Weep for England

'He came upon pale and graceful stone gates leading to some lost great estate with the National Trust's acorn on a road sign. He turned in and drove two miles down an avenue of limes. Families shrieked about him. He found a Gents and then returned stiffly to the Mercedes in the car park. People ran about taking plants from a garden shop to their cars to plant on their patios. If I had ever loved England, he thought, I would now weep for her. Sherwood forest watch him from every side, dense and black.'

from Jane Gardam's Old Filth (2004)

Under the Greenwood Tree - or Hardygate

That's what we have all been waiting for so long, "fans" of Thomas Hardy especially, the "transformation" of this dreary old cottage. Just look at that picture - how old fashioned it looks. One just can't imagine how the great man managed to live there, let alone write a book or two. Jeffrey Archer would never have put up with it. Apparently Mrs H. wanted to do something about it but the old stick-in-the-mud wouldn't budge. Just because he'd been born there for heavens' sake! The things that poor woman must have had to put up with! You can tell how hopelessly behind the times he was if you ever dip into one of his books: you really can see he wasn't at all part of the aspiration nation. People in his books just didn't seem to get on - for some quite peculiar reasons. I hope they know what sort of toilets to install - last time I went the loo was in a shed at the bottom of the garden. The kitchen was beyond belief. And the beds were a disgrace. Why don't they get a decent interior designer in? The place does have potential even though it's not well presented at the moment. "Some retail space" - I hope there's going to be enough so that those dreary books don't crowd out the mugs and tea towels. Well done, National Trust and Dorset County Council, I say. Not before time. There's plenty of space in that garden. How about a conservatory? How were we ever expected to understand anything about the local landscape without some information? They could even make it interactive, with virtual walks through the woods - with commentary of course.

Ruins, ancient and modern

In a recent newspaper comment article, Simon Jenkins, former trustee of the Architecture Foundation, former deputy chairman of English Heritage, current chairman of the National Trust, deplored the English ‘cult of the ruin’, which leads us to the antiseptic preservation of historical ruins, where close cropped ‘nationalised grass’ stops three inches short of the stabilised masonry – a description many will instantly recognise as characteristic of English Heritage’s wind-swept ruined choirs – whilst we dutifully reject any attempt to put our historic derelicts to any active use or, yet worse to some minds, ‘restore’ and rebuild them as the Victorians might unhesitatingly have done.

As in so many of our present cultural problems, the Victorians provide precedents for both the malaise and the solution. Simon Jenkins might have cited the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as a guide to a humane solution. Founded in 1877 by William Morris and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to oppose Victorian restoration of historic buildings to a supposed (and often spurious) ‘authentic’ state in which they were thought to have existed at some arbitrarily chosen point in their history, the society, in the spirit of ‘anti scrape’, campaigned against the destruction of those accretions of physical adaptions and maturings that embodied the history of the human use of the building over the course of its existence – the patina of buildings, one might say. It believed historic buildings should be kept in good repair, put to sympathetic use, and physically adapted if necessary, but that any additions should be frankly modern and not attempt to disguise the distinction between the new and the old. Protection, not preservation.

In this, as in his concern for the state of manufacturing, and especially for the condition of furniture making that was expressed in the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris, like Ruskin and other like-minded contemporaries, emphasised the human, not just the aesthetic aspect of the culture, art and craft of their time.

The SPAB continues to this day, still requiring each member to subscribe to Morris’s original manifesto, though at times it may seem that the humaneness of the society faces a tidal wave of professional and commercially motivated restoration experts and materials suppliers. Yet it perhaps preserves the original spirit of its foundation better than that other survival of Morris’s efforts, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which has renamed itself the Society of Designer Craftsmen, and about which I have commented somewhat critically in an earlier post.

As for that other English institution over which Simon Jenkins holds some sway, the National Trust, it too was founded, at the close of the nineteenth century, by people whose concern was for the well-being of people in the physical and cultural landscape, and, as such, they were the successors of Morris and his socialist-minded contemporaries. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the Trust began to devote so much of its energies to the preservation of the English country house, with which it has come to be so much associated in the public mind. That effort, in its own way, also laid much emphasis on the preservation not only of the buildings but of the material and detritus that embodied the lives of their past occupants, regardless of high aesthetic merit – everything from the Rubens to the elephant’s foot umbrella stand. A corollary of that was the desirability of maintaining the occupants in residence where possible, even if in reduced domain – something that was, we are told, later to lead on occasion to friction between the ‘owners’ and the Trust’s professional advisors and staff. Nevertheless, on another level the contextualised preservation of the art of the past, the only realm in which the cash-strapped post-war English could compete with the purchasing power of American and other foreign public and private art buyers, did achieve remarkable professional cultural and commercial success in opposition to the isolated, anaesthetised presentation of the cultural object in a museum environment – the cult, if not of the ruin, at least of the artefact.

For the masses, for whose benefit the Trust was originally established, this country-house culture came to be expressed in the ticketed-entry, exit-through-the-gift-shop ethos – a far cry from the cultural and social concerns of the young fogeys who had ‘saved’ the country house, but an essential prop to the political and commercial well-being of the Trust today.

In our own little realm of furniture making, we have an interesting conjunction of the historic and the modern in the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers, an association active in the affairs of the industry at every level including that of the small designer-maker and bestowers of the Guildmark, something about which I have commented in a few posts on this blog. This ancient sounding company was founded in the 1950s with full subscription to the arcane trappings of the City of London Livery Company – an relationship that such groups in modern economic life as public relations practitioners, international bankers, tax advisers, management consultants and security professionals have, in recent years, been anxious to establish. Move over, cordwainers and tallow chandlers.

Decoration

‘Decoration’ is a subject that calls forth the knives and cudgels. One group is brave enough to call themselves ‘Interior Decorators’, to the disdain of ‘Interior Designers’, those Squires to the Knights and Lords of Architecture. (Sometimes literally such – what was it in our generation that caused architects, historically for the first time, to be added to the ranks of those with Expectations of Honours? Was it just that New Labour wanted to show how switched on it was and couldn’t quite bring itself to ennoble the Gallagher brothers or Damian Hirst, or had the Fosters and Rogers simply risen to join the captains of industry?)

In fact the boot of disdain has been on the other foot in quite recent times in at least one context. In the 1930s and 40s, when the English country house aesthetic was being established (arguably our most successful cultural export, especially in the north American direction) as the National Trust struggled to rescue our ancestral aristocratic houses from the onward march of proletarian history, authentic clutter was preferred to any notion of period consistency. John Fowler, as Patrick Wright puts it in A Journey Through Ruins, “the advocate of ‘humble elegance’ and ‘pleasing decay’ who would become the trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’.”

But in our own times, a recent panel discussion by Designers about Decoration published in the design magazine FX (August 2010) might have got further if they could have brought themselves to step back more from the rather petty current turf war between interior ‘designers’ and interior ‘decorators’ – both terms now in considerable need of explication and demystification.

When did decoration become a sure sign of moral disintegration? In the second half of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the Victorian willingness to apply decorative effects of any provenance or quantity to manufactures. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose private feelings about sensuality and morality were more than a little occluded, explicitly decried ornament as a source of degeneracy and crime. Yet that did not prevent him from bestowing a richness on his room interiors belied by the elegantly stern exteriors of his houses.

We forget now how outrageous, historically and culturally, is what came to be an aesthetic and moral ban on decoration. Until the nineteenth century all art and artefacts that could achieve and afford it were decorated – Anglo-Saxon, Islamic, gothic, Aztec, Chinese, classical Greek – what is the Parthenon frieze if not decoration? The purpose of decoration was to beautify and differentiate. No-one doubted it.

It was the Bauhaus modernists (great admirers, as are most architects, of Loos) who introduced much of the confusion by claiming there was an undecorated form of any object that was inevitable, pure and moral. But the urge to beautify and differentiate could not be done away with, only disguised. There is nothing inevitable about the form of a Barcelona chair. It is pure differentiation. As, too, is the cosmetic appearance of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, however much it may relate to its engineering function.

Since we forwent decoration, we have had to differentiate through increasingly promiscuous manipulation of form, especially where we have acquired the capacity to manufacture pretty much as we like – the kind of technical virtuosity that was the Victorians’ undoing. The classical Greeks had little choice in the way in which they constructed a temple: they had soon to turn to decoration to differentiate their creations.

It makes some sense to say that ‘design’ is sculpted, whilst ‘decoration’ is applied. Yet modern architecture is sometimes characterised by a kind of applied form (as much applied as any decoration of Victorian architects) with wilful and extravagant external forms, ‘organic’ freeform or anarchic geometry, that bear little relationship to the internal utilisation of space or the logic of construction.

Time to pull the baby out of the plughole?