Our fathers were not tempted as we are in this. They had to use the local material and to stick to it. There were no railways in their time carrying blue slates to Whitby, or red tiles to North Wales. Now all these materials are brought to our doors, and the builder chooses each according to his own fad; and so we get all sorts of materials and colours hopelessly jumbled up together, with no thought of general harmony.
Our manufactured materials too are less beautiful. Our tiles by perfect machinery are made so true and flat that a modern tile roof looks as though it had been ironed with a polishing iron, like a shirt front. And both our tiles and bricks tend to become so hard and forbidding that no kindly lichen will clothe them, no wind and rain soften and tone them. It gives one something of a shock to see the delicate clematis and the clinging ivy struggling with a wall which, after twenty or thirty years, still looks as hard and new as the day it was built. The old tiles were a little curled in burning, and had a surface rough enough to afford lodgment for moss and lichen; and so the lines were less hard, and the newness of surface and colour soon mellowed into all sorts of lovely shades.
Many an old building that has little pretension to fine architecture, yet adorns a scene of natural beauty by its simple fitness of design, where a modern one would probably spoil it. Such design was the outcome of a natural effort to get the most use and convenience out of materials thoroughly known. Hence a general suitability is found between design and material, and an obvious connection between quaint features and the want that has called them into being. Look at the plainest old four-square thatched cottage, and there will nearly always be some interest in the way the thatch has been coaxed up over a window, or a ridge worked to avoid a chimney gutter, which redeems it from baldness. The same skilful handling of tiles is found in all real tile districts; and so we find many picturesque gables, which we should miss in a country of slates or stone shingles.
There is on all hands evidence of a willingness to give labour without stint; to do a job well and a bit more; to linger over it, and see if a little more work here and there would not improve the look. In fact, we read in these old buildings, as in an open book, of a simple workman who was something of an artist, one who could take pleasure in his work, finding joy in the perfection of what he created, and delight in its comeliness.
Whenever we again raise up such an army of builders, working at their trades with the pleasure of artists, then will all buildings become as beautiful as of old; then will it be possible for such workmen, co-operating with a true architect or master builder, to raise fine architecture, like our old cathedrals and abbeys. No effort of office-trained architects, with workmen whose chief interest on the job is to find ‘knocking-off time,’ can ever take the place of the co-operation between real craftsmen under the leadership of the most able among them: for it is to this that we owe most of the building that we can truly say adorns our country.
RAYMOND UNWIN.
CO-OPERATION IN BUILDING.
As beautiful as an old English village.” The phrase arrests our attention and calls up many a pleasant picture stored in our minds; but with the remembered beauty there comes too the associated sadness of something loved that is fast passing away. The picture we recall may be the view down some long wide village street bordered with clusters of cottages, some opening direct on to the roadside, some with their bright bits of flower border in front; here and there a break in the buildings is marked with the dark foliage of trees in a larger garden; a dignified forecourt with its iron railings reveals an old manor house, or a gate-way in a high wall overhung by elms leads to the vicarage; while at the street end where the road turns away is the lich-gate, leading to the church whose parapetted roof and slender spire rising far above all the surrounding buildings complete the whole group. Or maybe we picture to ourselves rather some village green, with the rows of sunny whitewashed houses, the barns and haystacks of an occasional farmyard, the end of an orchard, and the village school, that are gathered round it.