Part 3

The most hideous nightmare-panorama that comes to my mind is a scene of utter desolation not far from Etruria (a singularly inappropriate name), in Staffordshire, where slagheaps, collieries, blast-furnaces, potbanks and smoke dispute the foreground. Yet an old print that I saw in Messrs. Wedgwood’s adjoining works proves that less than two hundred years ago this was unspoiled country. From that time onwards, the northern half of England became the national workshop, and a large part of southern England became a private garden. At the present moment half the total population of England is concentrated in five comparatively small districts: “Greater” London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the “Black Country” and Tyneside.

Examples of the early factories built towards the end of the eighteenth century are to be found in the beautiful valley above Stroud, and in many wild and lonely dales among the Pennine hills. They stand beside fast-running streams which at first provided the necessary power, but before long the steam-engine replaced the earlier method, and a tall chimney was one immediate result. Smoke, of course, was another. Yet so many of these old “mills” still survive that we can study their architecture. There are mills in the Stroud Valley admirably designed in the Georgian manner, with well-proportioned windows divided into small panes, stone-slated roofs, and stone walls, innocent of soot and now golden with time. Built of local materials, they harmonise well with their surroundings. The same may be said of a few Yorkshire mills, though for the most part they have been blackened with smoke and are more austere. Standing by some deserted building of this type, its great wheel disused and its windows broken, in a lonely valley with only the noise of the stream audible, one always thinks of the machine-breakers in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, a grim incident of the countryman’s fight against progress.

But even if an occasional example of these old factories has some vestige of architectural merit, nearly all of them were unsuited to their purpose. It does not seem to have occurred to their builders that a “mill” existed for any object beyond the grinding of the last penny out of the sweated men and women and children whom it housed. Light, warmth, decent sanitary conditions--all were utterly ignored. It is hardly to be expected that the slave-drivers of early Victorian days would produce buildings of any interest, and in fact the great gaunt prison-like boxes that desecrate so many Yorkshire and Lancashire hillsides are a very fair expression of that greedy scramble for money that has caused such a backwash in our own day. For it must not be forgotten that some of the most beautiful places in England were violated in this way. Many people have never visited our northern counties, which they regard as a foreign land, yet which contain scenery at least comparable with anything south of the Trent.

But if one takes, for purposes of comparison, the two valleys in which the ruined abbeys of Fountains and Kirkstall now stand, one obtains a very fair illustration of the effects of industrialism. They are only some twenty miles apart, they were founded by monks of the same Order at about the same time, and in their original state they must both have been attractively situated. The modern visitor to Fountains, as he rounds the bend that has hitherto concealed the Abbey, invariably gasps at the beauty that bursts upon him, for here a nobleman’s park protects the site and no coal or iron lies near. But Kirkstall is blackened and overcast by the huge ironworks that sprawl over the adjoining hillside, a sooty mass of tumbledown sheet-iron sheds, bristling with tall chimneys belching out smoke; and the river that formerly fed the monks with trout is now covered with an evil-smelling and iridescent film of factory waste.

Yet, many and various as were the insults heaped upon rural England by “captains of industry” in the good old days when England was making money hand-over-fist, they sink into insignificance compared with the early Victorian achievement in housing. The golden age of self-help, philanthropy, missionary enterprise, evangelical zeal, individualism, and all the rest of it, produced the “back-to-back” house. The meanest streets of the East End, the worst slums of our Northern and Midland cities, were built while the Romantic Revival was in full swing and while Ruskin was lecturing on the Seven Lamps that he had discovered hanging in Venice. The wind sown in those prosperous days is quite clearly producing a whirlwind for us to reap in more difficult times, and one recalls another text about the sins of the fathers. This is not a faddist or an extreme view. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, in his new History of England (p. 683), writes of “the ever-advancing bounds of the realm of ugliness and uniformity, in its constant destruction of the beauty and variety of the old pre-industrial world. Indeed the more prosperous and progressive the country was, the more rapidly did that increasing work go forward.” And he quotes the grave words of another critic: “The Nineteenth Century did not attack beauty. It simply trampled it under foot.”

Proceeding with our examination of the various symptoms for which we shall eventually have to prescribe, let us now consider what are the shortcomings of the houses built for the people in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and more particularly how they have affected the appearance of our countryside. In themselves they were, as a rule, either entirely sordid, or both sordid and pretentious. The former were erected by manufacturers and colliery-owners in long rows to provide shelter for their “hands” at the minimum price, the latter were more often the work of that public benefactor known as the “jerry-builder,” and were erected as a speculation. In the former case the tenants had no option but to accept what was offered, so paid the rent required and occupied the house without demur. The jerry-builder’s houses, on the other hand, had to attract tenants, hence the pretentious element was introduced in order to ensnare the tenant’s wife. In those days, nearly all small property was held on weekly rentals and architects were hardly ever employed to design cottages or small houses.

But the houses had to be designed somehow, so the builder had recourse to sundry manuals or copybooks of designs for “Villas and Terrace Houses” in the worst style of the day. The idea of using such books originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, when numerous little calf-bound volumes appeared, but they contained little more than details of the Roman “Orders,” and such features as chimneypieces, doorways, etc. The result was that the speculative builder, who made his first appearance about that time, continued to build in the traditional manner, but added a classical porch and interior panelling and similar trimmings, which, even if they were often rather pedantic and un-English, were always in excellent taste.

The nineteenth century copybooks sprang from a very different source. “Gothick” architecture, for two centuries a byword and a reproach among all cultivated people, had been rediscovered. From Queen Victoria’s coronation to her jubilee, architects romped over Europe and brought home sketches of Gothic detail from France and Flanders and Venice. Ruskin, who was not greatly enamoured of English Gothic, but loved it in its French and Venetian forms, spread the glad tidings among the middle-class; and the famous architect, Street, ransacked Italy and Spain in his quest. All this mass of drawings was broadcast over the country at its period of greatest industrial prosperity. Once I worked in a provincial office facing a replica of a Venetian palace, and witnessed the erection of a factory-chimney copied from Giotto’s campanile at Florence.

Naturally the smaller fry in the building world aped their betters. Second-rate architects and hack draughtsmen set to work to adapt and caricature these fashionable forms for use by the builder on shops and villas. Terra-cotta manufacturers gladly joined in the game, so that soon scraps of Venetian carving and ornament came to be turned out by the mile and capitals copied from French churches were moulded in artificial stone in tens of thousands. To this movement may be ascribed a very large share in the deterioration of English towns and even villages, for the “Gothic” craze naturally spread from the centres of fashion to the smaller places. A travelled and studious architect, set down in a street of suburban villas to-day, should be capable of tracing the ultimate source of the pretentious porches, the tile cresting on the roofs, all the mechanical ornament reproduced down the row; and in nearly every case he could derive it from a Gothic church in France or Italy.

The sad thing is that these revived ornamental forms were only a travesty of the old. Gothic architecture was, perhaps, the highest form of natural and legitimate building that the world has ever seen: as adapted by the speculative builder, it had no structural meaning whatsoever, and consisted in mere chunks of crudely caricatured ornament, generally misapplied. Ruskin preached truth and honesty in architecture; but his pigmy disciples missed the whole spirit of Gothic. The barns and cottages of old England represent that spirit as well as the French cathedrals and Venetian palaces on which he concentrated with such disastrous effect, yet the English village has suffered terribly from the Gothic revival.

For the movement spread to village shops and banks, and, of course, all new churches erected after 1830, or even earlier, followed the new fashion. Because every old village already possessed a parish church, now becoming too large for its needs, there was little for the Church of England to do outside the towns, though there are many cases such as that at M---- in Middlesex, where an amateur effort in church-design by the saintly William Wilberforce, just a century ago, has ruined a beautiful old village highway. But the Nonconformist bodies, now flourishing and sometimes even wealthy, were not to be outdone in the race: so they abandoned the stark galleried chapels, that had hitherto followed the Protestant type invented by Wren for his City churches, for an ambitious and often flamboyant variety of “Gothic” that has created a discord in many a village street. There seems to have been a prevalent idea that every place of worship must be decorated with a spire, with tracery, and with a quantity of ornamental features, quite regardless as to whether funds permitted of a single one of those features being worthily executed, whether any of them symbolised the entirely English and healthy movement that produced Nonconformity, or whether they harmonised with surrounding buildings. Our final conclusion must be that the Gothic Revival, which, in the hands of a man like William Morris, who loved England passionately, might have done so much to save her countryside, was in fact largely responsible for its defacement.

Another characteristic of this singular movement was its utter disregard of what we now call “town-planning.” When Ruskin advised his audience to treat railway-stations as “the miserable things that they are,” because he disliked railways, he seems to have been voicing the spirit of his day, which was quite content to speculate on the symbolism of a piece of carving in a remote foreign city while men continued to build the most appalling slums. No town was “planned” in those days: it “just growed.” Occasionally a manufacturer like Sir Titus Salt coquetted with the idea of a rational lay-out for a town, but no scheme got very far until the idealist founders of Bournville and Port Sunlight inaugurated a new school of thought, proving effectually that good housing was not necessarily bad business.

At the present time, when authorities on town-planning have long made it clear that orderly development is both desirable and practicable, the haphazard growth of suburbs into the country is a deplorable and even a painful sight to every intelligent person. English individualism, sometimes an asset, becomes almost a curse when it interferes, as it still does, with nearly everything that can be done to save the English countryside from complete uglification. Consideration of the possibilities of town-planning in this direction must be deferred to our last chapter; for the moment let us consider one or two characteristics of nineteenth-century town growth.

Almost without exception, any man could buy a plot of land anywhere, and build on it anything he wanted. Tripe-dressing, sausage-skin making, and one or two other “noxious” trades might be prohibited in a few favoured localities; the obscure and often absurd law of “Ancient Lights” occasionally restrained his ardour. Otherwise, so long as his building was strong enough to remain standing, and provided with adequate means of drainage, he was as free as air. Building was essentially a commercial business; the rights or needs of the community did not enter into the question. Each man built for his day and generation: the future was left to take care of itself. Yet even from a financial point of view this was a short-sighted policy. When Wren’s plan for rebuilding London was upset by vested interests, a chance was lost of making wide streets that are now urgently necessary but cannot be formed except by payments of incredible sums for compensation. A more modern instance is to be seen in the Euston Road, which was a residential thoroughfare looking over fields when my grandfather knew it a century ago. Then shops came to be built over the front gardens as the old residents fled from the invading streets: and now these shops have to be swept away with heavy payments for compensation to allow the road to be converted into the great artery that any intelligent person could have foreseen when it was first built. This phenomenon is not peculiar to towns: it applies with equal force to the country districts that are continually being absorbed by towns. Half the squalor of modern suburbs is due to indiscriminate development. Trees are cut down and houses are run up along a main road. Traffic increases, and the tenants move away. The houses are clumsily converted into inefficient shops, extending over the front garden, or into seedy inefficient tenements. Empty plots are covered with hideous hoardings. Without undue interference with the liberty of the subject, much of this feckless muddling could be avoided by the exercise of a little rational foresight.

For this is a question deeply affecting the whole community, not a petty professional grievance. The mad race from towns to the fringe of the country is destroying the country for miles round: and the pathology of destruction is now clearly understood. A brilliantly realistic description of the growth of “Bromstead,” a typical London suburb, is to be found in Mr. H. G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli. All who have witnessed the slow spread of this malignant disease will agree that he does not overstate the case.

THE AGE OF PETROL (1910 ONWARDS)

It may well be objected that this is a mere journalese title, for the influence of motoring on the appearance of the countryside is not always apparent, and many other factors have been at work, among them the Great War and its considerable legacy of troubles. Moreover, some readers may point out that motor-cars were to be seen in England long before 1910. That is true; but they did not appreciably alter our countryside before that date, and the number of them was relatively small.

The most obvious influence that motoring has exerted on England has been in the direction of road “improvements,” especially since the War. Few of us foresaw that the clumsy and not very speedy vehicles which made their first appearance on our highways some thirty years ago, preceded by a man bearing a red flag, would eventually cause so radical a change in our ideas of the nature of a road. For a long time nothing happened. As motors increased in number and speed and bulk, they continued to become more and more of a nuisance to the cyclists and pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles still forming the majority of road-users. Clouds of dust whitened the hedges, and choked the inhabitants of all houses anywhere near a main highway. Accidents became frequent. All this was unavoidable, because even the best roads made by Telford and Macadam were unequal to the new conditions, and the far larger number of narrow winding country lanes were altogether inadequate for the strain that was now put upon them. An excellent instance of the resulting state of affairs may still be seen in the Isle of Wight, where several of the “main” roads are tortuous narrow lanes sunk between high banks topped with thick hedges. In the summer months a stream of huge charabancs tears over the whole island every day. At many places there is no possibility of these Juggernauts passing each other. Even a hay-cart presents such a complete obstacle that one or other vehicle has to back till the road widens, and in places the blockage caused by the charabanc forces a cyclist or a pedestrian to climb up on to the steep grassy bank while the monster with its cargo of yelling hooligans pushes past him. Either roads must be widened almost everywhere or motor vehicles of all types must be abolished, and, as the latter alternative is out of the question, we must accept the former as inevitable. How it may be effected with the minimum of damage to the beauty of our countryside will be discussed in the next chapter. England has not yet sunk to the level of the Western States, where it is a simple matter to shift a barbed-wire fence a few yards back on each side of the furrows that do duty for a road, and where the iron or wooden shacks that constitute a “home” may readily be wheeled to a new site on the prairie. England is a crowded little country full of sacred associations that go back to the beginnings of our race, and that is why we hate to see crazy new bungalows lining the Pilgrim’s Way. Their very appearance is an insult to our English sense of orderliness and decency, such as we should feel if a negro cheapjack started selling mouth-organs in Canterbury Cathedral.

In some parts of the country there are stretches of road that can be widened without material defacement of the landscape, but they are few. Ancient landmarks hamper progress in most places. Old bridges, for example, are altogether unsuited to heavy and fast motor-traffic. Often built askew with the line of a main road, they are nearly always very steep, very narrow, and, though often sturdy in appearance, are incapable of bearing the weight of a heavy lorry and trailer moving with the speed of a railway train. Here again is a problem requiring solution. Some people would attempt to adapt the old bridge to modern needs, others prefer an entirely new structure placed parallel with the old one, and, of course, the third alternative is complete demolition. The first method is generally impossible, and there is much to be said for a frankly modern design in reinforced concrete, provided that it does not stand in too close proximity to the ancient monument that it supersedes.

Another familiar rural feature that must perforce give way to the insistent needs of the motorist is the ford or “watersplash.” Much as we may regret its disappearance, it has to go.

But most difficult of all is the question of dealing with the narrow High Street of a town or village through which a main artery passes. Occasionally the jerry-builder has anticipated us here, and has erected some terrible Victorian nightmare of a shop right up to the old building-line of the historical cottages that he has demolished. In such a case the children of the Petrol Age may be able to expiate the sins of their fathers by pulling down that shop. But more often there is a building of real merit standing at the very bottleneck through which the procession of traffic has to squeeze its way, such as the old church at Barnet or the Whitgift Hospital at Croydon; and then we are in a quandary, impressed on the one hand by the legitimate needs of our time, deterred on the other hand by an almost religious sense of the sanctity of the past. Sometimes the obstacle is a mere cottage, a barn, a pump, a stone cross, or a quaint structure such as blocks Hampstead Lane near the Spaniard’s Tavern, yet even these must be treated with respect. The “by-pass” road, as suggested in the next chapter, is sometimes the best solution, but is not practicable everywhere. And lastly, there are the trees. As I write these lines I can hear the crashes of falling elms and yews that I have known since childhood. A snorting tractor is pulling them down bodily with a steel hawser, so that the grass-lined lane that runs near my home may be widened for the growing needs of what was once a pretty village.

But a wide straight road does not exhaust the motorist’s requirements. He becomes thirsty at times, and the village inn has already risen to the occasion, usually, it must be admitted, without detriment to the village street. The architecture of licensed premises is looking up. His car also becomes thirsty, (hence the petrol-station), and its occasional liability to gastric trouble involves the provision at frequent intervals of telephone-cabins and repair-shops or garages. We may profitably consider the design of these accessories and their relation to country surroundings in the next chapter. The phenomenal development in the use of motor charabancs has involved the provision of extensive “parking-places” in all pleasure resorts, e.g., at Brighton, where a large part of the sea-view from the Esplanade is blocked. The provision of a “park” at Glastonbury has led to an outcry recently, and everywhere the problem is pressing.

Finally comes the very vexed question of housing, municipal and private, that has grown so acute since the War. In this movement the motorist has played a prominent part, for he has helped to extend the “Housing Problem,” from its obvious location on the fringes of our towns, away to the remoter parts of the country. From Kent to Hampshire the bungalows line our southern cliffs. Housing needs may be divided into three groups: those of the townsman, the rustic, and the week-ender. The first concerns us here only to the extent that new housing in urban districts must of necessity be provided in the adjoining rural areas: thus London is now so congested that its County Council has had to acquire large estates in Essex, Kent, and Middlesex to provide houses for city workers, who are quite properly dissatisfied with the tenement-dwellings that are their only alternative. Then, although in many country districts the population is decreasing, new standards of decency impel the newly-wed to demand something better than the leaking and verminous hovels where their parents dwell. All these new houses, whether in country or town, have been provided in increasing proportion by municipal enterprise since the War, and hence their design is subject to a measure of control. Whether that control is sufficient to ensure a tolerable standard of architectural expression is a matter for further consideration: at this point it is important to realise that practically all the post-War “Housing Schemes” have been scientifically laid out on rational lines, with due regard for the future. It is that central control, whether exercised by a public body or by a properly constituted private organisation, which makes all the difference between the “lay-out” of Becontree or Port Sunlight on the one hand and an average bungalow settlement on the other. One is a design, the other an accident,--and the Italian word for “accident” is disgrazia!

Some sixteen years ago I endeavoured to interest the inhabitants of the district where I live in the possibilities of the then newly-passed Town-Planning Act. The more enlightened among them readily responded, but there were some who said that this was a rural area and that they had no wish to see it turned into a town. Since then it has turned itself into something resembling a town, but its growth has been spasmodic and irregular. A few years later came a proposal to acquire two fields in the centre of the district for a public park. Again the objectors appeared; what does a semi-village need with a public park, at a high price too? Fortunately the fields were acquired, and already they are nearly encircled by building plots. Meanwhile a great Arterial Road has been driven right across the new park, cutting it in half and reducing its attractions. Under a proper town-planning scheme such things would be impossible. Roads and parks would be laid out on paper years before they were required; and, though modifications of the first plan would become necessary from time to time, the ultimate gain would be enormous. Groups of adjoining authorities are already preparing regional town-planning schemes in concert, so that trunk roads may be provided in such a way as to pass through each area to its benefit and not to its detriment. If “Rusticus” stands too long while the river flows by, as the quotation on my title-page suggests, he will find the countryside engulfed.

In my last chapter something was said of the possibilities that the new science of Town-planning has to offer us, as a result of many years’ experience and experiment. We have seen the appearance of innumerable municipal housing-schemes, of “Satellite Towns” like Letchworth and the new Welwyn, of model industrial communities like Bournville and Port Sunlight, of communal efforts like the Hampstead Garden Suburb, of many admirable achievements in the developments of private enterprise. Originating at the time (1876 et seq.) when Bedford Park was laid out, the idea developed slowly before the War and has made great strides since. It is one of the brightest spots in the history of English progress, but it has not been sufficient to stem the rush of ersatz building that followed the War.

For it is the bungalow craze, with all that it now implies, which has most seriously damaged the appearance of rural England during the last eight years. There is nothing inherently unpleasant in the bungalow type of house. Properly designed and constructed, it may be made a thing of beauty harmonising perfectly with its surroundings. But, to my mind, its advantages have been grossly exaggerated. On the count of cost, the primary consideration nowadays, it shows no superiority over the two-floor house; reasonable privacy for its bedrooms is secured with difficulty; and it is apt to sprawl over the ground. One cannot quite realise why it has been so much favoured in recent years; possibly it is merely a transient fashion, like face-powder or crinolines. There was a great and a genuine demand for houses after the War, which had to be satisfied. Nine people out of ten took what they could get, and they got bungalows. For the most part their ménage consisted of husband, wife, and a two-seater. Neither servants nor children entered into the picture. There was a prejudice against everything connected with the pre-War period, especially with its social distinctions, and perhaps the ex-service man sought for the antithesis of the suburban villa. Accustomed for four years to scenes of ruin and to leaky Army huts, his mind readily accepted the slap-dash bungalow with its familiar barbed-wire fence and no-man’s-land of a garden. The effect of flimsiness and impermanence that characterises so many of these little buildings may be ascribed to three causes: the difficulty of paying for a house and a car out of an income that only provided a house before the War, the prevalent restlessness which almost rejects the idea of settling down in one place and letting oneself “take root,” and the insidious hold that the architecture of dumps and sheds had gained on the average man’s mind in 1914-18. His two-seater carried him out into what was (at first) the peace of the country, where land was cheap. Run up at express speed to satisfy an enormous demand, these bungalows spread out for miles along the roads adjoining the towns, thus avoiding the road-making charges that have to be met on an ordinary estate. And next this “ribbon” development continued far out into the country, so that people who had a slight surplus after meeting their hire-purchase payments for car and furniture could enjoy a sight of the sea on Saturday and Sunday from a bungalow perched on the Sussex cliffs. Thus this singular movement has had its main effect in rural districts, whose little Councils, with their often rudimentary by-laws, find the problem almost beyond their power to solve.

For these bungalows are for the most part designed without knowledge or taste, without regard to the tradition of English architecture or the claims of the English landscape. They are generally built of flimsy machine-made materials, largely imported from abroad. Yet they have satisfied a perfectly legitimate demand for accommodation, they have been erected honestly by builders and paid for by their owners, and they have so far complied with the laws of the land that they have earned a Government “subsidy” towards their cost. Hence the bungalow, which many of us regard as the motorist’s least acceptable gift to the countryside, constitutes a topic which must be criticised with extreme tact and caution.

There must be many beauty-spots in England that have been spoilt by motorists and charabancs since the War, but as a fair case one may cite X---- in Romney Marsh. A few years ago this was an artists’ paradise and a haven of peace. It has now become a glorified bus-park, where one is surrounded by petrol-pumps, garages, blatant exorbitant cafés run by loud-voiced aliens, “souvenir” shops full of Brummagem and German products, ice-carts, and innumerable direction-posts to “ladies’ cloak rooms.” All the charm of the place has gone in bribes to the tripper, and when he tires of it the ugliness will remain. When one sees a beautiful village or landscape prostituted to such ends, one wishes that the petrol-engine had never been invented.