Planned fantasy
Gavin Stamp
The Gentleman's Country House and its Plan 1835.1914 Jill Franklin (Routledge pp. 293, £15.95) If the titles of popular books are anything to go by, the English still remain sound at heart. Most, as always, think of the country house or cottage as the ideal place to live and even if they cannot realise that ambition they will buy books on country houses. Here is another book on the subject: but this is not another nostalgic, illustrated survey, rather, a scholarly and illuminating examination of the construction, Patronage and functioning of country houses during the period when an astonishing number were built: between 1000 and 2000 from 1835 to the Great War. On the whole, these are not glamorous houses. Most had a very short life serving the precise, socially stratified functions for Which they were carefully designed and many — the type of coarse, Romantic pile like Waugh's Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust — are now hospitals, convalescent homes, borstals, schools, even prisons — or demolished. Such buildings are the often absurd but nevertheless revealing products of the complexities of Victorian social attitudes and mobility; they are documents from a past age, to be ..analysed and understood, and Dr Franklin, building upon the work of Mark Girouard and Andrew Saint — Norman Shaw's biographer — does this with great skill and intelligence.
This book is an acceptable product of the new sort of architectural history which has arisen in reaction to a purely aesthetic approach. It is more interested in social and economic history than purely architectural; more concerned with plan and building type than with personalities and styles. Here is a very remarkable thing: a book with almost more plans than illustrations. A major part of this work is taken up with the formal analysis of 70 country house plan types, the author reaching the perhaps surprising conclusion that, in their search for freedom, asymmetry and picturesque grouping, Victorian architects were not very innovative in planning but just developed Georgian and 17th-century plans. The only new types appeared late, at the end of the century, and these — the 'butterfly' and the 'North corridor' plans — reflected a new enthusiasm for the sun.
Furthermore, pace Pugin and Gilbert Scott, Gothic Revival plans were no more practical than Classical ones; what mattered was the skill and sense of the architect. In this, one personality, one hero cannot but emerge — Norman Shaw. Style cannot be ignored, however, and it is a pity we are not given illustrations of many of the rambling, turreted and gabled mansions which rose from these complex plans; the reader needs to see evidence of E.13. Lamb's lament that 'a conservatory is certainly the hardest thing to design in a Norman style.'
In addition to the house plans, Dr Franklin discusses the changing functions of each room — including rooms like the double-height great halls which seem so puzzling today. Here is a salutary reminder that fashion constantlychanges even though each generation thinks its own predilections represent an absolute of common sense. The different attitude to light and air is instructive here: the architect William White wrote in 1856 that 'For warmth in winter, for coolness in summer, for cheerfulness, for convenience, for comfort, the less window the better'.
The great distances, the endless corridors and servants' wings were a reflection of the Victorian desire for an interesting 'Dinner Route' from Drawing to Dining Room as well as the great horror of cooking smells penetrating the main body of the house. Disraeli was once heard to murmur 'Thank God for something warm' when the champagne arrived. Even more important was the segreggion 'of the sexes. Male and female servants ideally had different staircases to their different domestic quarters and the possibility of male guests en countering, and therefore seducing pretty housemaids had at all costs to be avoided. The author suggests that elaborate plans ultimately failed to defeat human nature: at one house there were 'scandals in the laundry, which . . . was nothing but a brothel until a new entrance was built and gates put up to keep the intruders out' (a contemporary quote — not Dr Franklin's words). Attitudes, and therefore house plans, had changed by Edward VII's reign, when hostesses had to recognise that bedrooms might be visited by other guests.
As Girouard demonstrated in his Victorian Country House, much of the interest of these houses comes from the client and the origin of the necessary money. In this period the patronage changed profoundly, as Dr Franklin shows with interesting statistical diagrams. In 1835-54 Peers built 16 per cent and Squires 38 per cent of the new houses, but by 1895-1914 their combined proportion had dropped to eight per cent, while owners 'in food, drink and groceries' — a category not represented in the earlier period — made up 13 per cent by the early 20th century.
With such clients, the style of a house is nevertheless interesting because it represents a socially motivated choice. Elizabethan, Gothic, 'Queen Anne', Tudor, Baroque, all, at different times, and with different degrees of sophistication, reflect snobbery and Romantic nostalgia. To those who know Hughenden Manor, Disraeli's description of his new house can only seem ridiculous: 'We have realised a romance we have been many years meditating, we have restored the house to what it was before the Civil4VVars and we have made a garden of terraces in which cavaliers might roam and saunter with their ladye loves' — but perhaps that confirms the validity of approach of the new type of architectural history: the evidence of one's own eyes is less significant than the aspirations of the original builder. Nathaniel Hawthorne commented in the 1850s that 'nobody seems to be building in real earnest, to live and die in, but rather as a sort of plaything.'
A particularly interesting final chapter gives us the judgment of contemporaries on their new houses. Most, naturally, liked whatever was up-to-date and fashionable — especially if they had paid for it — but it is refreshing to read poor Lord Overstone on his new Hall 'which he had been persuaded to rebuild by his 't;vife in the 1860s: The New House, I regret to say, is the cause of unmitigated disappointment and vexation. It is an utter failure — we have fallen into the hands of an architect [W,M. Teulon] in whom incapacity is his smallest fault. The House tho' very large and full of pretension — has neither taste, comfort nor convenience. I am utterly ashamed of it. . . the principal rooms are literally uninhabitable — I shall never fit them up . . I grieve to think that I shall hand such an abortion to my successors.
Does the modern chairman of a borough housing committee ever write thus?
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