Gavin Stamp exposes Britain's vendetta against its Victorian masterpieces
The new book by architectural historian Gavin Stamp exposes our callous brutality towards our architectural heritage, says Simon Heffer.
The lost Euston Arch Photo: GETTY
I have written before about the Victorians, their ambition and achievement, and how blinkered and mindless it was to hold them and their works in such contempt. In most respects, those days are over. We still might find Carlyle and Ruskin rather strong meat, but other thinkers such as Mill, Darwin and Matthew Arnold are correctly treated with seriousness. Trollope may be regarded as a writer of high-end soap opera and much of Tennyson considered rather ordinary, but a lot of their literature, painting and architecture is now held in the highest esteem.
We are fortunate, though, that even if we find some Victorian novelists repetitive and derivative, and some poets obscure and laboured, their works are still available to evaluate, and perhaps even enjoy. It is not always true of the architecture. The benefit of being an architect is that your work commands attention even from people who do not seek it out, but who happen upon it. This can, and did, make some Victorians very famous: Barry and Pugin are still regularly praised for their work on the new Houses of Parliament. Others, with equally famous buildings, never remotely became household names, such as the two officers in the Royal Engineers, Fowke and Scott, who designed the Albert Hall.
But there is a fate worse than being the near-anonymous hand behind a great building, and that is being the architect whose great building no longer survives. The Luftwaffe and what passed for taste in the post-war period wrought a 30-year holocaust on Victorian buildings. We know what Goering's motives were; but those who wielded the demolition ball in the 1950s and 1960s had no such excuse, other than bigotry and philistinism.
Gavin Stamp, one of our most distinguished architectural historians, has done a depressing but important public service in cataloguing this odious chapter of destruction. A year ago, he published Britain's Lost Cities, which described the wealth of pre-20th-century buildings that were swept aside by hideous urban developments – many, thank heaven, later obliterated themselves. Now he has published Lost Victorian Britain, whose subtitle says it all: "How the 20th century destroyed the 19th century's architectural masterpieces."
On the back of the dust wrapper is the Euston Arch, which has come to serve as the great symbol of anti-Victorian philistinism, over whose destruction Mr Stamp correctly savages Harold Macmillan. Miraculously, the stones are being recovered from the river bed in East London where they were moved nearly 50 years ago, and there are plans to re-erect it. Other lost masterpieces, however, must stay that way.
The illustration on the front is, in its way, even more shocking. It is of a great vaulted marble hall with a grand staircase, a work so fine and so grand that it defies belief that anyone could have wanted to pull it down. It is the interior of the Imperial Institute in Kensington, destroyed in 1956 to allow the expansion of Imperial College. Mr Stamp describes it as "the first major undamaged Victorian building to be demolished after the Second World War".
It had been built by public subscription in 1893 – those were the days when what is now called "the Big Society" achieved great things by philanthropy, made possible by low taxation – as a monument to Victoria's Golden Jubilee. The architect was Thomas Collcutt. "Magnificently built of red-gauged brickwork and Portland stone, it was the supreme example of the eclectic taste of the 1880s," writes Mr Stamp. When its demolition was proposed, the Royal Fine Arts Commission complained of the secrecy with which the plans were being advanced, and protested that the building could be retained: no designs for a replacement had been published, raising suspicions that demolition would happen as much for its own sake as for any other reason. Progress won: everything except a campanile was destroyed.
Although much of the carnage was in London – both because of the pressure on the capital and the disproportionate attentions of the Luftwaffe – no major city was untouched, with the wave of philistinism even penetrating into the countryside. If were not bad enough that Paxton's Crystal Palace had burned down in 1936, his sumptuous Great Conservatory at Chatsworth (also known as "the Great Stove"), built for the 6th Duke of Devonshire in 1836-40, was dynamited by the 9th Duke in 1920. It was so well built and so vast that a carriage and pair could be driven down its central aisle, and it took six attempts to blow it up.
Bradford lost a Victorian market. Brighton lost its West Pier (and with Hastings's burning only last week, piers are an endangered species). Newmarket, Glasgow, Birmingham, Nottingham and Bradford lost fine stations or monumental station hotels. Many towns and cities lost fine pubs, such as the Woodman in Birmingham or Kean's Hotel in Liverpool. Commercial premises, the most famous of which was the Coal Exchange in London, dropped like flies: Middlesbrough lost its Royal Exchange, Bradford (a serial victim) its Swan Arcade – so grievous a loss that the local authority bought the neighbouring Wool Exchange to prevent it suffering the same fate – and Leeds a bank, Beckett's, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.
Victorian churches fell the length and breadth of the country, together with public buildings such as the Manchester Assize Courts, one of Alfred Waterhouse's masterpieces, and Preston Town Hall, another Scott building. One of the worst acts of vandalism was the destruction of Waterhouse's Eaton Hall, the palatial seat of the Dukes of Westminster, whose trustees decided to pull it down in 1961.
We have, I hope, reached a frame of mind where to pull down a Scott or a Waterhouse is like burning a Van Gogh or a Turner. Yet all generations seem to take against one architectural period or another. I feel that way about much that was built in urban Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Buildings of that period have their supporters: but they also have the misfortune of being made with inferior materials, on the cheap and nasty principle that has caused many of them to start falling down. If only we had learned the lesson in some other, less destructive way. Mr Stamp reminds us not just of what we have lost, but how idiotically careless we were in losing it.
'Lost Victorian Britain' by Gavin Stamp (Aurum Press) is available from Telegraph Books
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010
Gavin Stamp, one of our most distinguished architectural historians, has done a depressing but important public service in cataloguing this odious chapter of destruction. A year ago, he published Britain's Lost Cities, which described the wealth of pre-20th-century buildings that were swept aside by hideous urban developments – many, thank heaven, later obliterated themselves. Now he has published Lost Victorian Britain, whose subtitle says it all: "How the 20th century destroyed the 19th century's architectural masterpieces."
On the back of the dust wrapper is the Euston Arch, which has come to serve as the great symbol of anti-Victorian philistinism, over whose destruction Mr Stamp correctly savages Harold Macmillan. Miraculously, the stones are being recovered from the river bed in East London where they were moved nearly 50 years ago, and there are plans to re-erect it. Other lost masterpieces, however, must stay that way.
The illustration on the front is, in its way, even more shocking. It is of a great vaulted marble hall with a grand staircase, a work so fine and so grand that it defies belief that anyone could have wanted to pull it down. It is the interior of the Imperial Institute in Kensington, destroyed in 1956 to allow the expansion of Imperial College. Mr Stamp describes it as "the first major undamaged Victorian building to be demolished after the Second World War".
The Imperial Institute, Kensington
Although much of the carnage was in London – both because of the pressure on the capital and the disproportionate attentions of the Luftwaffe – no major city was untouched, with the wave of philistinism even penetrating into the countryside. If were not bad enough that Paxton's Crystal Palace had burned down in 1936, his sumptuous Great Conservatory at Chatsworth (also known as "the Great Stove"), built for the 6th Duke of Devonshire in 1836-40, was dynamited by the 9th Duke in 1920. It was so well built and so vast that a carriage and pair could be driven down its central aisle, and it took six attempts to blow it up.
Bradford lost a Victorian market. Brighton lost its West Pier (and with Hastings's burning only last week, piers are an endangered species). Newmarket, Glasgow, Birmingham, Nottingham and Bradford lost fine stations or monumental station hotels. Many towns and cities lost fine pubs, such as the Woodman in Birmingham or Kean's Hotel in Liverpool. Commercial premises, the most famous of which was the Coal Exchange in London, dropped like flies: Middlesbrough lost its Royal Exchange, Bradford (a serial victim) its Swan Arcade – so grievous a loss that the local authority bought the neighbouring Wool Exchange to prevent it suffering the same fate – and Leeds a bank, Beckett's, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.
Victorian churches fell the length and breadth of the country, together with public buildings such as the Manchester Assize Courts, one of Alfred Waterhouse's masterpieces, and Preston Town Hall, another Scott building. One of the worst acts of vandalism was the destruction of Waterhouse's Eaton Hall, the palatial seat of the Dukes of Westminster, whose trustees decided to pull it down in 1961.
We have, I hope, reached a frame of mind where to pull down a Scott or a Waterhouse is like burning a Van Gogh or a Turner. Yet all generations seem to take against one architectural period or another. I feel that way about much that was built in urban Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Buildings of that period have their supporters: but they also have the misfortune of being made with inferior materials, on the cheap and nasty principle that has caused many of them to start falling down. If only we had learned the lesson in some other, less destructive way. Mr Stamp reminds us not just of what we have lost, but how idiotically careless we were in losing it.
'Lost Victorian Britain' by Gavin Stamp (Aurum Press) is available from Telegraph Books
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010
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