Beacons in a squat, dark sprawl
Christopher Woodward
LONDON 5: EAST by Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner Yale, £29.95, pp. 864, ISBN 0300107013 In the 1950s Nikolaus Pevsner published London: The Cities of London and Westminster and London: Except the Cities of London and Westminster. In the current revision of his guides to British architecture, London has been divided into six. This is the final volume to be published, beginning at the ancient City boundary of Aldgate and stretching 15 miles to the border of Essex.
Inside the classic black cover is a brand new book. The research is staggering. The reader expects, and gets, up-to-the-minute notes on Hawksmoor’s great churches. But the authors have also looked at blueprints for 1960s bus stations in Redbridge and the 1930s social theory on ‘perpendicular drinking’, which explains the design of pubs in Dagenham. In an index which is 60 pages in length architects such as Lush and Lester and Plumbe (Rowland) and Harvey are immortalised beside Lutyens and Wren.
But what is remarkable is that the Pevsner approach to describing architecture — comprehensive in scope, technical and impersonal in style — continues to divide people. Pevsner-bashing was one of Betjeman’s favourite pastimes. The baton was picked up by John Harris in his irresistible memoir of being an architectural historian, No Voice from the Hall (1998). In one story a country-house owner mistakes Sir Nikolaus with his clipboard for the man who had come to read the gas meter. Another describes the one week each year in which Pevsner would invite all his friends to dinner. A–D came on Monday, E–G on Tuesday, and so on. The jolliest dinner was the year in which the secretary jumbled the alphabetical card index and the Harrises found themselves laughing with the Ls and the Ts.
The opposition is also to do with Pevsner’s advocacy of European Modernism — and, perhaps, the tradition of what Patrick Wright has called ‘the English road book’. In the 1930s Batsford Press published a genre in which the rolling English road becomes a personal meditation on past and future, the country and the self. East London continues to inspire this approach in the books of Wright and Iain Sinclair and the films just released on DVD — of William Raban. Pevsner never meandered, or stopped for a pub lunch. ‘Facts not opinions’, as they used to inscribe over the doorways of Victorian schools.
A year ago we moved from Notting Hill to a flat on the top floor of a block on the Commercial Road. It is where East London begins, but I had only travelled east to go to Sainsbury’s or Stansted. This is not a book to be read in an armchair, so on Sunday I tried it out with a walk down the Mile End Road from Aldgate to Bow, and back. It is the drive to the supermarket — a wide road of market stalls, Bengali discount stores, and takeaway restaurants. I had never stopped to look at the architecture. But the success of the Pevsner approach is that its ruthless objectivity takes you outside the comfort zone of middle-class architectural tourism.
A dozen guidebooks describe the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as the finest example of an 18th-century complex of factory, house and shop in London. But only Pevsner tells you that the nondescript 1960s Post Office next door is connected by a tunnel to Paddington, then points out the words ‘Working Lads Institute’ above a nearby doorway. Here, in the 1870s, 13-year-old boys came after work to study or swim.
A hundred years earlier this wide road was a suburb of handsome brick merchants’ houses; visible across open fields to the south were the masts of ships on the Thames. Just beyond Sainsbury’s is a courtyard of almshouses built for old sea captains or their widows in the 1670s. Shut the gate and you can hear squirrels rustling in the trees. In a sudden shower rain drips from chunky carved eaves and the rigging of the miniature ships sculpted on the skyline. It is one of the most beautiful discoveries in London.
It was in the 19th century that the area became ‘the East End’ of popular myth. Outside the almshouses a statue of General Booth marks the spot where the founder of the Salvation Army made his first speech. The Temperance Hall next door was endowed by a teetotal daughter of the Charringtons and built on the doorstep of the family brewery. Walking east there is a growing sense of the architectural landmarks being beacons of middle-class guilt in a squat, dark sprawl of poverty.
The grandest building is Wickhams Department Store, built in the 1920s as ‘the Selfridges of the East End’ and derelict today. Its façade is a screen of giant Ionic columns, their design based upon the Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae in Arcadia. But the colonnade stops at a small, white shop — and then starts again. When a Somali who was chewing green khat asked what I had come to see I read aloud the explanation: the shop belonged to a jeweller who refused to sell up. ‘That’s funny,’ he said, and translated to his friend. An old man approached. His brother had worked at Wickhams. ‘What does it say in that book? Yes. The jeweller was called Mr Spiegelhalter. Mr Wickham had to build around him.’ It is depressing when the cluttered, gregarious pavement ends and the Ocean Estate begins. Built in the 1940s and 1950s it was ‘neighbourhood 3’ in the Orwellian speak of the time. Streets were replaced by tower blocks. Here the book changes, too. Modernist housing estates, here and elsewhere, are described with a detail that would do justice to Palladio’s Vicenza. Page after page describes the mathematical calculations of the zoners, or the role of Professor R. O. Jones in the design of concrete panels. The language becomes that of the lecture room: ‘Scandinavian austerity’, ‘strong verticals’ or the ‘quirky patterning beloved by Lubetkin’. If I read these descriptions to the men on the Mile End Road they would think that I — and Professor Pevsner — were from a planet more distant than Speigelhalter. In the silent, empty spaces of the estates you can only think of Ian Nairn’s remark: if you want to like modern architecture, don’t come to the East End.
Back to the street, and thank God for the Millennium Bridge, built in the late 1990s to carry a public park over a busy road junction. It was designed by Piers Gough as a piece of curved yellow plastic, as buoyant as a canoe. Sitting on top, the ugliness of cities — the tarmac and the concrete and the traffic — seem ephemeral beside the scruffy, exuberant vegetation and the chaotic laughter of children kicking a football. I want to give the architect a hug.
This book is, for me, at least, a revelation. Walking the two miles home, the Mile End Road had become a different street; a hundred anonymous buildings had become living, friendly, complex faces. A perfect London Sunday, thanks to Pevsner.
Previous page
