RUSTICUS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
_For the Contents of this Series see the end of the Book._
RUSTICUS
OR
THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE
BY
MARTIN S. BRIGGS
_Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis._
Horace, _Epist._ I, i, 42
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_In the Heel of Italy._ 1910.
_Baroque Architecture._ 1913.
_Through Egypt in War-time._ 1918.
_Muhammadan Architecture in Egypt and Palestine._ 1924.
_A Short History of the Building Crafts._ 1925.
_The Architect in History._ (_in the Press_)
Made and Printed in Great Britain by
THE BOWERING PRESS, PLYMOUTH.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. “SO THIS IS ENGLAND!” 7
II. BEFORE THE DELUGE 12
III. KING COAL (_c._ 1810-1910) 26
IV. THE AGE OF PETROL (_c._ 1910 _onwards_) 46
V. THE FUTURE 61
SOME ADDRESSES 95
I.
“SO THIS IS ENGLAND!”
On every side a wail is rising over the irreparable damage that is
being done to the rural England that we all claim to love. The change
that has occurred is most evident to those who have not witnessed its
steady progress, rapid as it has been. To realise what has happened,
let us put ourselves in the place of an Englishman who is now returning
home after a sojourn of twenty years in some remote Eastern outpost
of our Empire. Imagine him as a sensitive observer like Doughty or
Kinglake, a man who has learned to appreciate the savage beauty of
the Arabian desert, the very antithesis of his own land. But now at
last the sand has eaten into his soul, and he is longing to see the
English countryside that he remembers so well. He thinks of small green
fields, of little grey churches with rooks cawing among the elms, of
running water, even of grey skies, in fact of everything that is most
characteristically English. There is nothing in our poetry that better
describes this England than Kipling’s “Sussex,” and Kipling knew all
about the East.
Our traveller lands at Folkestone eagerly anticipating his journey
through Kent, and, in order to see as much as possible of hedgerows and
villages and fields on the way up to London, he charters a motor-car.
There is something rather daring, to his mind, in this business of
the car; on his last visit to England in 1907 cars were not entirely
unknown, but there was then a touch of novelty about them. His driver
gingerly threads his way up from the harbour through a maze of hooting
charabancs and yelping Fords, with several hairbreadth escapes which
make the traveller wish himself back on his lurching camel. But soon
Folkestone is left behind, and he settles down to a contemplation of
the number-plate of the car in front, while the fumes of its exhaust
mingle with those of his own Corona. He expects to find some changes in
the aspect of England, but then of course there was the Town-Planning
Act in 1909, so that nothing very unpleasant need be feared, and at any
rate one misses the East Kent Coalfield by coming this way. The road
is very wide and very straight; there is no dust. A small lighthouse
with black and white sides, crowned by a red lamp busily blinking in
broad daylight, indicates a cross-roads. Yes, this new route avoids
the streets of Sandgate and Hythe, which must be very crowded in these
days, but the wire fences are a poor substitute for green hedges. And
these terrible petrol-stations every few yards with their glaring red
and yellow pumps are very trying to the eyes. Still there are some old
landmarks left: the hoardings are bigger than ever, and some of them
bear the familiar legends of Edwardian days.
He looks forward to passing through Lenham, Charing, and
Harrietsham--three beautiful villages on the main road--but as each is
approached his car swerves along the new racing-track and thus avoids
the village High Street, rejoining the old main road, widened beyond
recognition, a little farther on. He passes through a great cutting
gashed through the chalk. Felled trees lie by the road, old walls are
pulled down, all bends are straightened out, everything is cleared away
to allow the cars and charabancs to roar through the countryside. But
is it countryside any longer? More than anything else in this nightmare
drive he is impressed by the New Architecture, which appears to consist
mainly of bungalows.
The bungalow as he knew it in the East was a large, low, cool, white
building surrounded by verandahs, as un-English in appearance as
anything could be. But these bungalows are quite different, and seem to
be thrown haphazard all over the place, along the main roads for miles
beyond every town. Shoddy, ugly, vulgar shacks they are, recalling
to his mind some of the worst aspects of life in the Middle West as
depicted on the films. The materials of which they are constructed
are cheap and nasty. Round each bungalow is a collection of smaller
shacks, where the Baby Austin and the chickens live; and in place of
embowering trees he sees a jungle of wireless poles and clothes-props.
Untidiness, vulgarity, Americanism, discord of colouring and form, seem
to have invaded every village through which he passes.
Nor is this change confined to roads and buildings. The whole character
of the villages is altered. Smocks and sunbonnets have gone for ever,
and with them most of the old village crafts. The blacksmith’s day is
done. Artificial-silk leg-wear and gramophone-records fill the windows
of the village store, a blatant cinema has appeared next door, and most
people do their shopping in London.
So this is England!
II.
BEFORE THE DELUGE
In order to understand the changes that have taken place in the English
countryside during the last century or so, and in order to forecast
probable future tendencies, one must first endeavour to analyse the
charm of the unspoiled English village and landscape before coal and
petrol began to dominate our whole life. That charm is universally
admitted but not always rationally appreciated. To begin with, ruin in
itself is not a worthy subject for admiration. An American critic is
said to have observed to an Englishman:
“What thoughtful people your ancestors were; they not only built
churches for you to worship in but ruined abbeys for you to
admire.”[1]
The worship of ruin is a sign of decadence, though it has appeared
from time to time in history for hundreds of years. There is a social,
even a moral, reproach implied by the sight of a tumbledown cottage;
and to the present writer’s mind a ruined church is as much inferior
to a perfect church as a dead dog is to a live one. Nobody who really
loves architecture can really love ruin; his admiration for the
fragments of a great building only makes him wish he could see it in
its original splendour. But there is a mellowness and softness that
comes to a building with age, and that is a genuine æsthetic attribute.
Moreover, the element of historical association is a legitimate cause
for our pride in our old villages and towns, a cause by no means to be
neglected in this survey. But, apart from these two factors, the charm
of the English village, for our purpose, is to be judged strictly on
appearances.
Up to about 1810, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the
face of England seriously, the village remained almost unaltered from
its medieval state. Though its “lay-out” varied greatly according to
its situation, on a hill-top or in a valley, it was generally grouped
round a “green” and along the road that ran through it. The “green”
was the focus of communal life, at a time when each community was
inevitably far more self-contained than it is to-day. Here took place
such sports as wrestling and bear-baiting, and revels and dances round
the Maypole, of which a rare example survives in Otley, Yorkshire. Here
too were the stocks for malefactors, the pound where stray animals were
temporarily confined, the well where all water for the smaller houses
had to be drawn, and perhaps a stone cross. Usually adjoining the
green stood the village church, which gathered the rustic inhabitants
within its ancient walls. Gray’s _Elegy_ gives us the ideal picture of
a country church and churchyard, but in only too many villages such
an ideal was unrealised. On the village green would also be found the
inn, but the heyday of the roadside inn came with the introduction of
stage-coaches on the main roads in the nineteenth century. There might
be a group of almshouses, but no post-office or bank and probably not
a school. Down by the stream stood the mill with its great water-wheel,
or if there were no stream there would be a wooden windmill such as we
see on the Sussex downs. To an extent that we hardly realise, industry
was self-contained in these little communities. Nearly all the simple
wants of the cottagers were provided for within their own parish.
The blacksmith and the carpenter, the saddler and the basket-maker,
practised their crafts in every hamlet. Weaving and spinning, baking
and preserving were done by the women at home. Shops were few and
small, storing rather than displaying their wares. The comparatively
rare goods that were brought into the place from other parts of England
had to be carried on pack-horses, so that naturally they became
expensive luxuries. There were no newspapers, and hardly anybody in the
village--except perhaps the squire and the parson--possessed any books.
All these factors, though they may not seem germane to this study, had
a bearing on the outward appearance of the village. The squire, as he
came to be called, was the great man of the community, for, though he
himself might be the “lord of the manor,” that celebrity was more often
non-resident. Hence the squire’s house, then “Manor House,” “Hall,”
or whatever it was named, was a substantial building standing in a
good garden, and because of its size and position it has seldom been
affected by the unfortunate tendencies that have so often played havoc
with cottages and barns. Barns usually adjoined the squire’s house and
sometimes were attached to the rectory as “tithe barns,” for there
was collected the tribute of the fields. These barns are invariably
simple in design but often of great beauty, and the two qualities are
not unconnected. Then there were a few other houses of medium size,
and lastly the humble cottages where most of the inhabitants lived,
standing close to the road with a small garden behind them. Such were
the components of the old English village.
Beyond its doors was the common where the cattle grazed, and beyond
that again there were common woods where the pigs picked up their food
and where fuel could be gathered. Then there were fields for pasturage
and for cultivation, divided up into one-acre strips, of which one
man might hold any number. These long strips, separated only by a
foot or so of rough grass, must have resembled our modern allotments
in this country and the great open fields that one sees in France
and elsewhere abroad, where hedges and fences are seldom found. The
system of enclosing fields within hedges did not become common until
about the time of Queen Anne, so that one feature of our landscape
that we rightly regard as characteristically English is comparatively
modern. In many cases it is also immoral, for enclosure of common land
proceeded apace during the eighteenth century.
Yet of all features of the English countryside the one that has changed
most is the road. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century roads
were simply open tracks through fields or over commons. They were not
fenced in, their boundaries being vaguely assumed; and they were not
metalled. Their condition was so bad in North Herefordshire in 1788
that they had to be levelled “by means of ploughs, drawn by eight
or ten horses; and in this state they remained until the following
autumn,” Each parish was held responsible for the “repairs” of its
roads, but this process seldom involved more than a cartload of faggots
or stones in the worst holes. Hence wheeled traffic was impossible.
Everything and everybody had to travel through the mire, on horseback
or on foot; and at a time when the population of London amounted to
700,000, its fish was coming on horseback from the Solway, and its
mutton was walking up in thousands on its own legs from Scotland and
Wales, disputing the road with vast droves of geese and turkeys. Such
was the state of affairs up to the third quarter of the eighteenth
century, when turnpikes and tollbars began to take effect, but the
good coaching-roads of Telford and Macadam were not constructed till
the nineteenth century. Nor were bridges very common at a time when
there was no wheeled traffic, for any shallow stream could be forded
by a pack-horse. But such bridges as then existed were almost always a
pleasure to behold.
This picture of rural England at the end of the eighteenth century is
no more than a descriptive inventory of the contents of the average
English village at that time. Yet everyone who knows such a village,
unaltered by the march of civilisation since 1810 or so, can be relied
on to say that it has an undoubted charm of its own. There is certainly
no charm in an inventory, so we must now seek for the ingredients that
are lacking in our list.
The first is, without doubt, the perfect harmony of Nature and art. The
colours and texture of the old buildings harmonise admirably with the
colours of the surrounding landscape. In some places that is due to an
actual identity of material. Thus the old stone farm-houses that one
sees in the Yorkshire dales are built of the same sandstone rocks that
jut out from the hillside all round them. But, on the whole, that is
unusual. There is no similarity between the rich red brickwork of East
Anglia and anything in the surrounding earth or vegetation, nor between
the Cotswold stone cottages and the green slopes on which they stand.
After making all allowances for the mellowing that time produces, all
we can say about this matter of colour is that old building materials
seem to harmonise with their natural surroundings, whatever colours
are involved and whatever may be the surroundings. That is not quite
accurate. In Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales, where the prevailing colour
of the landscape is in dull tones, buildings of local stone with roofs
of sturdy thick local slates do undoubtedly merge into the general
colour-scheme more successfully than buildings with red-tiled roofs;
whereas the warmer colouring and more generous sunshine of the southern
half of England allows of a greater range of tone in buildings, even
assimilating the “magpie” half-timber houses of the West Midlands.
But texture, too, has a part to play. The materials used in old
buildings were all “home-made”; therefore they lacked the smooth
mechanical surface that is so antagonistic to Nature, and thus the
very defects of their manufacture prevented any clash between nature
and art. But, above all, most of these old farms and cottages were
simple, spontaneous, unsophisticated, and English. Their design and
their construction were traditional, born of the soil on which they
stood. The snobbery of the Victorian suburban villa was unknown to
the village yokels who produced masterpieces of cottage design. The
very simplicity of their “programme” was their salvation. They had to
provide a dwelling-house of given size from local materials. There was
no question of deciding between Welsh slates and red tiles: only one
form of roofing was available locally. The rooms were shockingly low,
according to our ideas, but as an external result there was a long low
roof, and low eaves, all assisting to produce an unobtrusive effect
attuned to the landscape. On the other hand, the fireplace and the
chimney above it were large, for wood was the only fuel available, and
thus bold chimneys are found externally. The windows were glazed with
small panes because nobody then could make large ones.
The old-fashioned cottage, a truly beautiful thing, was the work of
competent men who, generally speaking, were content to satisfy a
utilitarian demand without trying to create a sensation.
On the other hand there is a question that I have not yet heard asked:
was there never an ambitious tradesman or tradesman’s wife in the past
who wished to create an architectural sensation in the village? Surely
a flamboyant half-timbered inn must have looked rather startling when
first erected? And the village “highbrow” of 1750 or so who procured
from an architect in the nearest town a design for a Palladian façade
in the latest mode, did he not create a discord in the harmony of the
village street? The answer to this compound question must be in the
affirmative, but the results are less obtrusive than they would be
to-day. The black and white inn would have the same proportions, the
same fenestration, the same doors and chimneys, as a brick building in
the same street; and the “genuine antique” façade from Palladio would
become a little less exotic by the time that the village bricklayer
had finished with it. The harmony and repose that characterises the
old English village is mainly due to its isolation: there was no
disturbing influence from outside, no filtration of alien ideas, and
no introduction of discordant materials. But the “silk” stockings and
the gramophone-records that now decorate the shop-window of the village
store have their counterpart in the modern architecture of the village
street.
An endeavour has been made in the preceding paragraphs to picture the
unspoiled English village as it appears to the ordinary intelligent
observer of to-day. No attempt has been made to glorify village life,
past or present. There are some people who see nothing but cause for
regret in the invasion of the villages by what we call “progress,”
but for the most part those people are not sons of the soil: they are
either “week-enders” or people of comfortable incomes who have retired
to a cottage _orné_ amid congenial surroundings. They see and know
little of the monotony that drives the young people into the towns,
or of the hardships of lambing and winter work on the farms. There
are other critics who say that architecture is so much a reflection
of social conditions that a beautiful village could only have been
produced by a happy and contented people.
It is a question whether such a village is, or ever has been, specially
attractive to the eyes of its inhabitants, if indeed they have the
ability to consider such things at all. Admiration for the beauty of
the countryside seems to be a very modern cult, if we are to take
our great writers as typical of their time, though in fact they were
usually ahead of their time. Scott, Wordsworth, and other poets of that
period certainly saw something in it, but prior to their day there
is little evidence that even cultured men noticed anything worthy of
comment in the English landscape or the English village. There are
exceptions of course, and we find evidence of love of the English
countryside even in the work of so classical a writer as Milton, and
later in the poems and letters of Cowper. But probably Dr. Johnson is
typical of eighteenth-century men of letters. He declined a country
living on one occasion, and in several passages of Boswell’s _Life_
we find Johnson making fun of country manners, country conversation,
and country life generally, while of landscape and of the beauty of
the English village he has little to say. William Cobbett, writing a
century ago, is so obsessed with indignation about agricultural poverty
and the iniquities of the governing class, that he seldom comments in
his _Rural Rides_ on the charm of a village. Sandwich is “as villainous
a hole as one could wish to see,” Cirencester “a pretty nice town,”
and so is Tonbridge. But he waxes furious about some of the tumbledown
cottages that modern well-fed tourists would call “picturesque,” and he
regards the barrenness of the New Forest as a blot on our civilisation.
Cobbett provides a very good antidote to an over-sentimental view of
country life.
III
KING COAL (1810-1910)
The “Industrial Revolution” that changed the face of a large part
of England is generally stated to have commenced about 1770, when
machinery began to displace hand-labour and so drove the workers out of
their homes into factories. About the same time came the construction
of canals connecting the chief waterways and centres of population, and
the slow improvement of the roads. But none of these important changes
greatly affected the outward appearance of our villages until about
forty years later, when, as the title of this chapter indicates, the
steam-engine replaced the water-wheel in the factories, and when coal
began to make its influence felt all over the country. Simultaneously
there grew up a system of macadamised roads and stage-coaches, which
gave place in thirty or forty years to railways. For a century coal
was the dominant factor in English life, but since 1910 petrol has
played the main part in altering the aspect of the countryside.
Meanwhile, of course, minor causes have always been in operation.
The progressive enclosure of common land and the gradual grouping
of the old one-acre holdings into large hedged fields continued all
through the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of violent
agitation by Cobbett. Whatever may have been the arguments in favour
of enclosure, the inevitable effect on village life was to squeeze the
small man out of existence and to perpetuate the big farm employing
workers at starvation wages. Poverty stalked through the little
cottages, many of which were unfit for human habitation. The cruel
game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of poaching, and the woods
were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-guns, which sometimes claimed
a gamekeeper for victim instead of a poacher.
And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old
self-supporting village community, changes in the means of transport
brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one blow
the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic character
of village architecture. Too scattered, too cowed, and too poor to
organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their
consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive
Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the
century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these buildings
represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and parson with
its iron grip on village life. The dignified brick meeting-houses of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of another type, the
flamboyant Gothic chapel of Victorian days had not been conceived,
but the village Bethel of 1810 or so is a standing witness to the
cottager’s grievance against the ruling class of his day. Very little
cottage-building was done, for though the population was increasing
very fast, it was migrating from country to town in order to be near
the new factories.
The network of canals that spread over England between 1760 and 1830
or so did not greatly influence the appearance of the countryside,
though their numerous lockhouses and bridges have the merit of
severe simplicity. But the system of new roads introduced by Telford
and Macadam early in the nineteenth century had an immediate and
far-reaching effect. With them we enter on the brief but glorious
coaching-period, which holds such a grip on the English imagination
that it still dictates the design of our Christmas cards. The
“old-fashioned Christmas” that has been such a godsend to artists
implies unlimited snow, holly, mistletoe, and plum-pudding, with the
steaming horses standing in the inn yard and the red-nosed driver
ogling the barmaid. Dickens made the most of it in literature, Hugh
Thomson and Cecil Aldin in art. For the stage-coach immediately
enlivened every village and town lying on the great highways. The
roadside inn came into its own, but after some forty crowded years of
glorious life declined again until the motor-car provided it with a new
lease of prosperity, or at any rate until the cult of the bicycle gave
it a fillip.
The influence of railways on the appearance of the countryside has
been mainly indirect, in the sense of having destroyed the isolation
of villages and hamlets and with it the local characteristics that
they possessed. For example, the use of purple Welsh slates was almost
unknown outside Wales up to the beginning of the nineteenth century,
when they came into common use, for though their colour and texture
is unpleasing, they are relatively cheap and can be fixed on lightly
constructed roofs. So first canals and then railways combined with
factories to spread machine-made goods all over the country. Otherwise
the railway has not greatly defaced the landscape as a whole, for
there are still large tracts of country where one can be out of sight
and sound of it, and it is not so ubiquitous as the modern motor-car.
Many village railway-stations and cottages are inoffensively designed,
and in the “stone” districts of England are usually built of local
materials, but their appearance suffers as a rule from the dead hand
of central and standardised control. The habit of erecting enormous
hoardings in the fields bordering a railway must go far back into the
nineteenth century. Presumably these eyesores have some object in view
beyond merely annoying the traveller and defacing the landscape, but
certainly they must come up for consideration in the last chapter of
this essay.
Two hundred years ago, even more recently than that, the populous and
prosperous parts of England were East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Surrey,
Somerset, Gloucestershire, and some neighbouring counties. Agriculture,
sheep-farming, and the wool trade formed the main source of wealth: and
the only notable exception was the iron industry of the Weald, where a
sufficiency of wood fuel was available for smelting. Between 1750 and
1850 the great northward trek took place, and King Coal became supreme.
He ruined an appreciable part of Yorkshire and Lancashire, smeared
his ugly fingers over mountain valleys in South Wales and elsewhere,
created the “Black Country” in his own image, and last of all produced
the terrible blot that we call the “Potteries,” where the whole
landscape looks like a bad dream.
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,”[2] 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.
IV
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.