MR. PIPER'S HERESIES
srR,....4n the course of his kindly attack on me Mr. Clough Williams- pais advocates the removal of as many as possible of the Wren churches "to less boorish and less menacing surroundings, where neighbourly good manners might, one hopes, be guaranteed in per- petuity by some measure of civilised restraint of building." I still feel that any good city church would look foolish in an open space, and worse than foolish as part of modern development schemes as we know them. We have not yet found out how to " develop " opep fields without obliterating them by sham Tudor villas, super-cinemas and service roads.
In his defence of what he calls " that most efficient custodian, the Office of Works," he has given such a beautiful description of early nineteenth-century scenes in mediaeval churches depicted by Prout and Cattermole that anyone can see he is as deeply moved by old buildings that have rich pictorial texture as I am, and just as "incurably sentimental " about them. When I snake of the tidyings- up, the levellings and re-roofings by the Office of Works I was simply pointing out that this body has by now filched most of our national monuments from the artist and handed them over to the historian. They are no longer incipient pictures, they are museum exhibits. Their iron notice-boards with politely embossed words imply as much, as well as spoiling the view.
It is no use for Mr. Williams-Ellis to pose as an archaeologist. He knows that what he likes about a Cotswold manor house is that it is beautiful, not that it is old. He knows that a fifteenth-century manor house like that at Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire could be measured, drawn and wholly incarcerated in a learned work within a month at a thousandth of the cost in money and trouble of the " protective " work that the Office of Works has been doing there for years. He knows that to the historian with no eyes these records would be as useful as the building itself, and that any historian with eyes prefers a real ruin to a mummified one. He knows, too, that a couple of cows grazing form a more sensible foreground for such a ruin than a couple of motor mowers inside an iron fence. Every guide-book writer is wise to the folly fifty years after the wholesale " restora- tion" of our parish churches has been finished. Let us be a bit wiser about the. wholesale " protective " work (equally misnamed) that the Office of Works is doing under our noses.—Yours, &c.,
JOHN PIPER.
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