AND ANOTHER THING
Prince Charles can learn a thing or two from the Wyf of Bath
PAUL JOHNSON
since Charles has launched a new archi- tectural magazine — Perspectives — with a call for the people to be consulted. He wants the design of houses to reflect the wishes of those who will live in them. Who could quarrel with that? But then how do you discover what people want when they do not know themselves?
Most people see houses from the inside out: they can give a pretty specific account of what they need in the way of rooms, ser- vices, space, light etc. but have no notion of how they expect all this to be reflected in the exterior. Once they get outside the house they think in terms of the garden and garage. But there are a minority, of whom I am one, who visualise their ideal house as a building, rather than a collection of rooms, and see it from outside, in its setting. I can draw an exact picture of the house I want, down to details of brickwork, mouldings and chimneys, but I am hazy about what goes on inside it. I like that kind of thing to come as a surprise when I open the front door and go in. If an architect undertook to build me my perfect house, I suspect the first thing I would do would be to quarrel with him. And, come to think of it, the his- torical record shows that is what usually happens. Building your own house, even if you find an architect who is not a bundle of imperiousness and impracticality — and that is rare — is an exercise in frustration, financial ruin, disillusionment, and sheer bad temper.
So most of us buy second-hand houses and make the best of what we find and can afford. This brings variety at any rate. In the last 40 years or so I have inhabited the following: as a young man in Paris I lived (leaving out hotels) in a brick-and-stucco Art Nouveau studio in Montparnasse, a huge 18th-century studio in Montmartre which had once been a chapel and was built over a night-club, and a 19th-century flat carved out of a mediaeval palace in the Marais. In England I moved first to a late- Georgian flat in Knightsbridge, then an 1880s brick-and-terracotta one behind Har- rods, followed by many years in an early Georgian (1719 actually) house in Bucks. More recently I have bought a very early Victorian (1840) villa in Bayswater and a 1950s conversion of a coach-house in Som- erset which is a perfect example, down to the light fittings, of what I would call Attlee-Truman Modernism.
I have taken great delight in the varying styles and moods of all these domiciles, and have been happy in every single one, but none remotely corresponds to my ideal. Like Cathleen Moreland in Northanger Abbey, I have wanted all my life to live in a Gothic castle, Revival rather than Mediae- val — or, better still, both — with plenty of towers, turrets, machicolations, dim pas- sages, newel staircases, a chapel, a piscina, an aumbry and a flushing garderobe, not forgetting squints, meurtrieres and a solar. Such a vision is not so unrealisable as might be supposed, since, in my experience, any- one who actually owns a Gothic castle is only too ready to unload it on to anyone else. But whenever I have been seriously tempted, my wife Marigold has put her foot down firmly, and the cloud-capped towers have instantly dissolved.
Few people now, I fear, like the Gothic, and my dream of a Second Gothic Revival sweeping away the last modernist boxes and packing cases and restoring a world of spires and battlements is not likely to be realised. There seems to be a class division over architectural styles. Above a certain line, running halfway through the middle class, there is a distinct preference for Georgian. A duke or earl who tires of his ancestral pile and decides to build himself a more convenient abode is sure to commis- sion a neat Georgian rectory-style house, with long, light, many-paned windows, per- haps with a few Palladian flourishes in stone a la Quinlan Terry but essentially a red-brick 18th-century mansion. Most well- to-do members of the professional classes think along the same lines. Their idea of the good life is to wrap themselves in Geor- gian brick and white paint, and live as they imagine Parson Woodforde did or Mr Ben- net or Archdeacon Grantley.
Down the social scale, one travels back- wards in time. The lower-middle or work- ing classes may insist on all mod cons, even more emphatically, these days, than anyone else, plus a disco too. But they like the flash of an exposed beam as well. For over a cen- tury now, the popular preference, to which generations of mass-produced houses built for sale testify, is for some kind of Tudor. Not, indeed, the sophisticated Renaissance Tudor of John Smythson or Longleat, but something earlier, earthier and quainter, with an atmosphere of black-and-white lath-and-plaster rather than carved stone ashlar.
It is odd, but the bulk of the British seem to see their ideal house emerging from early Tudor times or even from the later Middle Ages. It springs from a child's story- book, illustrated long before the age of political correctness, the kind of house where Goldilocks met the Three Bears or where the Wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother — a cottage with casements and eaves and diamond-paned windows, sunflowers and hollyhocks in the garden. This is how ordinary British people visualise Arcadia, and they attempt to recreate it by patronising `Henry VIII Nights' at the local pub, where they are served food on 'platters' by 'wenches' and there are robust jokes about multiple wives, axes, heads and hauntings. That the Golden Age is dated in the popular mind some- where towards the end of the 15th century is further demonstrated by the extraordi- nary passion for garden gnomes, whose dress and headgear suggest they could easi- ly have been spectators at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
Why do people want to transport them- selves back to those dubious times? There is no answer to the question. One should ask, rather, why they reject so emphatically all the aesthetics of the Modern Age and the answer is all too obvious. They may be forced, by cruel councils and brutal archi- tects and planners, to live in tower blocks or concrete bunkers designed by heartless intellectuals who see a house as a machine for living in. But no one can make them like it. They regard modern architecture as merely the latest form which the age-old tyranny of the ruling class takes. If Prince Charles can free them from that, and help them to inhabit a Utopia where the Wyf of Bath or the Merry Wives of Windsor feel at home, then he would be well on his way to becoming a popular monarch.
Previous page
