“My dream is that folks’s eyes can be opened instinctively to their environment,” says Simon Jenkins on the finish of his new ebook. “I would like folks to level at buildings, snicker, cry or get indignant. I would like them to hate and to like what they see. I would like them to talk structure.” So he has written A Brief Historical past of British Structure, which he hopes will assist folks perceive what he calls the “language” of types – things like the distinction between Doric and Corinthian columns, or between early English and perpendicular gothic.
It seems to be two books in a single. The primary 200 pages are a brisk rattle by means of four-and-a-half millennia of the best hits of British constructing from Stonehenge onwards, speaking about cathedrals, nation homes and monuments somewhat than the locations of on a regular basis life, delivered with the measured if generally opinionated tone of a benign tour information.
He lambasts the postwar destruction of British cities
The final 70 pages are a partisan polemic in regards to the ravages wreaked on British cities by modernist planners and designers. He writes these as an engaged and enraged combatant: as a younger journalist he was concerned within the Seventies marketing campaign to avoid wasting Covent Backyard from redevelopment, and he has taken an curiosity in problems with heritage and planning – together with as a former chairman of the Nationwide Belief – ever since.
The primary half is a readable retelling of the usual histories, animated by the odd participating story and private remark. He makes sweeping statements as to what structure is. Stonehenge is; the intricate, older advanced of round homes at Skara Brae in Orkney isn’t. He contestably asserts that the Elizabethan Hardwick Corridor – a towering and violently authentic assertion of energy and wealth in glass and stone and tapestry – “exudes an English dignity and calm”.
He appears uncomfortable with extra artistic and ingenious architects, equivalent to Nicholas Hawksmoor (whose use of baroque components is named “tentative”) or Sir John Soane. His personal choice is for what he calls a “golden age” within the second half of the 18th century, a extra tasteful and stylistically orderly period when “for maybe the primary and solely time, a big constituency of Britons managed to talk structure”, by which he means a principally aristocratic clientele who shared with their architects an schooling in historic Roman and Greek types.
The second a part of the ebook is extra vivid. Right here Jenkins lambasts the postwar destruction of British cities by architects, planners and politicians, intent on sweeping away the “out of date”, handing over public areas to vehicles, and fulfilling (in his telling) the demented visions of the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier, a person who hated the peculiar shop-lined streets that make up most cities.
This story has been a lot informed, and it’s somewhat wearying that Le Corbusier continues to be belaboured (as he’s in Thomas Heatherwick’s latest Humanise) at the very least 50 years after his city concepts went out of style. The collateral harm of Jenkins’s onslaught on the trendy additionally consists of a lot stunning and profitable structure, however it’s nonetheless arduous to disagree that some true atrocities have been perpetrated. And the writer, who was there in these planning battles, has earned the best to speak about them. It’s due to these disasters, he writes, that he needs to coach the general public in structure, in order that they will’t be duped by professionals sooner or later. That is an intention that anybody who loves the artwork of constructing can applaud.
I’m unsure, although, that the deal with the “language” of structure – a factor whose guidelines are to be discovered – is wealthy sufficient to carry a couple of transformation in public understanding. It’s a approach of taking a look at buildings that treats them as objects of connoisseurial contemplation somewhat than as three-dimensional areas which can be made, inhabited and lived, as creations of each magnificence and strife. He’s generally illuminating in regards to the position of politics in structure, and large on the elitist contempt that he says modernist architects had for peculiar folks, however he’s gentle on the methods during which the brutalities of the enclosures and slavery funded the nation homes of that “golden age”. Structure, in different phrases, is extra magnificent and extra turbulent than Jenkins permits.
A Brief Historical past of British Structure: From Stonehenge to the Shard by Simon Jenkins is printed by Viking (£26.99). To assist the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply prices might apply
