JANUARY/FEBRUARY, 2025
There are three reasons why this important summary should be recommended reading for all art and architecture students, even if some of them need first to be taught how to read properly.
First, this lifelong enthusiast’s view gives a solid introduction to our country’s architectural background; how it evolved decoratively from military austerity to beauty and then back to spartan brutalism. It provides a useful foundation on which to build personal knowledge and preferences. Jenkins is especially informative on the battles between proponents of Classicism and Gothic. And he has travelled far and wide: the carbon footprint of this book can’t be much short of a coal-fired power station – incidentally, an impressive class of structures he misses out. All informed readers of this book might niggle – I did – between some examples selected for mention and the omission of their own treasured haunts. For me, I was surprised he didn’t cite Bristol Cathedral’s Norman Chapter House, its eager decorators so keen to articulate bare ashlar they got their measuring wrong and had to squeeze up their zig-zags to fit. He also undervalues, I felt, the best Art Deco, especially in London.
Second, it exhorts all of us to look up and interrogate our surroundings because, architecturally, from St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield to Wilkins’s Somerset House and Wallis Gilbert’s Daimler showroom behind Russell Square, London is a thrilling jigsaw, the architectural pieces of which come alive and are at least as rich and detailed as those in any other city. I should have liked Jenkins to have given us the benefit of a lifetime’s expertise in analysing architecture to explain what precisely it is that turns mere ‘building’ into ‘architecture’.
And third, and perhaps most importantly, the book’s comprehensive coverage of arguments over post-1945 reconstruction will cause architecture students especially, most of whom always think they know best and would subject us unconscionably to their pipe dreams, to adopt a humbler attitude, one more considerate to those whose lives their ideas may blight.
Jenkins is not liked by the modern architecture establishment whose theories, exposed by his diligent trawling of first sources, have so often been corruptly put into practice at the expense of those whose lives and needs officialdom chooses to ignore as irrelevant. “The aversion to humanityâ€, Jenkins writes of planners and architects, “was fanaticalâ€. He exposes in pleasing detail the mistakes they made …
A Tale of Two Sisters
… I have personal experience of these oversights as a result of which I have even less regard for recent architects than he does. I just hate them, all of them. Soon after the war I was born in the house of my grandmother Alice Wathey. She was one of 13 children, all born in the 19th century into a solid, 3-storey Victorian terrace house (still there the last time I passed) in Moss Side, Manchester; the father drove a horse-drawn omnibus. Alice left school at 12 and worked for over 50 years as a machinist in Cheetham Hill, including war work – caps in the First, parachutes in the Second. Between Openshaw and Belle Vue (!), it was a 2-up-2-down, ‘Coronation Street’ style terrace of smoke-blackened brick – three windows and a door; ‘stripped Georgian’ Jenkins dubs this. It came with a tiny apron of flagged back yard in one corner of which was an outside lavatory whose unlagged pipes burst on cue every winter. The front door opened straight on to the pavement across a proudly donkey-stoned mustard step. Beyond the cobbled street was an extensive croft of flattened rubble, the gift (one of many hereabouts) of Hermann Göring. Everyone in Openshaw paid weekly rent to the same property company whose rent collectors swarmed through like a posse on Saturday mornings. Most of the local men, like my grandfather and great grandfather (who was killed there in 1920), worked at the nearby, vast Beyer Peacock locomotive, carriage and wagon works. When Gran moved here in 1925, the house had no bathroom and, until decades later when a geyser was installed, no running hot water: on Monday evenings she visited Gorton bath house (terracotta-tiled Edwardian baroque) on Hyde Road for her weekly ablutions in the cheaper ‘Second Class’ section. We lived in a similar house round the corner in Jefferson Street but I spent much of my childhood in Gran’s spartan yet spotless little dwelling whose grate blazed in winter.
In the late-60s she was informed that her house, where she’d lived all her adult life, would be demolished as part of slum clearances which erased most of east and south Manchester. She and her elder sister Connie, who now shared No. 9 with her, were given choices of where they could go; Hulme (locally pronounced ‘Oom’), Glossop and Whitefield were three of the options I recall. This long-standing neighbourhood, where everyone really did know each other, was destroyed by this enforced diaspora. Deprived of this supportive community, these materially impoverished people were left with next to nothing to cling on to.
Gran chose Whitefield, a sprawling estate at the edge of north Manchester built on marshy moorland between Middleton and Bury: Her ground floor flat was modern by Truro standards – she had a bathroom for one thing – but with erratic underfloor heating over which she had little control. The block was prefabricated and jerry-built; the window frame in the living room was, for example, so badly fitted you could see daylight coming through from outside. She complained most bitterly about fern-like black fungi spreading up the wall in the corner next to her armchair. She knew no one locally and the shops were further away than she was used to walking for her loaf and milk. We couldn’t be there all the time and I remember many tears. On one occasion she sat opposite me and said most pitifully ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ – over 50 years later this exchange still haunts me. Isolation and dislocation soon ushered the arrival of dementia and her removal, albeit briefly, to an old folks home.
Meanwhile, Connie, fatally, chose Oom. An even worse misfortune was moving into the infamous Charles Barry Crescent (illustrated), of which the Manchester Evening News initially declared that “the design for a thousand maisonettes in long curved terraces will give a touch of eighteenth century grace and dignity to municipal housing.†The reality was different. Connie also knew no one, was condemned to living behind a bolted door and feared venturing out on decks patrolled by scallywags. Unused to the noise, she simply gave up and, having been healthy, was dead within months. Ten years after this complex opened, Manchester Council’s Building Committee, who had previously described it as “one of the finest schemes in Europeâ€, now considered it “an absolute disasterâ€. It was demolished inside 30 years of having been built because it was half-abandoned as no one would live there.
Nobody will convince me that the lives of both these decent, hard-working and formidably independent women, who for all their hardship were welcoming and generous, were not shortened by this regrettable official indulgence of architects and developers who laid waste our major cities without consultation or remorse.
I salute Simon Jenkins for his perseverance and skill in explaining to us how this enormity of state-approved manslaughter came to pass. His narrative of architectural egos allowed free rein by complicit bent councillors is truly incredible, outrageous; Alice, Connie and their like were the collateral damage of a corrupt, indifferent, get-rich-quick system. And, inevitably, although one infamous Newcastle official was imprisoned for accepting bribes, no one has been brought to book for the billions squandered on architectural theories resulting in instant slums, some of which, astoundingly as though no lesson had been learnt, were then replaced by other instant slums. And still there are ‘heritage’ know-alls of the metropolitan liberal kulturati who wish to preserve some of these architects’ uninhabitable speculations.
The deeper tragedy of much 20th century mass housing is that in pursuit of novelty allied to a festering hatred of history, so much worthy of preservation was sacrificed, and some of it even illegally demolished. When travelling on the continent it becomes apparent that this crude uglification was unique to our own industrial cities. Nowhere else, excepting perhaps the bleak numbered blocks of monotonous suburbs radiating from Soviet Moscow, allowed this to happen to the same degree.