Pearls before swine

Gavin Stamp

Georgian Model Farms John Martin Robinson (OUP £35) The subtitle of this elegant, well illus- trated and excessively expensive book is 'A Study of Decorative and Model Farm Buildings in the Age of Improvement, ,1700-1846'. This may seem recondite, even for architectural historians, but particular building types are often most instructive expressions of particular historical periods: country houses for the early 18th century; Prisons for the early 19th; railway stations for the mid-Victorian age; town halls for the Edwardian and, perhaps, local govern- ment offices for our own desperate times. As Dr Robinson convincingly demons- trates, no building type tells us more about the preoccupations of late 18th-century Britain than the 'model farm', the product of the enthusiasm for agricultural improve- ment shared by so many — with the conspicuous exception of Cobbett.

Cobbett thoroughly disapproved of the °es! sv ge

class of favourably impressed Francoias de la Rochefoucauld in 1784. 'All the farmers ,are well mounted and most of them enjoy nunting with the harriers three or four times a week. . . Their houses are always clean and well kept. . . and they are al- ways careful to keep one small sitting-room sPotlessly clean and sometimes quite ele- gant. In this room they receive their guests; the tables and chairs contained in it are of Well-polished mahogany, the chimney- Piece is sometimes of marble but generally Of carved wood.' In marked contrast to France he noted how in England 'it is generally regarded as an honourable thing 10 be a substantial farmer. . . The reason that farming is regarded as an honourable estate is that the highest in the land engage

in it.' The highest indeed: no less than George III himself bothered to design a swineherd's cottage in Windsor Great Park.

The buildings in which de la Roche- foucauld was so pleasantly entertained were most likely very new. Because of the great changes in agriculture, the Georgian farmhouse became typical of rural England and standard in Scotland. Architectural and agricultural enthusiasms coincided with the happiest results and Adam, Hol- land, Soane and Nash, for instance, all designed farm buildings. These were not small jobs done under duress and in which they took no interest; rather, they were opportunities for fruitful experiment and some talented architects, such as Samuel Wyatt, actually specialised in farm build- ings.

Adam designed massive farm buildings in his 'castle style' in Scotland and other architects employed a suitably picturesque manner. More typical, however, and poss- ibly more interesting are the two other styles which were used: the rustic Tuscan, which was inspired as much by Inigo Jones's church in Covent Garden — 'the handsomest barn in England' — as by Italy, and the 'primitive', that reduction of Classicism to sheer, stark forms which is so characteristic of the Neo-Classical phase all over Europe. And here is another fruitful comparison with France, which illuminates political events at the end of the 18th century. In France, the 'advanced' Neo- Classical buildings by Ledoux were the hated customs barriers around Paris and the royal salt mines at Arc-et-Senans; in England, the style was best expressed in farm buildings: the primitive Doric barn at Solihull by Soane or the huge, sublime 'Great Barn' at Holkham designed by Samuel Wyatt for Coke of Norfolk. At the

salt mines (still extant), Ledoux used an ideal radial plan; in Britain such geometric- al plans found a happier use for the layout of barns and stables.

As Dr Robinson is at pains to demons- trate, the famous ornamental dairy built by Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon did not inspire English examples but was itself a product of fashionable anglophilia in matters of rural life.. The pretty thatched dairy at Althorp, designed by Lady Spencer and Henry Holland in 1786, would seem to owe absolutely nothing to the Spencers' visit to Versailles in that year.

Dairies are undoubtedly the most delight- ful of farm buildings: a place principally for women away from the dirt and smells of the farm itself. They are almost always ornamental and fanciful; there is a Chinese dairy at Woburn, a Moorish one at Sezin- cote and many Gothic examples.

All these different types of farm build- ings are examined in turn by the author, as are the extraordinarily inventive experi- ments in new building materials for farm buildings. This search for something which was cheap and, most important, tax-free

produced the enthusiasm for pise, a super- ior form of mud construction which was,

for once, inspired by France. Needless to

say, no pise cottages survive in Britain today (although mud cottages by the Arts

and Crafts architect, Detmar Blow, of a century later apparently do); nor do exam- ples of the oddest of all such ideas. This was C. J. Loudon's proposal, which he actually tried out, of using roofs of tarred paper on top of untrimmed beech logs.

This book concludes with gazetteers of surviving model farm buildings in England, Wales and Scotland. Sadly, the usefulness of these lists is likely to diminish with time for, as the author observes, his study, 'while drawing attention to a little-known aspect of English architecture, is also likely to be its epitaph'. These buildings were products of the 'Agricultural Revolution'; another agricultural revolution, infinitely more destructive to the English landscape than anything Cobbett had to endure, is now sweeping them away. In the late 1970s the largest group of applications to demol- ish listed buildings concerned farms, and farm buildings are exempt from planning control, if not from listed building control.

Hence the appalling new structures which disfigure many farms. As fine Victorian model farms are also at risk, it seems a pity that this survey had to end with the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Careful reading of the preface and dust- jacket of this handsome book elicits the information that the author is a farmer's son who 'lives in Lancashire'. This con- trived image of a provincial bucolic eccen- tric will surprise those who also know him in London, whether as the Fitzalan Pur- suivant Extraordinary, the librarian at Arundel Castle, a resident of Bloomsbury or as one of Ken Livingstone's disting- uished employees in the GLC's historic buildings division. All of which, like this present book, goes to show his versatility.