Englishness and Modern Architecture

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

73

Englishness and Modern Architecture A l a n P owe r s

2

“People have said that our work is very English, but they haven’t been able to articulate it very well”, says Stephen Proctor. Despite the difficulty of articulating Englishness, critics have identified it in the past as a weakness whenever they think they can detect it. What are they, in fact, seeing?

Can it be articulated in a positive way?1 In his film Robinson in Space, 1997, Patrick Keiller, an architect by training, made ‘the problem of England’ the thread on which to hang his picaresque narrative of two depressive and alienated intellectuals in search of the soul of their country. While architecture is only incidentally a theme of the film (despite having been Keiller’s first career), it poetically and comically exposes the complex deception that England has become, not only with its buildings evoking the past, but with its concealment of economic reality behind a series of screens, so that most of the time the real activity of the country is invisible. The historical content of the film suggests that fakery has been going on a long time, as a form of denial of unpalatable realities underlying the wealth and power of the ruling class.

Robinson in Space was made during the John Major years, before the unfulfilled promise of New Labour, which included the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales, prompting questions of what real English identity remained

when these more vocal and assertive identities were subtracted.

The official celebration of the Millennium itself, at the Dome, was described as “flashy, arrogant, dishonest and empty at the centre”.2 An event that was meant to enhance a sense of Englishness offered pretentiousness and evasion. En route to the Dome, the public might have passed by the Millennium Village, where Proctor and Matthews were the designers of housing, distinguished by bright coloured panels, as well as by an exemplary concern for shared public space that was intended to set an example for a new wave of governmentpromoted housing. The first units were ready for occupation at the end of 2000, alongside taller housing by Ralph Erskine (Erskine Tovatt), and a school and health centre by Edward Cullinan, forming the core of a future community.

Such conspicuous exposure was risky, but there was something generous and good humoured here that the Dome was lacking. Reviewing the scheme in 2003, Stephen Chance, an architect with PTEa, a larger and longerestablished housing-based practice, praised “the strong visual brand” that distinguished the housing by Proctor and Matthews and Erskine. 3 Kenneth Powell called it “crisply detailed and colourful–and not over folksy–an antidote to the drab surroundings.”4

74

P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h e w s A rch i t e c t s

This has remained an apt description for most of the partnership’s work, although their liking for bold visual effects was apparent prior to the Millennium Village. As Chance recounted, while being “initially cautious about such decorative architecture”, they “embraced Erskine’s picturesque approach to massing and the ideas of Gordon Cullen”.5 Both principal partners studied at Sheffield University where they were tutored by the visiting professor Michael Wilford. Stephen continued on the Diploma Course where he was taught by the then head of school, David Gosling (a disciple of Cullen), the architect and planner mentioned by Chance, and author of a major study of his work and Michael Wilford. Andrew’s diploma studies were at Cambridge University. In 1986, Proctor worked briefly alongside Cullen and Gosling, devising schemes for the Isle of Dogs, a late and productive phase of Cullen’s career which is less well known, since sadly none of them were constructed. Nonetheless, it was a formative experience for Proctor which shows through the later work of the partnership.

Gordon Cullen was born in 1914, and worked with Raymond McGrath and Berthold Lubetkin in the 1930s before going on to become an urban theorist through brilliant drawings and texts that established the theory of Townscape in the public mind. None of today’s younger practices can trace such a strong and direct line of descent from Cullen as Proctor and Matthews. As Proctor recalls, at Sheffield, apart from Gosling’s advocacy, “Townscape was a dirty word, too readily associated with a cheapened version of Cullen’s imagery that he himself was eager to disown when he wrote in 1971, ‘in my view, the original message of Townscape has not been delivered effectively. We have witnessed a superficial civic style of decoration using bollards and cobbles, we have seen traffic-free pedestrian precincts and we have noted the rise of conservation.’”6 The approved figures at Sheffield were Aldo Rossi and Georgio Grassi. These Italian practitioner-theorists had some affinities with Cullen, but arrived at their radical positions in a more abstract manner, without Cullen’s strong visual sense of how to compose buildings and spaces to make lively places linked to the past. Drawn to the unfashionable Cullen, Proctor and Matthews discovered his deeper purpose. They were aware that his vision sprang from the same impulse as the 1930s watercolours of Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious that frequently show places with a special character of contained space and varied scenery, and are now a nostalgic touchstone of Englishness seen through a mildly modernist prism.

Townscape, like its parent aesthetic, the Picturesque, has

always been prone to oversimplification and vulgarisation, but its assumptions continue to underlie a large amount of English urban design practice, whether manifested in Leon Krier’s masterplan for Poundbury nearly two decades later, or even in the much-abused Essex Design Guide of 1976.

At the same time, there is arguably nothing essentially English in the urban conditions and situations that provided Cullen’s exemplars. Like his colleagues on The Architectural Review, Ian Nairn and H de C Hastings, he found more satisfaction in the small towns and parts of the larger cities of France and Italy. They must have been aware of similar theories developed by Camillo Sitte, although Townscape did not believe in showing its reference sources. It was far from being a smug endorsement of an English status-quo, more a warning to treasure what remained of an authentically varied environment before it became degraded by planners and road engineers into an extended Subtopia. In addition, it proposed new ways of creating the same effects, in order to stitch together the fragments, or even create de novo, as New Town planners such as Frederick Gibberd found themselves doing. In the words of Hastings’ alter-ego, “Ivor de Wolfe”, it was aimed at “all who believe the urban consequences of those odd bedfellows, Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier to be the spawn of the devil working through his chosen vessels”.7 Or, as Hugh Casson put it in 1947, “Those three old witches, the garden citizen, the Bauhausian and the County Councillor, still bicker round the pot brandishing their pet recipes–the cosy suburb, the concrete termitary, the classic well-drained boulevard– while the public stands round sniffing like the Bisto kids.”8 Townscape was the creed of the mildly agoraphobic: both the Garden City tradition of Howard, and its modernist reworking by Le Corbusier left open large spaces that inhibited pedestrian movement and deliberately destroyed the proximity of a European city.

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Opposite Steve Bell, Cartoon of the Millennium Dome Above Greenroof Way, Greenwich Millennium Village

75

76

P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h e w s A rch i t e c t s

Top Illustration from A Design Guide for residential Areas, Essex County Council, 1973 Bottom Aldington and Craig, The Lyde, Bledlow, 1975–1977

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Gordon Cullen, Proposals for the Greenwich Peninsula, 1988

If there is one aspect of planning that has achieved a high level of agreement between otherwise opposing factions, it is the belief in the benefits of density, whether visual, operational or social, that have informed the Urban Renaissance report of 1999 and the New Urbanist movement, allowing Richard Rogers and Leon Krier to sit down, metaphorically, for coffee in the same piazza. In this climate of opinion, it has been possible to build densely in places such as New Hall, Harlow, creating mews courtyards and three-storey terraces which have strong urban qualities.

It would be a mistake to equate Proctor and Matthews with Townscape in any simplistic or limiting way. It is certainly not an identification that many architects would have welcomed in recent years, for there is a body of antiTownscape literature, coming first from the New Brutalists in the 1950s, but sustained into the present by writers such as John Macarthur and Andrew Law. 9 Arguably, however, this reaction has begun to play itself out. Back in the early 1960s, Alison and Peter Smithson created an exemplary townscape at the Economist Building and even commissioned Gordon Cullen to make drawings of the urban scenography framed by their fragmented pieces of building. Townscape does not answer all the questions that an urban designer needs to address, but in its own area of concern, the perceptions it codifies seem to be deeply rooted ones. There have been exemplars of antipicturesque planning, such as Milton Keynes Central, in which a plain grid creates a thrilling effect, partly because it is so rare in England, but the lack of variety and protected space in modern housing was high among the design

77

factors that turned opinion against modernism in the second half of the 1960s. Whatever secret fantasies of Cartesian graph-paper some architects may nurture, the terms of the unwritten truce between the British public and its architects in resolving the style wars have included a clause prohibiting their open display.

Townscape is highly experiential, so that there is limited advantage to be gained by exploding its theory on paper if the reality continues to smile back at you. The work of Tayler & Green, a small practice based in East Anglia in the period between 1945 to 1975 gives a proof of the pudding.

They did not depend on the pages of The Architectural Review for instructions on urban composition; rather they were part of the same sensibility and movement of thought, operating slightly ahead of the theory. Having proved their qualifications as pure modernists with a building in Highgate in 1940, Tayler & Green adjusted to the reality of working for Loddon Rural District Council. In their long terraces of houses remained embedded a memory of Ernst May’s terraces in Frankfurt, but theirs had pitched roofs, and, as time went on, simple forms of decoration in cut barge boards, diaper patterned brick walls, often with crisp borders and framing devices. They flirted with vernacular, but never became neo-vernacular, rather in the same way that their friend Benjamin Britten arranged folk-songs and by harmonising them with a knowledge of modern music, returned to them an authenticity that was obscured by the more ‘classical’ settings of the Edwardians. Tayler & Green’s effects remained under strict control, and they were not only decorators, but sound on construction.

What mattered most was how to place houses on Greenfield sites in villages, retaining mature trees and hedgerows, getting the right balance between community and privacy, and making something that was pleasing to the passerby in a reworking of older forms.

As Herbert Tayler wrote in 1955, “We must be frankly less ashamed of the aesthetic side of building houses.”10 Still today, aesthetics is a suspect word, but admitting that it isn’t everything that is needed in architecture does not automatically remove it from consideration. Until recently, Proctor and Matthews were unaware of Tayler & Green’s work but there are some instructive similarities. A substantial part of both practices’ portfolio of work is residential, and both courted criticism by their indulgence for decorative effects. These are not without their justifications, however, in terms of making housing more attractive to its users.

While drawn towards a middle ground of popular taste, both practices remained true to a modernist aesthetic, although Tayler & Green probably went further in adopting

78

P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h e w s A rch i t e c t s

literal representational elements than Proctor and Matthews.

Tayler & Green were of the same generation as Ralph Erskine who was a student, with Cullen, at the Regent Street Polytechnic years before a stroke of coincidence put his work alongside that of Proctor and Matthews. Born in England in 1914, Erksine found himself in Sweden when war broke out. As a Quaker and pacifist, he decided to remain, and founded his practice there, getting a head start over some of his English contemporaries who had to wait the best part of ten years before they could begin to build.

Swedish architecture of the 1940s, and Erskine’s work as part of it, shows what a 1940s style of modernism might have been like had the war not got in the way. It has an anti-heroic character, with a strong attraction to nature and an openness to the past and to context, strengthening tendencies of the 1930s until the norms represented by modernism of the 1920s were almost completely reversed.

This did not remain the status-quo for long. New Brutalism, the tendency that emerged in the 1950s as a new avant-

garde, tried to revive some of the formal qualities of 1920s Modernism, in conjunction with a new feeling for the authenticity of materials. One can view the long history of modernism as a sort of pendulum swing between these two sets of choices.

Erskine was for a time a member of Team 10, the selfgoverning think tank of radical architecture, along with the ruling couple of New Brutalism, Alison and Peter Smithson.

He reacted against the stereotyped mass public housing produced after the war in Sweden, while regretting that this reaction too easily became identified simply as an aesthetic or stylistic matter.11 As a northern pragmatist, he tended to distance himself from other Team 10 members who were more concerned with theory, finding most in common with Gian Carlo de Carlo, the Italian architect who had a rare concern for the lives and feelings of the people he was building for. Erskine built several major projects in England: Clare Hall, a post-graduate college in Cambridge, housing

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Opposite Eric Ravilious, Village Scene, watercolour, 1934

at Newmarket and Milton Keynes, and, most famous, the Byker Wall at Newcastle, which was undoubtedly the project that recommended him for Greenwich some 30 years later.

Right Ralph Erskine, Byker Wall, Newcastle, 1971–1982

Erskine was invited by Hunt Thompson Associates to become a prestigious lead designer for the Millennium Village, a project upon which a disproportionate weight of New Labour expectation was placed. The site for the ‘Village’ extends back from the eastern, downstream side of the Greenwich Peninsula, some way south from the Dome that marks the tip of this land configuration, a place whose uses through time have been almost entirely exploitative. It was a bold aim to build a community from scratch in this place that is physically disconnected from existing streets and houses, even though it offered the advantages of a cleared site with spectacular views.

One of the principles for the project was to use several designers in order to achieve variety and cope with the speed of production needed, and when this question of which firms to engage came up at a meeting, the client, Alan Cherry of Countryside Properties, said “I’ll use young practices like Proctor and Matthews”. He had recently commissioned them to design the Chronos Buildings, a mixed-use project on a sensitive site in close proximity to the seventeenth century Alms House on the Mile End Road in East London. It was a lucky coincidence. They went out to meet Erskine at his office at Drottningholm outside Stockholm, and despite the tensions between other partners in the project, they learnt from Erskine how to work on a larger scale than before, and the importance of large balconies. Erskine liked to vary the position of these on the elevations, rather than having one stacked above another.

Byker achieved a high public profile as a scheme that overcame public disillusionment with housing at the end of the 1960s. Instead of tower blocks in rows, there were smaller-scaled dwellings with the look of a settlement grown over time. Instead of concrete panels, there was patterned brickwork (an echo of Tayler & Green again) with bright timber balconies. Instead of repetition, there was variety. In place of the remote bureaucratic architect, there was an office on site where future tenants could discuss their personal preferences. After the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968, the inauguration of the Byker project the following year was the symbolic turning point for public housing in Britain, offering a new start and exorcising the memories of past failures. Not surprisingly, many architects who had committed themselves to an austere vision of social service found it hard to accept.

79

Lionel Esher described Byker as having “the shabby, makeshift, intensively humanised quality of a shantytown in Hong Kong. He reported that the old people said ‘It’s like the Costa Brava.’”12 Surely there was nothing quintessentially English here, unless it was a perennial willingness to appropriate foreign styles for their exoticism and their scenographic quality. Byker was conspicuous for its use of colour, which, by the end of the 1960s, had been long overlooked as a component of modern architecture (Tayler & Green, as one might expect, enjoyed colour in a Festival of Britain spirit). Too often, colour is discussed in isolation, and because a choice of colour can easily be changed, it is seen potentially as a superficial attribute of design. The words used by the architects Sauerbruch Hutton of themselves seem also to fit Proctor and Matthews, In our use of colour we set out with neither a didactic nor an academic approach…. Rather in our search for an architecture of intelligence and integrity; we continue the modernist legacy of treating colour as a resource in the creation of space. We also use colour to imbue places with sensual character and memorable qualities.13

80

P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h e w s A rch i t e c t s

Academic architectural studies still tend to be printed in black and white, and thus colour is seldom a leading issue in scholarly discourse. It is furthermore a hostage to fate, since later building owners can so easily delete or misinterpret the design intention. Since 2000, bold colour has become much more widely used on buildings in Britain as part of the neo-modernist tendency. It is a component in what is now called “The New Ornamentalism”, which also includes the application of pattern to building facades. It is a fascinating turn of the modernist saga, as the tectonic Vitruvian roots of the movement are supplanted by the tradition of Gottfried Semper, with his emphasis on surface. It is a tradition little understood by the British when explored by unconventional modernists such as Thomas Tait, HS Goodhart-Rendel or Tayler & Green, and they probably failed themselves to recognise the source of their ideas. The recent enthusiasm in England for Dutch and Swiss architecture forms part of this movement, as does Caruso St John’s revival of relief decoration in homage to Louis Sullivan. It offers a new range of aesthetic effects at a time when the architect’s freedom of design in the building is often constrained and reduced to picture-making.

hovers above the ground like a piece of fake stone wallpaper that, in order to fool you, turns out to be the real material.

This kind of scenography went down well in England, and Berthold Lubetkin, as one of Le Corbusier’s most creative followers, played with the whole range of these effects, introducing floating panels of knapped flint when extending a house in Mill Hill, and going to extremes of surface decoration with his own Penthouse at Highpoint II, brilliantly rendered into explanatory cut-away drawings by Gordon Cullen for The Architectural Review in 1938.

When John Piper began to draw and paint architecture in the late 1930s, he transferred what he had learnt about organising flat shapes as an abstract painter into a stylised representation of neatly demarcated parallel planes. The immediate post-war conditions of building suited a collage style, since the supply of materials was unpredictable, and a little had to go a long way, with a mix and match technique that had been foreshadowed in the palmier pre-war years.14

One classic modernist strategy for using colour is that promoted by Theo van Doesberg in the De Stijl movement, where the intention is to emphasise the three-dimensional quality of the form. Proctor and Matthews use colour in a flatter and more frontal way that suits the limitations present in so much housing design. The effect is more like a collage than a model, a sensibility and technique that is also shared with Le Corbusier, at least when he was not in his De Stijl mode. Le Corbusier, whose work as a painter sprang from the launch-pad of Cubism, introduced a technique of collage into architecture, through making framed panels of texture, such as the rough stone of the Pavillon Suisse in Paris of 1930–1932, where the curving wall is snipped around and

As the brilliant but reactionary designer-critic HS GoodhartRendel remarked with evident delight in 1949, even modernism which claimed to reject style had grown up, and was now playing the same game of “evoking emotion… by the creation and selection of significant forms” that all architectures before it had played. “Forms that signify not physical desiderata such as convenience, cleanliness and cheapness, but spiritual desiderata–harmony, wonder, gaiety, awe.”15 It was not so much a change of material conditions but a change of heart and a temporary loosening of the constraints of the first phase of modernism.

Cullen liked to use colour, and although it would be overdeterminist, no doubt, to say that the limitations of colour printing in the pages of The Architectural Review influenced

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Opposite left Netherfield, Milton Keynes Opposite right Taylor and Green, Housing for the Elderly, Ditchingham, Norfolk, 1959 Right Ralph Erskine, Clare Hall, Cambridge

his vision of architecture, it remains true that the cheapest way of adding colour was to draw ‘colour separations’ and use these to add ‘spot colour’ to black and white outlines, rather than create a full colour artwork and have it translated into expensive and unsatisfactory process blocks. The result, seen in a series of drawings such as “Bankside Regained” of 1949, or “New Marlow”, 1950, was much like a collage– patches of pure colour, usually vibrant, imposed without tonal modification, making the resulting visualisations read strongly in two dimensions, especially when combined with Cullen’s enjoyment of display lettering. When colour photographs were shown, as with a new school at Cheshunt, featured in September 1949 with scarlet, canary yellow and deep blue wall panels, and a blaze of coloured cupboard doors. As David Medd wrote in the accompanying article, these colours responded to the bright clothes and high-pitched voices of the children.

The doctrine of Townscape developed at The Architectural Review under the inspiration of H de Cronin Hastings, with the hand and eye of Cullen to give it reality. The word began to creep into various articles in the magazine after the war, until at the end of 1949 it was presented by Cullen and Hastings together as a coherent theoretical position, a middle way between the two formalisms of modernism and traditionalism. Hastings’ text explained why such a permissive doctrine was the only justifiable position for professional designers to take after the war-time struggle against totalitarianism. In his mind, it defended the freedom for the common man against designers with over-insistent ideas about what was right. Townscape showed people how to use their eyes first, and enjoy the messy reality instead of trying to tidy it up (and failing, such being the enormity of the task). Hastings brilliantly linked this approach back in time to the English Picturesque movement of the 1790s, founded, as he put it “on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price”.

In a way, Townscape achieved a brilliant solution to ‘the problem of England’, if that problem is interpreted as being one of resistance to modernism. It was a compromise, certainly, but one that by permitting decoration on limited terms, exercised its own particular potential to engage a latent sense of heraldic art, in its clear, conventionalised outlines and jewel-like colours. Besides this, it opened a door for the philistine English to become their own experts in the arrangement of spaces, as they were of their own crowded mantelpieces. In 1961, Cullen published his book, Townscape, which still remains, in abridged form, a standard text for urban design. Everyone who studies the history of post-war architecture in Britain, however,

81

becomes aware, almost by way of a foundation myth, that the colour and jollity represented in the Festival of Britain and its theoretical correlative, Townscape, were very bad things from which the soul of modernism had to be saved.

Following a historical narrative, we can trace the second near-death of modernism to the 1970s, when what had been a relatively unified style split into three branches.

High-Tech is probably the best known, combining balancing a new decorative quality with an obsessive concern with the display of structure. The vernacular revival took many forms, and left that word exhausted in the wake of so many bricks and tiles held in space by steel frames beneath them. It was, however, the public’s favourite and to a large extent remains so. Outside the profession, few made the distinction between those architects such as Aldington & Craig, or Maguire & Murray, who were attuned to vernacular from a strong personal commitment to legible and meaningful architectural form derived from New Brutalism, and the larger majority who traduced its many possibilities. Coincidentally, it was Peter Aldington, an

82

P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h e w s A rch i t e c t s

external critic at Sheffield who kept an eye on the progress of ex-students, who recommended Proctor and Matthews for one of their first commissions, two houses at Haddenham in Buckinghamshire. Finally, there were postmodernists, although perhaps all three categories deserve the name. Double-coding, classical references, jokes and lots of colour were unleashed, and sometimes performed with brilliance, as with James Stirling and CWZG, but outstayed their welcome as, like vernacular, they became common property.

the expansion of theory in architecture schools, and are adept at providing verbal explanations at all levels. Very little of this has been what is sometimes called “operative theory” that shows you how to solve problems. Instead, there has been a worldwide expansion of other more poetic forms of theory that do not exclude political ideals, although often fail to read as effectively across between pure thought and instrumental activity as they might wish. In this context, it is interesting to consider Proctor and Matthews as one practice among many more concerned with doing than with

The period when Proctor and Matthews were starting was the beginning of the next phase, in which their contemporaries succeeded in clearing the air, partly in the sober climate of recession in the early 1990s. Rejecting most of the pathways of their immediate predecessors, they followed the rule of the 30 year taste cycle and went back to explore the 1950s, finding in curves and colours, in collage and Cullen a manner that was popular and photogenic. They ushered in a period that may in future be seen as a remarkably fertile time of creativity in British architecture, helped by lottery funding for cultural projects and by the expansion of educational buildings. It could seem very shallow at times, although some have reaped rewards from

talking. Despite an attractive modesty, they were thrust into the spotlight on the Greenwich Peninsula, and survived.

They have built a studio for a YBA, Mark Quinn, but with the same unpretentious care that they bring to speculative housing in Harlow or Chelmsford. They have built zoo buildings, following in the footsteps of Berthold Lubetkin and unlike him deliberately tried to play down the architectural display in order to allow visitors the best experience of the animals they have come to see.

Is this modesty part of the definition of Englishness? Like all other attempts to define the term, there will be exceptions on both sides–modest foreigners and immodest

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Opposite Le Corbusier, Le Pavilon Suisse, Paris 1930–1932 Top Gordon Cullen, cutaway drawing of Lubetkin penthouse, Highpoint II Bottom Gordon Cullen, "Bankside Regained", The Architectural Review, 1949

83

84

P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h e w s A rch i t e c t s

Englishmen and women. It is possible to pull out the desk drawer of English identity clichés and find plenty of others, but it is no longer a safe or useful activity. In his Reith Lectures of 1955, Nikolaus Pevsner was brave enough to try defining The Englishness of English Art. Some of his categories, such as linearity, ‘detachment’ (meaning compositions made up of discreet incidents rather than amalgamated forms) and the Picturesque seem to suit Proctor and Matthews very well. However, if instead we return to Patrick Keiller, does the ‘problem of England’ turn out to be that of architecture’s continued distance from the public, despite 20 years of trying to be nice?

The entirely unexpected award of the Stirling Prize to housing in 2008, after years in which glamorous one-off projects took the prize, was a belated recognition of architects’ hard work in this unglamorous sector where there is a constant struggle with developers in order to

achieve anything that looks remotely award-winning without the best bits being value-engineered to oblivion. Despite their high reputation in this field, and the high sums available until recently from house buyers, Proctor and Matthews still express concern about the dislocation between design and delivery, a process in which important aspects of domestic architecture are often diluted. If the ‘problem of England’ was the lack of a sufficiently informed market for non-standard houses outside a few oases of eccentricity such as Cambridge, then its persistence during good times is a warning for what may happen in bad times, unless there is some radical change to the way things are done.

Architecture lovers look back with some nostalgia to the housing schemes of Eric Lyons for the developers Span, believing in a golden age of the 1950s and 60s when planners made such things easy to do. Span was no

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Opposite John Piper, Littlestone on Sea, Collage, 1936 Right Hertfordshire County Architects, Cheshunt School, c. 1949

ordinary developer, its director being Lyons’s former architectural partner, Geoffrey Townsend. Span was commercial, but nobody made big money from it. Lyons most famous work on the Cator Estate in Blackheath was achieved despite a continuous struggle against Greenwich Council and he inserted a sculpture into an external wall opening at Hallgate of a man almost crushed beneath the weight he is carrying, bitterly entitled “The Architect in Society”.

Townscape hoped to let the English discover their better selves in design, but it was over-optimistic. The ‘problem of England’ is surely that, despite the cultivation of English qualities in architecture, achieved with such success in circumstances that are never easy, a practice such as Proctor and Matthews (even with such high profile projects) has still made only a small impact on people who should recognise a good thing when they see it.

85

Footnotes: 1, In conversation, 21 April, 2008.

2, Bayley, Stephen, “A Doomed Dome”, TLS, 3 November 2000, p. 18.

3, Chance, Stephen, “Reality Check”, RIBA Journal, July 2003, p. 36.

4, Powell, Kenneth, New London Architecture, London: Merrell, 2001, p. 176.

5, Powell, New London Architecture.

6, Cullen, Gordon, “Introduction to 1971 Edition” in The Concise Townscape, London: Architectural Press, 1971, p. 13.

7, de Wolfe, Ivor, “The Death and Life of Great American Citizens”, The Architectural Review, February 1963, p. 91.

8, Casson, Hugh, “The Obliging Sharrawag” in Grand Perspective, Contact Books, 1947, p. 65.

9, See John Macarthur, “The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities”, Routledge, 2007 and Andrew Law, “English Townscape as Cultural and Symbolic Capital”, in Andrew Ballantyne, ed., Architectures: modernism and after, Blackwell, 2004.

10, Tayler, Herbert, “Landscape in Rural Housing”, Housing Centre Review, no. 3, May–June 1955, reprinted in Elain Harwood and Alan Powers, eds., Tayler & Green architects, the spirit of place in modern housing, Prince of Wales’s Institute, 1998, p. 72.

11, Erskine speaking in interview with Clelia Tuscano, in Max Rissalada and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Team 10, 1953–1980, in search of a utopia of the present, Rotterdam: nai publishers, 2005.

12, Esher, Lionel, A Broken Wave, The Rebuilding of England 1940–1980, London: Allen Lane, 1981, p. 187.

13, Sauerbruch Hutton Archive, Lars Müller Publishers, 2006.

14, See Alan Powers, “The Reconditioned Eye—architects and artists in English Modernism”, AA Files 25, Summer 1993, pp. 54–62.

15, Goodhart-Rendel, HS, “Ressessment 3: Paris Opera House”, The Architectural Review, vol. 105, June 1949, p. 303.

Picture Credits: P74 © Steve Bell P72, P76 (below), P80 (right) © Tim Crocker www.timcrocker.co.uk P77 © Mrs Cullen P76 (top) © Essex County Council P82 © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 P78 © Estate of Eric Ravilious. All rights reserved, DACS 2009 P79 © RIBA Library Photographs Collection, RIBA24920 P83 (all), P85 © RIBA Library Photographs Collection P84 © Tate, London 2009. © The Piper Estate

ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

Black Dog Publishing Limited 10a Acton Street London WC1X 9NG United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7713 5097 Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 8682 info@blackdogonline.com www.blackdogonline.com