Urban Heritage

Question 1

1945

Answer 1

Br faced immense problem w cities
• Extensive bomb damage to city centres - need 4 reconstruction of industry and commercial property. Hadn’t been in great shape even before blitz - victorian architecture rotting/ decaying in interwar period. Slum housing contrib to structural decay - something had to be done

Till 1945 no idea of preserving cities

Question 2

two post-WW2 decades

Answer 2

unparalleled urban modernization across europe. Even in this context Br unusually enthusiastic about modernisation of towns and citie

Question 3

1945-50

Answer 3

• Comprehensive redevel of Br cities on enormous scale
  
  • Tower blocks to combat housing problems
  • Rebuilding of bomb-damaged commercial areas
  • Inner-city motorways/ ringroads to cater 4 emergence of mass motoring pop
  • This architecture = transformative. Planners want to overhaul not rebuild
  • Planners and architecture united in optimism for new tech to redevelop and create new, more egalitarian soc in line w post-war philosophies
  • Post-war period Coventry re-planned by Gibson. Pedestrian walkways, removed cars from city centre - humanistic approach. Harlow in Essex similar - for time most visited architecture centre in wrld
  • Bristol bombed extensively, much reconstructed - huge amount of city centre
  • Broadmead was one of 1st urban renewal projects in Br post-ww2
  • Links - similar aesthetics, building heights, etc
  • United by influence of Scandanavian modernism. Festival of Britain influence 1951
  • Huge amount of govt money poured into reconstruction
  • Rural impulse to conservation but no urban

Question 4

JohnSummerson, ‘The Past in Future’ in JohnSummerson(ed.),Heavenly Mansions and other essays on architecture(London, 1949)

Answer 4

• Import architectural historian
• Curator of the Soane museum. Key figure
• 1948 piece
• Talks about what should/ not be conserved
• Like divorced wives old buildings money to maintain and oft get in way
• Brought face-2-face w value decisions
• Circumstances deserving preservation:
1. Work of art
2. Distinct creation, characteristic of school
3. Significant antiquity
4. Scene of great events/ labours of great men
• Limited def of preservation
• Only small number of builds should be preserved
• 2 types of architecture - literary and aesthetic
• More import than great ppl = buildings as wrks of art
• Notable = minimal definition. Quite elitist
• Not about architecture import to community, about preserving what he defines as great architecture thru study
• He’s between nostalgic conservationists and anti-conservationists
• Issue of conservat of builds diff to paintings etc - preserving build requires not building something in that space

o 1947 piece
o ‘like divorced wives [old buildings] cost money to maintain
o Asking about architectural conservation both in the source and outside of it
o In the heat of the post war development debate
o One of the founders of the national buildings record 1941
	§ Recorded damage done to buildings by the war
o People were more interested in creating a modern society
	§ Not to preserve
o Post war housing crisis was enormous è very important to remember this
	§ Slum scandals à evacuated children à huge argument to get rid of the slums and thus the inadequate Victorian housing 
o Summerson was an elitist
	§ Didn’t think buildings should be preserved just because they were old, they had to be architecturally interesting
o He is not clear on who has the ability to arbitrate and decide what should be preserved
	§ So is talking all about what should be preserved but doesn’t talk about who can decide
	§ Shows his elitism
o Local authorities were much more in power in the post war period to decide what to do with their buildings than they are now
o Bannam piece would be useful in this answer
	§ See lecture notes à Erika talked about this
	§ Cities should embrace modernity
	§ As people’s lifestyles change, their homes and cities should too
	§ Buildings don’t make communities, but people do
	§ Bizarre that left wing conservationists should be working with right wing elitists to protect buildings that were symbols of old class systems
o Aj jungson à key source
	§ Worried that everywhere would look the same if everyone modernised
	§ Wanted individually
	§ The old places were unique 
o Civic amenities act 1957
o 1975 declaration of Amsterdam
o See lecture notes à have covered this already
o Gentrification à another challenge 
	§ Has forced a lot of people out of cities and original residents feel priced out of their homes
	§ ‘socially cleansing’ inner cities
o Make sure to address the second question à they are 2 part questions
	§ Summerson’s views were somewhat followed
	§ Things were preserved where it was appropriate 
o Make sure to mention all these points if answering on conservation - How to answer the 2 parts
o Analysis of source
o And then broaden that out 
	§ Make it clear that you are familiar with the wider debates

Question 5

ReynerBanhamNew Statesman , 12 April 1963, 529

Answer 5

• Architect
  
  • Better known for vitriolic comments in media about architecture
  • Key supporter of new brutalist mvmnt
  • Great character - fun to study
  • New Statesman 1963 on conservation
  • Mustn’t preserve boring, ill built and inhumanely planned just bc knights and barts of Establishment culture happen to live in it
  • Looking to overhauling cities in terms of optimism of future
  • Overhauling soc to create more social democratic soc
  • Building conservat seen as elitist, old fashioned
  • Builds shouldn’t just be preserved bc old

Question 6

Summerson and Banham representative

Answer 6

• Push against conservation
  
  • See it as elitist
  • Popular consensus w reconstruction of towns and cities
  • Little interest in preserving old, grimy, obsolete envi
  • Slow mvmnt against this

Question 7

Town and County Planning Act 1947

Answer 7

• Enshrines in law for 1st time the listing code
  
  • Listed builds invented as part of this legislation
  • Ensures builds protected
  • Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest
  • Very limited form of conservation which only protects a minority of buildings
  • Just 200 000 buildings protected
  • Grade 1 = 1 really unique. Buckingham Palace, Blackpool Tower
  • Just preserves building but not context around building

Question 8

1950s/60s:

Answer 8

• 1st drips of resistance to anti-conservation
  
  • Plans 4 reconstruction of Picadilly Circus - London city council planned 1950s to demolish old builds and replace w pedestrian area and motorway. Incr opposition to this till totally dropped
  • Euston Arch stood at front of Euston station. Based on Greek ceremonial arch. Early 1960s plans to demolish and replace w modern station architecture. Large media protest. Building knocked down in the end. Huge outcry. Crucial moment - failure but awakened ppl to idea of preserving buildings in cities
  • Minor cases of preservat battles in bigger story of urban reconstruction
  • Began to open up interest in urban conservation

Question 9

3 reasons why large-scale urban renovation began to be opposed:

Answer 9

• Protests against slum clearance. Post-ww2 huge clearance of Victorian slums. Huge num of properties not fit for purpose but many absolutely fine. Slum clearance more and more controversial. By end of 1960s, post-war slum clearance began to be seen as vandalism. Ppl began to feel that losing communities. Neighbourliness of victorian housing vs estates began to turn tides
  
  • Property developers face increasing criticism. 1950s/ 60s Britain witnessed office construction boom - skylines transformed. Enabled bc helped planners to reconstruct city - developers made to pay for roads etc around office blocks. Incr out of favour - seen as forcing out existing communities to build ugly buildings
  • Outcry build vs property - Wilson 1964 banned construction of new office blocks in London
  • Road construction. Inner city motorways and noise/pollution. Post-war drive to allow everyone a car, affluence. M32 Bristol driven through pre-existing residential areas. Cut through communities and filled with smog, noise pollution. Homes Before Roads campaign. Westway West London. Tide turning against comprehensive renewal. Failing communities despite optimistic intent
  • Range of battles vs renewal on a grand scale. Covent Garden - scheme to turn into modernist concrete commercial zone battled away. Bath - huge amount knocked down 1960s to provide new commercial areas - much of this stopped
  • Preservation battles lead to individs forming and joining local conservation groups. Bottom up
  • Mounting grassroots opposition
  • Diverse group of ppl - diff beliefs, end goals. Some were old fashioned elitists who didn’t like seeing Br change under welfare change. Others on the left. Campaigned vs removal of w-c from inner cities and enormous profits of property developers. Strange amalgam of old right and new left

Question 10

Jane Jacobs - 1916-2006

Answer 10

• American. Fights against inner city motorways
  
  • Death and Life of Great American Cities 1961 - bible of conservation mvmnt
  • Comprehensive renewal is destroying cities
  • Inner city neighbourhoods must more or less not be changed
  • Good city had diversity of uses - offices, houses, shops in same area of city - city used 24 hours a day so ppl around all day making city feel a lot more liveable and safer
  • Recipe of good city not separation of tower blocks, commercial areas - mixed occupations and social profiles. Premodern mix = to aim for
  • Not that interested in historic side but joined by those who are

Question 11

Gordon Cullon, Townscape, late 1950s

Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City:

Answer 11

• Both argue for extension of preservation to large areas
  
  • What’s rly import is not just preservat of few buildings but feeling of walking through historic area
  • Shift from listing to preservation of large swathes of city

Question 12

A. J.Youngson, ‘Britain’s Historic Towns’, in Pamela Ward (ed.),Conservation and Development in Historic Towns and Cities(Oriel Press, 1968)

Answer 12

• In opposition to Banham and Summerson
  
  • Import of preserving
  • Preservat import to:
  • Preserve feeling of place
  • Protect ties to hist
  • Defend urban areas as places of beauty
  • Preservat under threat by devel, population pressure
  • Swing in attitude to historic built environment

Question 13

Tide against urban renewal

Answer 13

Civic Amenties Act 1967:

* Introduced by Duncan Sandys
* Leads to conservation areas
* Greater protection for the entire environment in a given area
* Nothing can be demolished w/o special permission
* Any new construction must be done in character of the area
* Conservation zones = huge success
* Today 9600 conservation zones
* UoB = located in conservation area
* Most of Bristol - all of Bristol West - is a conservation area

Kingsdown becomes a conservation area:

* 18th C area, one of 1st suburbs of Bristol
* Prosperous m-c, esp late 18th C
* By postwar period, Kingsdown largely inhabited in slums. Fallen on hard times. Build in bad condition. Only hope for area and its ppl was seen as comprehensive renewal
* Thus just off Tower Hill council buildings
* Just as these build tide turned against comprehensive renewal
* M-c move in and area begins to organise against demolition
* Neighbourhood conservation group set up
* Made into conservation area
* Area behind coop redeveloped in low rise style - more humane and in keeping w style of rest of area
* Victorian pub preserved in middle of estate - attempts to keep links w past architecture

Question 14

Trajectory

Answer 14

• Knocking down
• Conservation areas
More sympathetic architectur

Question 15

Br trajectory shared w rest of Europe

Answer 15

• Turn to urban heritage
  
  • W/in idea of devel common Eur identity, Eur community keen on preservation agenda
  • Georgian urban neoclassical arch seen as unifying Eur - true that almost every country has similar form of flat-fronted neoclassical architecture
  • European Architectural Heritage Year 1975
  • Declaration of Amsterdam - joint conservation agenda
  • Eur common heritage
  • This is architecture about whole areas not just individ builds
  • Attempt not to remove preexisting communities
  • Preservation in communication w ppl who live there

Question 16

Absolute conflict in urban heritage between preserving residents and preserving building:

Answer 16

• Crucial problem of urban heritage
  
  • Preserving build requires a lot of investment
  • Heritage socs end up evicting long standing w-c communities to preserve
  • How to resolve conflict? Difficult. No real solution found

gentrification

Question 17

From 1970s:

Answer 17

• Living in old building becomes fashionable
  
  • Early wave of gentrifiers
  • Writers, teachers, academics etc - attaining cultural capital by living in middle of city rather than new suburbs
  • Starting w Barnsbury, then Islington, Bristol, Manchester across inner cities
  • This is transformative
  • 1945 - new house fashionable
  • 1980s - fashionable to live in old house you’re doing up yourself. DIY market created for this
  • But this raised property prices, removing w-c’s
  • Conflict around gentrification still becoming more fraught

Question 18

The Townscape Movement

Answer 18

led by the Architectural Review in the 1950s, the townscape movement reacted to the modernist tendency to regard the city ‘as a ind of sculpture garden’.
In reaction to modernism’s ‘architectural objects’, townscape mvmnt emph the relationship between building sand all that surrounds them, and encouraged designers to enclose buildings around public space rather than sit buildings in the centre of it

Emph on resurrecting the social and symbolic function of the street and other pubic spaces

Christopher Alexander and his co-authors adopted Sitte’s and Lynch’s methodologies in an effort to create a sense of historical identity in new settings

Question 19

Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City, 1960)

Answer 19

Through interviews and questionnaires, found that ppl come to understand places through five major features of the physical landscape: paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks

Called for the creation of ‘place character’

Question 20

Regionalism and Vernacular Design

Answer 20

Vernacular design two main referents - the past (historicism) and the locale or site (regionalism)

Question 21

Venturi and Contextualism

Answer 21

Recipient of the 1991 Pritzker Prize, Robert Venturi widely regarded as ‘father’ of postmodern architecture and urban design

1966 - Complexity and contradiction in Architecture.

Whereas modernism either/or attitude w ultimate goal of purity, unity, order, Venturi proposed more inclusivist

both/and attitude w the goal of complex and illusive order of the difficult whole

Venturi, attitude towards history - As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past

Tradition involves, in the first place, the historical sense

Rowe, contextualism - streets and squares as room-like spaces.

Contextualism evolved to encompass wider contexts of history and culture, recognizing built form’s symbolic as well as functional aspects

While emph the vitality of traditions, contextualists did not wish merely to emulate the past, but to incorporate new elementss

Contextualism reacted to the singularity of modern mvmnt’s architectural object

Question 22

Historical eclecticism

Answer 22

Whereas modern urbanism emulated the machine to accommodate an industrial society, postmodern urbanism seeks inspiration from pre-industrial townscapes to accommodate a post-industrial society

Historical eclecticism of American urban designers revealed renewed concern w aesthetics - art for art’s sake

Question 23

Paul Goldberger, New York Times architecture critic

Answer 23

If there is anything that has marked the buildings of the 1980s, it is a sense of romanticism toward the past; all the post-modern architects, those who choose to imitate the past literally and those who only allude casually to it, share a sense of fondness, and sometimes even awe, about what has come before

Question 24

Historical Preservation and Gentrification

Answer 24

infatuation w the past among architects was paralleled among the general public, resulting in efflorescence of historic preservation movements across the globe

Paul Henry Gleye, The Breath of History - took Lynchian analysis to discover which elements of a townscape ‘enhance the sense of historical identity in a place’ so that preservationists coul dproduce this sense of identity, and thus sense of security and meaning.
Focusing on Munster, seven elements of responsible preservation identified: reconstruction of major monuments; repetition of trad. architectural motifs; reaffirmation of the centre and periphery; incorporation of historical clues; retention of perceived city scale; adoption of historical design ordinance; retention of traditional land uses in the town centre

After suburban boom, move back to central city in 1970s and 70s

Gentrification usually results in the displacement of people and businesses because it increases land values and rents even when occurring in already abandoned sections of town

Question 25

Critical Regionalism

Answer 25

Annoyed by the glibness w which hist and vernacular were being invoked, some began calling for more reflexive or critical approach in the early 1980s.

Frampton - no such thing as an authentic local or national culture due to centuries of culture contact and interfertilization

Question 26

New Urbanism

Answer 26

Dissatisfied w the conventional post-WWII suburban tract development as well as the master-planned and gated communities which succeeded them, others have proposed a neotraditional urbanism more recently dubbed the New Urbanism

Draws inspiration from townscapes of the past in an effort to engage their surroundings rather than retreat from them

In order to achieve this, neotraditional urbanism seeks to provide quality public spaces that are semi-enclosed, legible and connect places that poeple use

Inspired by pre-industrial environments but also seeks to acknowl current needs and tastes

Traditional Neighbourhood Development (TND) - e.g. Seaside, Florida. Small-town philosophy

Neotraditional urbanism in UK - Melville Dunbar - Essex new town early 1970s

Artisanal villages would combine housing, studios and stores. Commercial area inspired by older cities, especially medieval ones

Redevelopment of Canary Wharf, Docklands - most extensive urban version of neotraditional urbanism

Question 27

Prince Charles

Answer 27

Vogue for neotraditional architecture and urbanism aided and abetted by Prince Charles.
Prince of Wales - architecture should respect the landscape, a building’s size should be in harmony with surrounding structures, buildings shouls create sense of privacy and safety

Prince Charles admires Seaside, embarked in own mission to build four traditional Dorset towns or villages in area around Dorchester, part of Duchy of Cornwall
Building code inspired by the 18th C English village

Sunday Telegraph criticized PC’s efforts to return to a world where squires and gentlefolk lived happily alongside the artisan class

Now built and inhabited, many skeptics becoming converts

A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (1989)

Rebuttal to Prince’s book entitled The Prince of Wales: Right or Wrong? An Architect replies (1989)
Referred to Prince’s principles as “The Ten Commandments”

Oct 1992 - Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture began offering 1st course to 30 students

Question 28

Jencks definition of postmodernism (1975)

Answer 28

double coding: the combination of modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually of other architects

Question 29

Jencks tracing trajectory of postmodernism

Answer 29

beginnings in 1950s and 60s reaction ot modernism. Early 1970s 2nd stage - which featured pluralism and eclecticism. 3rd phase - classical phase - began in late 1970s

Question 30

Postmodernism

Answer 30

reinstating attention to the cultural, historical, geographic, and symbolic contexts

In reaction to modernism’s clean break w the past and regarding of future as a model - historicism

Rather than insist on permanent solutions, this theory aspires to achieve a dynamic unity, acknowledging need for flexibility in architecture and urbanism, which entails an on-going self-critique, making evolution obligatory and revolution unlikely

Rather than provide pat answers, postmodern urbanism seeks to raise questions and to provoke or simply to accommodate post-industrial society rather than shape it (Ellin)

Question 31

MilesGlendinning,The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation(2013)

Answer 31

Conservation Movement became successfully contained within the consensual framework of the welfare state, whose governing ethos of peaceful progress allowed it to flourish as never before. Doctrine of sharp separation of old and new, agreed by both conservationists and modern architects, allowed the Movement to coexist with the dominant forces of radical reconstruction and to begin spreading its scope unobtrusively across wider areas of the built environments

The new status quo survived for the first two postwar decades, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, convulsed by confrontation

When, after 5-10 yrs, things settled down again, and a stable system of heritage values began to re-emerge, overall landscape of the Conservation Movement in Western countries had changed significantly. Modernism fallen from favour. Renewed anti-modernity

For a decade or two, conservation = the dominant force in built-environment policies and debates

Question 32

1960s destabilisation of welfare-state consensus

Answer 32

public face left-wing.
Waves of strikes in Br, student riot in Feb 1970 in Cambridge against the Greek dictatorship

tide really began to turn with Jacobs’ outspoken campaign from 1961 against Robert Moses’s West Village redevelopment project.

Changes implied change in practices of Conservation Movement, away from dominance by elite experts towards greater social inclusivity

rise of user-participation mvmnt

Question 33

Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath (1973)

Answer 33

culmination of a torrent of media campaigning about threats to the city, including an Architectural Review special issue of May 1973.

Concern was not with the great set pieces ike Royal Crescent. Fergusson inveighed against losses of ‘minor architecture’ or ‘artisan Bath’ - demolitions of ordinary classical streets that left the masterpieces ‘like mountains without foothills’

Question 34

1970s surge of interest in brick neo-vernacular designs

Answer 34

exemplified in housing publications by the 1973 Essex Design Guide

Question 35

conservation victories

Answer 35

defeat of 1971 proposal for massive hotel development in Clifton, Bristol. Victory of STAG (Save the Clifton Gorge) celebrated in 1980 book, the Fight for Bristol

Question 36

local govt elections 1968

Answer 36

many cities passed from Labour to Conservative control on the basis of pledges to curb urban renewal and multi-storey flat-building

Question 37

evolution of housing improvement policy

Answer 37

House Condition Survey 1968 - 1.8 million houses in England = ‘unfit’

Seminal govt report, Old Houses into New Homes - 250% increase in improvement grants and targeting of both external environment and internal facilities of sub-standard housing through ‘General Improvement Areas’ (GIAs).

Over 260 GIAs designated within two years

many GIAs focused more on problems of affluence than slum poverty, e.g. 1500-dwelling Arlington GIA in Norwich designed to curb car traffic and parking clutter through road closures and demolitions

Most influential GIA = Macclesfield. Young architect Rod Hackney - persuaded fellow residents to set up community association and lobby municipality to designate a GIA

From 1973 govt surveys suggested the GIA programme had avoided the worst houses and encouraged gentrification

Housing Action Area (HAA) w much higher subsidies introduced 1974
Total rehab carried out by housing associations soared (in Scotland, from 7% in 1971 to 81% in 1979)

GEAR (Glasgow Eastern Area Renewal)

Question 38

Heyday of urban conservation in 1970s Britain

Answer 38

1976, the number of listed buildings had doubled in 8 years (to 230,000)
Number of conservation areas in England alone, having passed 1000 in 1970, had now reached 3600

Civic Trust initiatives in urban conservation mid- and late 1970s

Greatest achievement of this civic-amenity heritage system = campaign to rescue decayed 18th/19th C classical New Town of Edinburgh
Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee (ENTCC) disbursed over £2.5 million over the following decade (after 1971), focusing not only on elite showpiece streets but on the ‘tattered fringe’ that had degenerated into slum conditions, as epitomised in its first major project, the rehab and complete refacing of 23-24 Fettes Row

Question 39

Collab between planners and historians

Answer 39

1971-9 Working Group on Urban Conservation effectively prioritised historic towns for development-control purposes through a ‘star’s system devised by Chief Historic Buildings Inspector (from 1976) David Walker, an expert on Victorian architecture

Question 40

Shift from left to right in conservationist movement

Answer 40

First harbringer = 70s eruption of an angry new protest movement focused not on ‘The City’ but on the alleged continuing neglect of country houses
Doubtless reflecting the continued social prestige and cohesion of the landed classes in Britain, country houses had commanded an increasingly wide cultural support in the postwar austerity.

Campaign for restoration of Scottish castles.
1991 rebuilding of Forter Castle, Perthshire, a 1560 tower, roofless since it was burned in 1640 by the Duke of Argyll
Programme petered out 1980s

Takeover of community participation movement

Question 41

Country house restyling

Answer 41

1950s and 60s US-born decorator Nancy Lancaster and partner John Fowler developed a chintzy, informal aesthetic of ‘romantic disrepair’, underpinned by US-style standards of comfort and conveniences

This style helped to foster a coordinated country-house brand in the public mind

2 or 3 million country house visitors in late 50s to 28 million in 1971

Question 42

1974 exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House

Answer 42

Roy Strong (V&A Director), journalist Marcus Binneya nd John Harris, proselytised right-wing interdisciplinary approach

Climax of exhibition = Hall of Destruction, inspired by Guilio Romano’s painted room in the Palazzo del Te, Mantua.
Linked, British Tourist Authority-sponsored report by historian/decorator John Cornforth also painted a doom-laiden picture, tho Cornforth’s stats didn’t completely support his stance, suggesting that of 2000 notable surviving country houses, only a quarter faced even minor threats

Question 43

SAVE Britain’s Heritage

Answer 43

est 1975 by country-house activist Binney and helpers. Rise to prominence. Right-wing

Straightforwardly attacked Modernist redevelopments and demolitions

Question 44

Artley and Robinson, New Georgian Handbook

Answer 44

celebrates right-wing anti-modernist victory in the ‘Great Conservation War’ of 1970-80

Question 45

Founding of the Thirties Society

Answer 45

1979

Question 46

Commodification of urban heritage

Answer 46

August 1978, English Tourist Board survey - over 1 million ppl visited top 26 attractions in England

Once-stodgy Barcelona rebranded and restyled as city of fashionable, youthful contemp art w diverse heritage
Glasgow, seen by govt planners in 1977 as a desperate case of decline, attracted a bewildering range of cultural-economic promotion activities

Emergence of new govt heritage organisations dedicated to marketing as well as bureaucratic administration.

England - heritage elements of the 1970s’ technocratic super-ministry, the Department of the Environment, were converted into semi-commercial organisations by the 1983 National Heritage Act. This created English Heritage, Commission headed by tourism-conscious Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, which disbursed large-scale govt subsidies, awarding £86 million in grants in 1988, including £1 million for preservation of Calke Abbey. Membership base of 250,000 in seven years

Question 47

Hugh Casson 1971

Answer 47

Attack on the degrading disease of cuteness under which old buildings are corseted and pomaded into a travesty of themselves

Question 48

Hewison, The Heritage Industry (1987)1

Answer 48

Br’s heritage has been corrupted by a ‘miasma’ of commercialised nostalgia

Question 49

ElizabethMcKellar, ‘Populism versus Professionalism: JohnSummersonand the Twentieth-Century Creation of the “Georgian” ’, in BarbaraArciszewska, and ElizabethMcKellar, (eds.),Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture(Aldershot, 2004)

Answer 49

John Summerson (1904-92) was unquestionably the first, and arguably the
greatest, professional architectural historian to have been born in the British
Isles.

Although, on the
one hand, Summerson was the ultimate e tablishment figure a Curator of
the Soane Museum, member of counties board and committee and the
media’s favourite architectural historian, yet in other ways, not lea t
temperamentally, he remained an outsider.’

Architecture Here and Now brought together Williams-Eilis’s interest in the
Georgian and his passionate concern to protect the character of the English
landscape with the MARS agenda of modernism and regeneration, through
an ordered approach to town and country planning

sought to win
public acceptance for the new style through presenting it as part of a long-established
English tradition of building which had been lost in the eclectic and
overly ornamented buildings of the previous hundred years

The book called for a return to order and simplicity in architecture
for which the Georgian period provided the best model at every level, from the
domestic to the urban.

Surruner on’s 1957 paper, ‘The Case for a Theory of Modem Architecture’,
delivered at the RIBA- in which he argued that it was impossible for the modem
movement to take a single, uniform position - created a storm of controversy
following which he abandoned his public engagement with contemporary
architecture to concentrate on historical research.

In an article on architectural
popularizers in the journal of the RJBA, he was the natural choice under the
museum curator heading.9’ He also taught at Birkbeck College from 1950 to
1967 as well as at the Architectural A ociation from 1949 to 1962. Summer on
maintained a Reithian commitment to the public phere that formed the ba i
of the teaching and broadcasting from which so many of his publications
sprang. The Classical Language of Architecture (1963), for e ample, tarted. a. a
series of lectures for Birkbeck studenst , then became a celebrated television
programme, before finally becoming immortalized in print.
Summer on’s position at the end of hi career, writing once more about the
contemporary, welcoming the liberation that the passing of modernism .had
opened up for designer such as Jame Stirling and celebrating the collisions
between past and present that the new architecture co~tamed ~ave led to
suggestions of his position as a proto-postmodernist.

His criticisms of the conservationist stance were motivated as much
by the slide from the notion of history as a rigorous discipline into the nostalgic
catch-all of heritage a by a concern to ensure good modern design. Pevsner’s
and Summerson’s public mission to popularize architecture had in a sense
succeeded too well. Pevsner never witnessed the resultant commodification
of historic buildings, but Summerson looked on in bewilderment, leading him
to comment in 1986 when discussing the huge public interest in the country
house and the publishing industry it had spawned, ‘How many books can
there be with that title now?’

Question 50

PeterLarkham, ‘Changing Ideas of Urban Conservation in Mid-Twentieth Century England’Change Over Time4 (1) (2014)

Answer 50

postwar policies did not arise wholly from the scale of bomb damage. Area-based conservation appears in plans from the 1940s, predating its adoption in 1967 legislation

The 1909 Housing, Town Planning Etc. Act made provisions for ‘‘areas of any special character,’’ but the nature of what might be ‘‘special’’ was not elaborated; and Edward Morrell M.P. managed to introduce ‘‘the preservation of objects of historical interest or natural beauty’’ into its wording. Historic interest at least has persisted to the present day. A wider interpretation of conservation

he 1932 Town and Country Planning Act diluted the general definitions of interest in the 1909 and 1923 acts, referring instead to ‘‘protecting existing buildings or other objects of architectural, historic or artistic interest.

Action on the ground was guided by dominant tastes and local feelings, which do change over time. Monuments and individual structures still tended to be the focus of attention, although this was now likely to include medieval structures.

Pressure became especially acute with the spread of motor vehicles. At Southampton, walls and gates were scheduled ancient monuments. Despite protests, parts of the walls were demolished. The north gate was severed from its wall and left isolated on a traffic island in the early 1930s

need to rebuild on a large scale revealed certain shortcomings in the English planning system that were first addressed in the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act. This focused on issues such as site assembly, compulsory purchase, and compensation: conservation was a relatively minor concern. But after the intervention of the M.P. for Twickenham, the act gave the relevant minister, for the first time, the power ‘‘to compile lists of buildings of special architectural or historic interest,

Shortly afterward the more radical and wide-ranging 1947 Town and Country Planning Act was passed, which would underpin much British planning throughout the postwar period.23 This act required that the minister compile lists of significant buildings

The plan for Newcastle upon Tyne, for example, proposed improving the settings and accessibility of important historic buildings.39 Although Norwich sought to retain as many as possible of the identified significant buildings, it also noted that ‘‘some of [them] are in good repair and others in bad and sometimes deplorable condition: their treatment is at present at the mercy of the purse and conscience of their owners.’’40 The opportunities (and resources) for direct action on the part of the local authorities were scarce.

Lavenham in Suffolk, described as a small town (population 1,454) and treated very briefly in the rural reconstruction plan for Sudbury and District,51 brought the question of area-based conservation to the fore even during wartime. Its major resource was a large number [End Page 101] of timber-framed late-medieval houses; but many were in poor condition

So ‘‘character’’ was emerging as an issue, if only in small towns overwhelmingly provided with easily identifiable character. Yet, in this example, local concerns for place-promotion and provision of modern facilities outweighed character and conservation significance: it took external pressure, despite mixed feelings in the ministry, to quash the [End Page 102] redevelopment plans.

Great Yarmouth was a well-preserved medieval port town, with a rare surviving pattern of tightly packed narrow alleyways—the ‘‘Rows’’—leading from a wide market street to the river and harbor (Fig. 4). This area had been neglected and the surviving buildings were in poor condition by the 1930s

Demolition and redevelopment of the Rows was proposed, leading to a public inquiry in 1948 into the local council’s proposal for compulsory purchase, at which numerous voices were raised in protest.
In this case, a substantial area of considerable interest, despite its wartime damage, was virtually destroyed despite attention from conservationists

Coventry’s medieval walls proved another problem case. Coventry had expanded rapidly as an industrial city; during World War II, it suffered extensive bomb damage that left little of the medieval town intact.
The city’s radical reconstruction plan, developed mainly by the young city architect, D. E. Gibson, suggested the removal of some of these remains in the early 1950s.
he debate spread to include the Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, the redoubtable medievalist B. H. St. J. O’Neill, who visited the site in December 1952. He wrote in an internal memo that ‘‘[i]t is, of course, quite clear that the Coventry planner, who is a malignant, has paid no attention at all to ancient monuments because he dislikes them.’
the ministry won, the plans were adjusted, and the segments of Coventry wall remain.74 The significance of this example is not just the escalation of center-local conflict, nor the views expressed, but the conservationist view overcoming the radical tabula rasa reconstruction view.

There was little progress until the end of building control and rationing in the mid-1950s, but the subsequent building boom, with its large-scale demolitions and wholesale change, soon produced a substantial critical reaction. Polemics such as the Rape of Britain, the Sack of Bath and the Erosion of Oxford were published.80 The boom came to an end only with the Middle East war and oil crisis of the early 1970s.

Conventional histories highlight Sandys’s 1967 Civic Amenities Act, originally another private members’ bill, as a watershed: it extended protection to entire areas of [End Page 107] towns and cities as ‘‘conservation areas.’’ Some have suggested that he was influenced by French legislation of 1962 known as the Malraux Law, which introduced secteurs sauvegardés: every individual monument classé was already protected by a 1-km-diameter zone protégé.81 Yet, as has been shown, the roots of the 1967 act, again a private members’ bill rather than government-sponsored, lie at least as far back as the 1940s in the area-based protection ideas developed in some of the reconstruction plans.

important to note how much conservation action has been spurred by individual Members of Parliament (particularly those lucky enough to be able to put forward private members’ bills), rather than by any government in office.

A wider, landscape-based approach is likely to be a more appropriate response to widening notions of what is seen as ‘‘special,’’ particularly at the local level, as English planning responds to recent moves towards ‘‘localism.’’