Treasures of the East
East London—Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, ' (His Majesty's Stationery Office. 17s. 6d.) I HAVE lived in London—more or less—for thirty years, and as an inquisitive person, an architect, and an almost gluttonous sight-seer, - I thought that I knew it pretty well. To-day for the first time I suddenly recognised that I am the merest dabbler, an ignoramus scarcely fit to do the honours of my town for a reasonably enquiring antipodean.
The occasion of this humiliating awakening is Volume V. of the London inventory of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, a really startling catalogue of East London notabilities in the way of architecture. The Commission, headed' by Loid Crawford; start off with a ceremonial report to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, which thus concludes
We humbly recommend to your Majesty's notice-the follow- ing monuments in East London as especially worthy of preser- vation," No. 11 in the secular section being no other than the Tower of London, within the Borough of Stepney.
One can scarcely imagine any but the most complete cataclysm endangering the Tower, but it is very good to see so many less celebrated but no less honourable survivals of a distinguished architectural past having the protection of the SoVereign invoked on their behalf; however formally. It is pleasant to think of the Sovereign as Defender of the Arts; and one is reminded of a passage in A Picture of England (1789); by M. d'Archenholtz, formerly as captain in the service of the King of Prussia, wherein he wrote Many of the English, with great propriety, imagine that, if the present king had a taste for architecture—London would actually become the most superb city in Europe." Alas, for a century past there has been little taste for architecture amongst the English, whether Royal or other, or perhaps one should say. such taste as there has been was mostly so wretched in quality that one should be actually . grateful for there being so little of it... z . . . .
The Tower I-do -know faixly well-in a muddled sort of way, but there need-be no muddle for anyone in future who has the good sense to provide himself with this book, for quite apart from -the full- and well-illustrated account of this, the most complete mediaeval fortress in England, he will find himself armed with a large scale map of the--whole labyrinth from Roman to modern, giving the date of every wall and building at a glance.
.It is not this account of the. Tower, nor of Greenwich Hospital (that mankhold to be the finest group of buildings in the world), nor even of _The Queen's House or the. Royal. Observatory that make the book so exciting, because these things are already and deservedly " sights " of world-wide renown : The signal merit of the book really is that it has unearthed for the intelligently curious a whole collection of distinguished building and craftsmanship of which very few of us indeed Were even dimly aware. No doubt we have vaguely heard of Eltham Palace" and Eltham Lodge, but how many of us realize the mediaeval magnificence of the one or the urbane- dignity of the other, even as they stand to-day
rather forlornly hemmed about by little buildings of our own time that can never be classified architecturally for the simple reason that they bear no relation whatsoever to architecture ?
Then there is Charlton House, near Greenwich, that grand Elizabethan mansion looking somewhat like a smaller Hatfield, Sir Christopher Wren's entirely delightful little Morden College at Blackheath, with its cloistered quadrangle and its chapel, for all the world a rustic version of an Oxford college, unforgettable for the warm charm of its mellow brick work and white-sashed windows, and memorable too for the masterly blending of what might be called the institutional and the domestic styles.
Even these buildings, however, are known to most archi, tectural students if only by repute, though there must be many pictured in this volume that are practically discoveries of the Commission, who would appear to have made their survey and selection with the utmost diligence and wisdom.
They need be given no special marks for churches and almshouses, except for the discretion of their choice, because these things were easily tracked down ; but who would have suspected the existence of Brooke House in Hackney, appar- ently a sixteenth-century manor house of which the north court-yard is shown, that one would have guessed to be somewhere in the remoter part of East. Anglia had one not the Commissioners' word for it that it was practically within motor-hoot of Liverpool Street Station ?
Woolwich, Lewisham, Greenwich, Stepney, Camberwell, Bermondsey and the rest, all of them have old street fronts, stair-cases, door-hoods, memorials, churches, even farm- houses or ancient cottages to make them notable to the
antiquary. -
How much else there is most painfully notable to the sociologists we already know only too well, and though the first impact of the book Itself, crammed- with distinguished and charming things, is to make one believe East London a sort of milky way of things beautiful and old, the sparse peppering of red dots on the map of the eastern half of the County of London which accompanies the book shows one how sadly little there really is in that vast wilderness of bricks and mortar that has any gracious message to us from the past, All of us who have ever had- to find our dispirited way across the planless welter of dunce-building that really makes up nine-tenths of what is statistically " London," are achingly aware of this deficiency, and aware, too, that hardly in a thousand acres of this soulless urbanism is there even one single thing of urbanity of our own age worth preserving for any other.
One can only hope, that this, the Commission's concluding volume may be as widely read as it deserves, so that like the recently published town-planning report of Greater London, it may stimulate us into having a little more civic pride and, further, into having a little more in our City to justify it.
CLOUGFI WILLIAMS-ELLIS.
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