No Arterial Motives
By KENNETH J. ROBINSON A STATUS - SEEKER has been trying to buy a house in Suffolk for £30,000. No one, I am glad to say, can find him one. Silly Suffolk is not as silly as all that. While other counties have be- come swollen with the offensively picturesque properties of stock- brokers, Suffolk has re- mained barren and un- fashionable. Is this anything to do with Liverpool trect Station and its notorious bottleneck? Is it because no builder can leant on his trowel in the face of a vicious nor'-easter? Or is it simply that no one has approached the place with arterial motives'?
Whatever the reason the friends of Suffolk— and you can count me among them—have the Place to themselves and are free to plumb the ical.! shallows of its contours, to wrestle with the local not.. Pro riUnciation of Walberswick and to wander vhat) al Pevsner in hand,* from Helmingham's ame -all' to Kirkley's (the fleche is weak) congrc- -or Illational church. Not forgetting Lowestoft's I tO, 11104e. rti morgue—though this is just what Dr. ind-.° IleVSiter has done, while enthusing about the Rik!, sar4.1architects' work on two local houses, one ago- PINE (the `Prince Albert') and one private ures Landing' on ,Oulton Broad). !Nile two pieces of post-war architecture aPtiettr in Dr. Pevsner's list of no more than ;one's seWn in the whole county that he thinks worth Meltoning in his introduction. He describes the vdef as 'uncommonly excellent—restrained ex- ternal, ; tly as the architects (Tayler and Green) are '11 everything they do.' This is true enough, and without using any of the clichis you might expect such as stuffed fish, decorative glass and so --the architects have created two bars that dent offend even the oldest habitues.
The private house at Oulton Broad is such a Perfect example of a building superbly well Placed on its site and superbly designed to match Ids owners' needs that Dr. Pevsner (who gets both its address and date of construction wrong) underrates it sadly when he calls it 'incon- Wcuous and unmannered.' Incidentally, if you do use this guide as a means of tracking down modern architecture as well as Jacobean parclose screens, you may /senletimes be a little surprised. Why, for in- ;lance, does a Nonconformist church at :13swich take a tiny beating while an equally modernistic' one at Stowmarket is let off with (.4, factual caption? And why does John and Sylvia Reid's little house at Oulton get a mention WI spite of the wreckage of its neat design by a an owner), while there is no reference to 4.1 excellent fugitive from California by Fello Atkinson? And where is the work of that young IDsvvich architect, Peter Barefoot?
* BUILDINGS OP ENGI AND: SUFFOLK, (Penguin, s. 6d.)
of 01 I must not bore you with more details of mod- ern buildings missed or misrepresented. Let me urge you to look out for the new hamlet at Rushbrooke, near Bury St. Edmunds (architect: Richard Llewellyn Davies), and to go out of your way by as much as a hundred miles, if necessary, to see Tayler and Green's astonishing Norfolk rural houses just over the Suffolk border. The first is an excellent group of linked houses in the whitewashed country manner known locally—and quite affectionately—as `cowshed'; the second—in large and small groups dotted about the Loddon area—hug the land- scape like their ancestors, reflect the low sun- rises and sunsets on their colour-washed and colour-bricked walls and make you resurrect old and forbidden words like 'prettiness' and 'charm.'
I am a lazy lover of Eak Anglia. I find it very restful to hurtle at random along the deserted roads of this subtly-changing county, without braking for the nagging attractions of brick nogging. It would take .a guide of great enthus- iasm to drag me away from the enormous pleas- ures of the fast-moving landscapes to the more detailed pleasures of dec., perp. and the darlingest of dados. Dr. Pevsner and his research team seldom seem enthusiastic. And when they are, I am left wondering why. Could not his compilers get complete up-to-date information from local allied societies of the Royal Institute of British Architects? And wouldn't it be a good idea for someone to visit all buildings men- tioned? It is ridiculous to call readers' attention to the mid-nineteenth-century show-piece by John Thomas, the Royal Hotel at Lowestoft, without telling them that its ironwork facade has been mutilated by a local architect.
Incidentally, I have been reading the Pevsner guide while looking around Suffolk for a rent- able holiday cottage. There 'is something wrong with all of them—something I might not have discovered if it had not been for the Design Centre's current exhibition of `Weekend Living.' The Centre points out, in its explanation of a furnishing scheme costing £750, that until now people (ignorant clods) have always bought cheap, secondhand things for their country cot- tages. The idea behind the lush furnishing dis- played, we are told, is to show people that `modern furnishings provide the most sensible solution in an old cottage and that they are neither incongruous nor expensive.' Well, if they don't call £750 expensive, all I can say is: I do.
Previous page
