommodation was provided they usually showed little reluctance to leave. That which a man with a yearly income of £75 thought not good enough was eagerly snapped at by a manwith perhaps thirty times as much, and all because of the writings of a Frenchman who lived 150 years ago.
But now we come to the most curious fact of all, which is that the new owner of the cottage does not really care for simplicity. If he bought the cottage because he really wanted to get back to nature in contrast to his city life, if he -were content to fetch his water from the well at the end of the garden, to do without sanitation, to go to bed with the birds and to rise with the sun, then his position would be a logical one, and I, speaking for myself, would sympathise with him. But, no ; he wants to transfer all the material resources of civilisation into surroundings entirely unsuited to them. The poor little house receives as its first accretion a large servants' wing only distinguishable from the nucleus by its more antique appearance. Near the hall door there will probably be a sanitary turret draped with pipes and bristling with spouts. Near the new garage, with glazed over washing-space, is the electric light engine puffing away fussily. Next follow new spare bedrooms. To preserve the atmosphere many of the inconveniences of the old work reappear in the new, and modem door furniture of mediaeval design—wooden latches and strings—is installed throughout the house. Finally a red tennis-court takes the place of the cabbages and currant-bushes. Why was all this money spent on a low clayey site ? Because in the middle there still remains the former habitation of a long-dead rustic.
For some curious reason these rich, luxurious, complicated people are willing to put up with his steep, dangerous, little stairs, to crack their foreheads against his low doors, to stand their fake furniture on his sloping floors, to endure his smoking chimneys and, in general, to put up with every possible minor inconvenience in order to imagine with smug satis- faction that they are leading a wild and primitive life.
How violent has been the reaction against the Palladian pomp of the eighteenth century, and who shall say which epoch has fallen into the greater absurdity ? Then we were " proud to catch cold at a Venetian door " : now we prefer catching pneumonia from the draughts of a hovel.
GERAA.13 'WELLESLEY.
Previous page
