Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular

Peter Guillery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415565332
• eBook ISBN: 9781136943140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book extends the concept of British vernacular architecture beyond its traditional base of pre-modern domestic and industrial architecture to embrace other buildings such as places of worship, villas, hospitals, suburban semis and post-war mass housing. Engaging with wider issues of social and cultural history, this book is of use to anyone with an interest in architectural history.

Presented in an essentially chronological sequence, from the medieval to the post-war, diverse fresh viewpoints in the chapters of this book reinforce understanding of how building design emerges not just from individual agency, that is architects, but also from the collective traditions of society.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Vernacular Studies and British Architectural History

Peter Guillery

In British architectural history the word vernacular has tended to evoke a narrow range of stereotypical forms and features – cruck frames, cross passages, scarf joints and the like. As for architectural history itself, there is still truth in W. R. Lethaby’s lament of nearly a century ago: ‘We have been indeed betrayed by the mysterious word Architecture away from reality into a pretence about styles and orders and proportions and periods and conception and composition’.¹

Perceptions are facts, and these connotations are problems. Analyses of hybrid architectural practice and traditions across a great continuum have been hobbled, and in Britain architectural history and the study of vernacular architecture remain artificially separate disciplines. This is a separation that may have its origins in mid-twentieth-century ideologies and attitudes to class, but, if so, that is largely forgotten; it has become a habit, familiar and largely accepted by those on the inside, of no interest to those on the outside. That is part of what’s wrong. Architectural history, as a study of society, as ethnography, is (as my former colleague, Nicholas Cooper, is wont to say) too important to be left to architectural historians. Moreover, as Nancy Stieber has cautioned in an American context, ‘the success of architectural history as an autonomous discipline may in the end be measured not by the quality of our internal dialogues, but by the degree to which others need and want to benefit from the way we make evident the value of building and site as historical evidence’.²

Increasingly, encouragingly, and from both directions, studies of what is vernacular about architecture in Britain look beyond distinct categories of objects, forms or techniques. Rather they are beginning to explore a point of view, one that sees the local, indigenous, ordinary, everyday, popular, nostalgic or numerous. From this vantage point, seen from below, all architecture is vernacular, more or less. It is simply a matter of things looking different from different positions – parallax. There is also another perspective, that from which the word vernacular is essentially meaningless in a democratic view of architecture. But, following Marcel Vellinga, that is a next stage: ‘It is only when the vernacular, like the modern, the popular, the colonial or the informal, has become analytically obsolete, that its existence and importance will truly have been recognized’.³ And, it might be added, once the concept of the vernacular is obsolete, then it will be possible to turn to the materiality and specificity of particular buildings with a fresh view of what sets them apart.

Conventional British definitions of the vernacular break on the rock of modernity, specifically the Industrial Revolution, but that transformation did not eliminate communal or non-academic approaches to the design of buildings. All buildings partake somehow or other of the ‘traditional’, generally held as a defining characteristic of the vernacular. For the mining of this seam there is great potential in an extension of the concept of the vernacular beyond its usual base of pre-modern domestic and industrial architecture to embrace other buildings – places of worship, villas, hospitals, suburban semis, post-war mass housing or entire built landscapes. This potential has been widely realized in North American architectural history and, to be fair in a British context, there is a recent volume on Scotland’s buildings in an explicitly ethnographic series.⁴

An equivalent English volume may seem inconceivable, but there are strong English precedents for the incorporation of the everyday into the mainstream study of architectural history. These come through a third major historiographical thread that must be set alongside the archaeological and the art historical, both cheaply disparaged in my binary opening. A plainly historical approach to architecture is every bit as venerable, and has been no less successful. In fact it has been resurgent in recent decades as inclusive outlooks have spread, as, for example, through the Pevsner Architectural Guides series. From this historical tangent, it is most evident, the separation of buildings into vernacular and non-vernacular subsets makes little sense.

For this alternative inheritance, historical architectural history, the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) long carried the torch. Its warrant of 1908 licensed investigation of ‘the life and times of the people in England’. This was profitably exploited in the later decades of the twentieth century, integrating archaeological and art-historical approaches in a shift away from inventory towards a focus on the socio-economics of function, class and status, a move that was mirrored by the sister commissions in Scotland and Wales.⁵ The Survey of London, with its separately derived public-service-based inclusivity, was brought fittingly alongside into the RCHME upon the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986, and then launched itself into chronicling the sheds of Docklands. The missions have not been renounced and, since institutional merger in 1999, ‘life and times’ work continues from within English Heritage, its vigour unstilled, and in some respects renewed.

Victorian terraced houses in northern towns provide an instance. In the face of government-sponsored urban clearances (the Housing Market Renewal Initiative) many were under threat in the first years of the twenty-first century. Such buildings had rarely been well studied in their local contexts, so new survey was undertaken.⁶ Other recent synthetic state-agency work on largely post-Industrial Revolution vernacular subjects includes study of the history of shops and shopping, a corpus of studies on workshops, and surveys of urban places of worship, seaside towns, Scottish farm buildings and London’s humbler Georgian houses.⁷

Boundaries between vernacular studies and ‘polite’ architectural history have, of course, been ignored or broken down much more widely. There are the revised Pevsners, and there is the planning-based work of the period-defined national amenity societies, unavoidably catholic in its remit. Numerous more purely academic studies have questioned categories more overtly, in some more recent cases through openness to a ‘material culture’ approach.⁸ Ever since its formation in 1956 the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain has made sporadic forays towards bridging the disciplinary divide,⁹ and the Vernacular Architecture Group has lately grown increasingly open to questions about its proper remit.¹⁰

Needless to say, some mainstream historians, though too few, do use ordinary buildings well to anchor social histories of subjects as diverse as Georgian market towns and East End tenement life.¹¹ To one side, a great maverick, was Colin Ward (1924–2010) – this volume would be incomplete without a paean to his work. Ward worked as an architect and a planner, and, all the while, as a pragmatic anarchist. He wrote widely on the history of popular self-build and in support of Walter Segal and his self-build housing system. From Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976) to Cotters and Squatters: The Hidden History of Housing (2004), Ward grappled with aspects of architectural history that almost all others have ignored.¹² One aspect that has been, strangely, both fêted and ignored is inter-war private housing. J. M. Richards led the way with The Castles on the Ground (1946), discussed here by Erdem Erten. In Britain’s suburbs Richards found ‘a true contemporary vernacular’.¹³ Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies (1981)¹⁴ was among a number of studies that followed, but, a further quarter century on, the lead article in the 2006 volume of Architectural History, based on the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s preceding annual lecture, was Gavin Stamp’s barnstorming polemic on the need for serious attention to inter-war neo-Tudor housing.¹⁵ It is shocking that such a call should have been necessary. The gauntlet has been picked up, and Ward’s perspectives echoed, in this volume by Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law. Their chapter on the ‘Tudoresque’ is a first fruit from a larger research project on ‘mock Tudor’.

That subject is a good example of how the study of buildings that pertain to social groups that are not dominant or elite can draw out the strength of precedent, and focus attention on cultural conservatism as a socially dynamic force. Traditional building practice may often be a product of an absence of choice – what is conventionally vernacular. But tradition in the presence of choice is no less vernacular.¹⁶ Resistance to fashion can be as significant as susceptibility to fashion. Further, receptivity on the part of the historian to nostalgia as a major cultural force highlights the elusiveness of any defining line between the vernacular and the neo-vernacular. The ambivalent character of vernacular revivalism is addressed here in Esmé Whittaker’s chapter on Dan Gibson and in Erdem Erten’s on Richards. The post-war ideological milieu that led some modernist architects and critics to react against internationalism and to aspire to anti-heroic anonymity was significant in relation to the founding of the Vernacular Architecture Group in 1952, and some architects soon went further – the Smithsons to speak of an ‘as found’ aesthetic, and James Stirling to view Victorian terraced houses in northern towns sympathetically and as ‘vernacular’.¹⁷ But nostalgia is nostalgia and history is history. The historian’s task is not the same as the architect’s. The aim is not approbation of one or another kind of building, but understanding. Indeed,

Searching for places of identity that may have survived the destructive power of rationalization is an epistemological trap. It entails a nostalgic idealization of a past that never actually existed. There is no hidden liberating potential lingering in the discovery of hitherto suppressed vernacular spatiality. Moreover, it would be naïve to assume that modernity is reversible.¹⁸

Nonetheless, approaches towards understanding the importance of the ordinary or everyday remain one important side of vernacular studies. At the same time and on the other hand, even the greatest and most monumental architecture can be better understood through heightened awareness of local or indigenous forces, by emphasizing reception, use and underlying shifts in architecture’s social meaning, and by understanding all architectural design as emerging from social relationships tempered by individual creativity, that is by interpreting architecture as a ‘field’ in the sense introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and anticipated by J. M. Richards.¹⁹ The vernacular has been traced in some of modernity’s most archetypal sites,²⁰ and Frances Holliss and Miles Glendinning carry this approach forwards here, ranging from Le Corbusier to T. Dan Smith.

For the other end of modernity, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elizabeth McKellar does the same, placing Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House in a context of suburban villa building in Greenwich. Another instance from that period illustrates a different way that the low can underpin the high. In London in the 1630s a humble church layout with an innovative centralized plan was designed to suit the doctrinal beliefs of one ideological group, moderate Calvinists, only to be adopted, seemingly embraced, by ascendant Puritans when and after it came into use in 1642. Following the Restoration the type was subtly appropriated and modified by neo-Laudians, and, through further vicissitudes, architectural meaning had been almost completely turned round by the 1720s. What had been conceived as an exemplary auditory for low reformed worship came to be projected as a High Anglican model, Hawksmoor adapting and enlarging the modest mid-seventeenth-century interior on a monumental scale at St George in the East, one of the 1711 Commissioners’ churches. Far from humble, these were symbols of power and pious munificence that were meant to intimidate, to appear ‘enormous when compared to the neighbouring diminutive hous...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Following the Geometrical Design Path
• Chapter 3 Pre-Reformation Parish Churches
• Chapter 4 The Villa
• Chapter 5 The York Retreat
• Chapter 6 Self-Conscious Regionalism
• Chapter 7 Tudoresque Vernacular and the Self-Reliant Englishman
• Chapter 8 ‘The Hollow Victory’ of Modern Architecture and the Quest for the Vernacular
• Chapter 9 A Modernist Vernacular?
• Chapter 10 From Longhouse to Live/Work Unit
• Index