Last word
Lost London
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Those of us who, like Mr Pinfold, love the architecture of every age except our own can find few cities which more firmly confirm us in our prejudice than London. Where else is there such a contrast between the glories of the past and the horrors of the present? From Westminster Abbey to Centre Point is a decline which can only be described in one of those popularised technicalities which I never fully understand, like quantum leap (can you have a quantum drop?). The nation which produced Jones and Hawksmoor now produces Colonel Seifert: Si monumentum requiris, stand in Bishopsgate and bloody well circumspice. The Hambro's building, the NatWest building and Draper's Gardens constitute a monument of a kind, though coarse language rather than scientific metaphor comes to mind when trying to sum it up.
The City is the epicentre of the London architectural disaster. Just what a calamity it has undergone I am reminded not so much by walking through it — one has become inured to the frightfulness — as by perusing Howard Colvin's Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 which was published last year. To look on the bright side, all is not lost when an Oxford don can still produce a work of scholarship on this scale, and an English publishing house (John Murray) can issue it in a form which does it justice. It is a snip, seriously, at £30. The Dictionary is a revision and expansion — though much more — of the previous Biographical Dictionary. . . 1660-1840 which I studied when I sat nervously at Mr Colvin's feet, acquiring a love of the English Baroque which even the peculiarly dry and academic approach to the subject that the syllabus ordained could not dampen.
Reference book freaks will not need to be told that this book can be read as well as consulted. In fact reference books have the great advantage over tiresome narratives, historical or fictional, that you can pick them up, open them where you like, and read as much or as little as you feel like. As I have observed before, the only person who has managed to import this quality into a traditional work of history is Mr Theodore Zeldin in his singular France 1848-1945: not exactly a new art form, but not history as you and I understand it, squire.
I have already made some fascinating discoveries in the new Colvin. Did you • know, for example, that Marchmont House, Berwickshire, was the work — and the only known work — of Thomas Gibson (the conclusive evidence is in the Scottish Record Office), and that no member of the Adam family had any part in its design? Tim. There has been a certain amount of misinformation on this point.
Not all that one learns from Colvin is merely interesting. Some pages of the book are profoundly depressing, reminding one as they do just how grim has been the spoliation of London. It would be bad enough if the monstrosities that disfigure the City had been erected in open land. Far worse is the knowledge of what they replaced. And the greatest single loss, if one may call it single, is Wren's City churches.
Fifty of them were built after the Great Fire of 1666. By no means all of them were purely the work of Wren, though he supervised all, rather as a master painter of the Rennaisance worked on the outline and on important details, leaving the background to pupils in his studio. In Wren's case much was left to his subordinate colleagues, Hooke and Woodroffe, and to the senior craftsmen. One may argue that Wren produced greater masterpieces, most obviously St Paul's which the fifty churches so appropriately surrounded, but there is something especially delightful and characteristic of Wren about the churches, with their often simple bodies and their always brilliant and various steeples and towers. I say there is when of course I should say there was. Scarcely any of the fifty survives in its original state; more than half have disappeared — and in the most wretched of circumstances. It is a widespread misconception that most of these churches were lost in the last war. In reality the Church of England has been more than a match for the Luftwaffe. Some seventeen churches suffered severe bomb damage, but only seven of those were destroyed.
Eighteen of Wren's churches were simply demolished, beginning with St Christopher le Stocks, Threadneedle Street, which was pulled down in 1781 to make way for the less amiable building which we associate with that address. All but three of the eighteen were demolished between 1865 and 1905, an act of vandalism unsurpassed even in this country. The explanation or excuse at the time was that the proceeds from sale of the sites would be used to pay for more clergy, which Sir John Betjeman has called a wicked piece of simony. The real reason, I am inclined to think, is that destructive urge which seems to come over property owners from time to time. There it is. Complaint is useless, as Evelyn Waugh once said in a similar context. Instead of whining I dream of a benevolent despotism whose first acts will be to pull down all buildings higher than six stories, to re-erect the Euston Arch and to rebuild the City as it was in 1750. Such a scheme, said a literal-minded civil servant to whom I had put it, would be intolerably capitalintensive; and he seemed put out when I explained that these works would be performed by chain-gangs of architects, planners and former employees of the Department of the Environment, paying their debt to society.
Previous page
