How England Made the English by Harry Mount

Author:Harry Mount [Mount, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670919154
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

In 1362, Henry Yevele, Master Mason of the King’s Works, designed the nave of Westminster Abbey in almost exact imitation of the earlier Gothic part of the building that had been started a century before. English Gothic architecture barely changed between Gloucester Cathedral’s chancel in 1350 and its Lady Chapel in 1450. The principles of Palladian architecture, too, remained much the same from 1715 for a century or so.

For all their foreign origins, both Gothic architecture and Palladianism morphed into idiosyncratically English styles. They worked, and can even be considered archetypally English, because they were playful, instinctive impersonations of foreign influences, which were then adapted to accommodate the English weather, English taste and the logistics of everyday English life.

That peculiarly English, alluring accommodation of influences doesn’t come through in more carefully planned, consciously old-fashioned, modern pastiches, executed in a short time. That’s the problem with somewhere like Poundbury, Prince Charles’s model village in Dorset, begun in 1994 to a plan by Leon Krier, and still expanding.

Poundbury may be built in imitation of the classic organic hodgepodge of the traditional English town, with curving, asymmetrical streets, alongside a mock-eighteenth-century, Palladian fire station and a faux-medieval town hall. But what jars at Poundbury is the impractical, slavish imitation; like the installation of modern windows, blocked up in emulation of original windows elsewhere that had been blocked up from 1696 to 1851 for a genuine reason – to dodge window tax.

You get the same awkward shiver down the spine in the new generation of American suburbs, designed to look like a series of Victorian villages, and blended together to produce seamless, sprawling developments. Something that feels harmonious when it has been built up naturally and organically over several centuries feels artificial when it’s all built in one go. The English like oldness – and modern tributes to oldness – but they don’t go for elaborate, over-designed tweeness.

This desire to copy or adapt the old, rather than plunge headlong into the avant garde, is for a simple reason: England is an old country, still full of old buildings, despite the modern horrors inflicted on many towns.

It also helps that England can still, just about, afford to be proud about its past. For at least the last century, it’s been on the right side in its conflicts, certainly in the First and Second World Wars, anyway. There’s little need for an English equivalent of the German compound noun Vergangenheitsbewältigung – ‘coming to terms with the past’. Germans have had to use the word rather a lot since 1945.

A preponderance of old stones in this country makes it harder to insert new stones among them and still achieve any sort of harmony. The childish steel and glass tower blocks recently built by the Candy Brothers at One Hyde Park in central London – or the bright-orange one built by Renzo Piano at Central St Giles near Tottenham Court Road – look particularly hideous and infantile, when surrounded by older, more sophisticated, low-rise buildings.

New York and Chicago

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