MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE photographs and drawings now being exhibited at the National Gallery by the National Buildings Record remind us of the immense architectural riches which this island possesses. They remind us also that prior to 185o few really ugly buildings were ever erected in England. Not only did we possess architects and decorators of taste and learning, not only was a knowledge of architecture as much part of culture as a knowledge of the classics, but the ordinary citizen took an alert pride in the beauty of his town and the dignity of its municipal buildings. When the Indus- trial Revolution reached its climax people began to lose all archi- tectural awareness and ceased to notice what was happening to their towns. It was not that the later Victorian age failed to produce great architects ; the syntax and grammar of many of the architects of the later nineteenth century are beyond criticism ; it is merely their phraseology which seems to us artificial and elaborate. It was the lesser architects who did such harm, and it was indeed a national .and European misfortune that the age of the most extensive building that the -world has ever seen should have coincided with the only period during which the majority of the world's inhabitants ceased to notice what was being built. Even today, when a revival of architectural interest is spreading rapidly among the younger genera- tion, their elders remain amazingly ignorant and obtuse. It would be an interesting experiment, for instance, to ask the City Coun- cillors of our five largest towns to name the architect of their own town hall and to state the date at which it was erected. I doubt whether more than to per cent. could give a correct answer to such questions. And if our aediles are so ignorant and apathetic, how can one blame the citizens if they do not notice anything at all?
* * * * It was not only upon England that a dark cloud of indifference descended between the years 185o and 1900. In France also, which for so long had been the mother of good taste, buildings were erected which bore no relation either to French tradition or to any acceptable standards of structure and design. Paris itself was largely preserved owing to the fact that Baron Haussmann and his staff evolved and maintained a harmless and indeed suitable formula for the apart- ment houses with which they lined their boulevards. But in some of the French provincial cities there exist town halls and prefectures which can compete in ugliness with the worst that our own indus- trial cities display ; nor can one conceive anything quite so tasteless as the suburban villas with which, at the end of the century, the French littered the outskirts of their towns. In Germany a natural taste for caryatids and rustification led to heavy orgies in plaster, and Berlin, before it was demolished, became a museum of archi- tectural errors. In 1900 things began to change. Van de Velde invented the whiplash curve of art nouveau, some strange relics of which can still be seen in the more suburban stations of the Paris metro. In Germany the effect of Van de Velde was disastrous, and pretty little towns such as Weimar broke into a rash of art nouveau villas, upon the facades of which giant lotus plants were affixed in pink and yellow stucco. It may have been a false start, but it was at least a start. Over there in the United States the great sky- scrapers were slowly evolving their own formula and transforming the brown-stone homeliness of New York into one of the loveliest cities of the modern world. And in more recent years Le Corbusier in France and Eric Mendelssohn in Germany have been among the many pioneers to study the application of modern materials to modern needs. We ourselves have not been behindhandwith a revival of public interest in housing we may have a renewal Of muni- cipal elegance ; and it is thus useful at such a moment to be reminded of the high ideals and the high attainments of our architecture in the past. * * * * The National Buildings Record, under the Chairmanship of Lord Greene, the Master of the Rolls, and under a Council of Manage- ment comprising such diverse people as Mrs. Arundell Esdaile and Sir Kenneth Clark, Mr. Osbert Lancaster and Lord Justice Mackinnon, was established in the early months of 1941. Its immediate object was to collect detailed photographs and drawings
of all buildings of national value which either had been, or might shortly be, damaged or destroyed by enemy action. With the help of such analogous bodies as the Central Council for the Care of Churches, the Warburg Institute, and the Courtauld Institute, they have already accumulated a photographic record of some 225,000 items. The exhibition now being held at the National Gallery represents therefore but a small fraction of their total library. Even as such, however, it is most impressive. In the first place it Mut- trates in a dramatic manner the terrible damage which has already been done. We are shown, for instance, the contrast between St. Benedict's Church at Norwich as it stood in 1938 and as it.appears today after a visit from the Luftwaffe. Even more instructive is the confrontation of the two photographs of a large drawing-room in Portman Square designed by James Stuart in 1781 ; you have the peace-timc aspect with its delicate mouldings, its sofas, its silk screens and flowers ; and beside it is the photograph of the same room as it stands now, a litter of scraped bricks and charred beams. In the second place we have a record, available for all time, of the lesser known masterpieces of different ages, whether it be the perfect Regency manner of Dix's Field at Exeter, or the elaborate richness of the vestry of Wren's St. Lawrence Jewry. In the third place the exhibition shows its some good photographs of objects of archaeological or artistic interest which have been uncovered by bombing and demolition. And, most important of all, the collection when completed will inform future generations of exactly what our squares and terraces looked like before the bombs began to scream and whistle through the night.
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We are not all gifted with a retentive visual memory, and even the most familiar buildings become vague to us once they have disappeared. For ten years I lived opposite the Clock Tower which Arthur Cates affixed to the Inner Temple in 1873. It was completely destroyed in 1941. As I leave my chambers in the morning I still find myself checking my watch by the empty space where the clock once stood ; I look up instinctively, but instead of that ugly accurate time-piece I gaze upon the London sky, and where the clock once stood now floats the little silver whale of a balloon. Yet although Cates' Clock Tower had become for me so constant a habit that even now I revert to it, I do not think that I could draw the thing from memory with any accuracy at all. There were other, buildings around it of far greater beauty which have also gone. There was the Middle Temple Cloister which was undoubtedly designed by Wren in 168o ; there was Lamb Building, of which only a low stump now remains draped in 'wistaria and carpeted with loosestrife.- And there was the Master's House, loveliest of all seventeenth-century domestic build- ings, of which only the back wall now remains. The time will come when the Benchers will have to decide in what manner to rebuild their battered Temple. It is a good thing that, not they only, but the public at large, should have before them a full and detailed record of what was there before.
* * * * It may be said that records of most of our more famous buildings, often accompanied by measured drawings, exist in many forms and in most libraries of architecture. The National Buildings Record aims at rendering such documents as accurate and as complete as possible. It goes further. Realising that some of our greatest sculp- tors and masons devoted much skill to mural monuments, and that these fall ready victims to fire and explosive, it is hoped to collect as complete a record as possible of all such secondary monuments, fittings and wood-work as may still survive. A detailed index will be kept and the resulting records will be microphotographed. We shall thus obtain something which we have never had before in so complete a form—namely, an illustrated catalogue of all our national treasures. A visit to the National Gallery during the next six weeks will convince anyone of the true value of the work being done. Lord Greene and Mr. Walter Godfrey must be congratulated upon the enterprise which they have shown, the knowledge which they have accumulated, and the scholarship with which they have performed this outstanding public service.
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